Written by: Rik
Date posted: November 19, 2008

In the last game, Max’s “dream sequence” levels came in for a bit of stick, not just for the slightly daft content, but also because they were fairly bloody irritating to play through.

Well, the dream sequences are back, and they’ve been improved to the extent that they’re now a much more valid part of the game this time around. From the gameplay point of view, it helps that you can’t really be killed during a dream, making the whole experience more of a playable interlude that contributes to the narrative rather than an actual level per se.

With the world covered in a hallucinatory haze, locations morph into each other while characters from Max’s past and present sporadically crop up to announce something troubling. It’s almost like having an actual dream, albeit one that would only be likely if you’d recently been through similarly traumatic experiences and/or had ingested significant quantities of cheese or psychotropic drugs just before bedtime.