Taking place two years after the events detailed in the original, Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne finds the titular character living in squalor, still tragically broken by the murders of his wife and infant daughter and shuffling numbly through his days as a New York City Police Department detective.
Stumbling upon a vicious murder carried out by a gang of rogue industrial cleaners, Max finds himself drawn into a twisted conspiracy swirling around a Russian gangster, a low-level Italian mafioso, his icy partner, his violence-prone lover and a secret society known as the Inner Circle.