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Screenshot from Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days -
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Platform: PS3, Xbox 360
Publisher: Namco Bandai
It's hard to imagine exactly why Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days was put into production. Sure the first game wasn't terrible, but it did nothing distinctly different to stand apart from the myriad of other, better third-person shooters on the market. Yet here we are, a couple years remove from the first pairing of "gaming's most notorious criminals", flung back into the disturbed world of medicated psycho Lynch and tragic Kane as their best laid plans fall apart, this time in Shanghai.
There's one immediate and polarizing thing that IO Interactive have tried to do with the sequel to make sure it does something different this time; while the idea is to be applauded the application is less than might have been hoped.
You see Kane and Lynch 2 is a documentary, sure it's a documentary with a massive body count, let's say Bowling for Apocalypse Now, but still, a documentary. Shot by an invisible, and inconsistent, invisible cameraman, Dog Days is an astonishing lesson in a good idea gone bad, what should make the player feel more involved ends up just causing a great deal of disassociation with the characters and with the game itself.
Lens flares, shaky cam, grainy, low-resolution images are all supposed to lend an authenticity to what is going on but instead makes playing through the game more annoying than realistic. Gone is any connection with Lynch or Kane, instead the story is washed out by the over-reliance on the mechanics of the game to actually drive everything forward.
And forward they go. The original Kane and Lynch encountered problems when deviating from the straight-forward protect, kill or survive missions into heist or stealth ones as these later levels felt terribly under-developed and inconsistent. Dog Days' problem is that apart from the odd slow passage, there is NO variation in theme on display. Simply keep moving forward, kill or be killed.
The documentary style also lends itself to the action sequences, which make up the majority of the game. Getting shot, and you will get shot, washes out the neon and colour from the world making it starkly grey and foreboding; manage to make it back into cover or onto your feet in time and the world comes back to life.
Story-wise, Kane and Lynch 2 has "gaming's most notorious criminals" reuniting in the modern metropolis of Shanghai on Lynch's promise of one final, can't miss job to set them up for life. Before dropping Kane off to his hotel though, Lynch has one small mission to complete whereupon the Chinese shit hits the fan and the terrible twosome find themselves on the wrong side of an enormous gang war.
From the start to the finish in single-player mode (and be warned, this is only 4-5 hours), there is barely time for a coffee break as Kane and Lynch are thrown from one hopeless situation to another. As a game that is consistent only in its attempt to build characters, Dog Days is hobbled by this relentless pace as most of the story is overwhelmed by an endless soundtrack laid by bullets and ballistics.
Underneath the haze of endless gunfire the cover system itself works reasonably well, although not as effectively as some of the landmarks of the genre. Enemy gangsters or police will also pop in and out of cover and picking them off, especially early in the game, can be a frustrating experience. This is intensified even more by the eerie accuracy of times of your single-layer AI buddy Kane, who smoothly moves through levels picking off enemies before you can even orient yourself. This occasionally makes it feel like you're watching Kane and Lynch 2 instead of actually playing it.
After finishing off the short single-player story mode, players have the option of either Arcade mode or online multiplayer, both of which are nice inclusions but don't offer anything overly compelling either.
Multiplayer is broken down into three variations. Fragile Alliance, where a team of criminals must steal as much loot from a heist and escape; Undercover Cop which is the same as Fragile Alliance except one gamer must prevent the heist as a mole in the group and finally Cops and Robbers where one group tries to escape with the cash and the other tries to prevent them.
All three modes are reasonably entertaining when they work but can be mind-blowingly infuriating when affected by lag (which is often) and with only six maps to work off of, will eventually become overly repetitive. Arcade mode is merely an offline version of the online multiplayer except with AI controlling the other characters.
A sequel no one really asked for ends up as a game no one is going to remember, but with a huge Hollywood adaptation in the works (with Bruce Willis and Jamie Foxx in the titular roles!) it doesn't look like Kane and Lynch, did I mention they're "gaming's most notorious criminals?" are going to stay quiet anytime soon.
Rating: 6/10
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