Note: The following blog has moderate spoilers for Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days.

Kane & Lynch 2's concrete infinity of chest-high walls represents all the default sliders for video games in the late 00s-early 10s. The title is at best a delivery mechanism for a steady sense of overcoming challenge and at worst an ugly trudge of a game. As a shooter, its most interesting quirk is its shotguns. They predictably provide a sharp sucker punch to enemies but remain able to do so over long ranges, scoring you multiple hits on targets even many meters away. In general, Kane & Lynch 2 thinks about range in a way that makes little sense, and while the shotguns are the happy accidents that arise from that, there are also plenty of ways the game's handling of distance kills pacing and believability. The single-player mode contains many large, open maps which is not unusual, but it doesn't give you the weapons you'd need to deliver accurate, fatal shots over the long distances between you and the enemies. Almost none of the guns have the camera zoom very far in when you hit left trigger, many of the firearms have a wide automatic spray, and there's only one or two rarely encountered weapons that have iron sights on them. I also suspect that the damage your shots do drops off the further they travel and even if that's not true, the game gives you the impression that it is because certain targets can sustain multiple rounds to the body and keep fighting just fine. This compounds with a genre-wide problem that's always existed for cover-based shooters.

In a game like Kane & Lynch, you have these moments when you can't tell when your enemies will pop out for you to shoot, but you can't stay constantly aiming at them for the instant that they do because you'll get ripped to pieces by incoming fire. This creates a hyperviolent whack-a-mole where you end up hoping you just happen to have your reticle hovering over your targets the moment they make their move. It leaves play over-reliant on luck as opposed to skill and draws out fights only to stage anti-climactic scenes of you and your foes shooting and missing again and again. When combined with low character health, formidable enemy firepower, or particularly resilient enemies, it also encourages you to approach danger in the most cowardly way possible. In films, the action scenes that make a positive impression on us are always dynamic and often feature heroes plunging themselves headlong into jeopardy. By contrast, poorly-done cover-based shooting often keeps you rooted to once piece of cover, plinking away at enemies until their numbers run out, and then moving onto the next lot. This kind of cautiousness is just smart if you don't want to die and restart from the checkpoint. However, it creates arduous play experiences, and this tends to be true towards the back half of many cover-based shooters as greater guardedness is required to safely make it from one end of a level to the other.

In good action media, scenes should speed up and become more intense as the piece goes, but that's often not the case in this particular game genre. What's more, while good games often do more in their later sections to keep a hold of us when we've already seen everything the core mechanics have to offer, bad games just serve up a hitching version of the same combat that came before. Kane & Lynch 2 is a fantastic example of these patterns, representing pure shooter grind in its last few stages. Combine this with how infeasible it often is to headshot enemies, and how unnatural it feels when you can see police shaking off multiple bullets to the torso, and it starts to raise serious questions about whether Kane & Lynch 2 is a good use of your time. Conceivably, you could make quick work of multiple enemies at once through the game's explosives mechanic. You can throw fire extinguishers, gas tanks, and other items into crowds and then shoot those canisters for a red barrel effect. It's obviously meant to encourage co-op "set, 'em up, knock 'em down" teamwork, but when you can't use the same mechanics for aiming the guns to aim these flammables, the accuracy isn't there for this to be a reliable means of attack. The only thing that softens the disappointment is that it's fun to skip fire extinguishers across the ground and watch them flip over several times like wonderfully warped G Mod objects.

The lukewarm, uninspired gameplay of Kane & Lynch 2 only makes the IO general manager's promises about it look like they came from a backwards alternate universe. According to the aforementioned Niels Jorgensen "Every aspect of the game has been designed to deliver a fresh perspective to the words 'intensity' and 'realism' in video games, [...] Gamers are always looking for something new, and that is exactly what they are going to get with Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days". It's a hilariously press release thing to say. To no one's surprise, Kane & Lynch 2 doesn't make you think any differently about what a shooter can be, and yet, there is something sickly charming about its personality. Most subpar games try hard to convince you that they're quality entertainment and when they fail, it comes across as sad. Kane & Lynch is not quality entertainment, it's a mess, but it's a self-confident mess, just like its title characters.

Adam "Kane" Marcus and James Lynch are interestingly immoral and gross human beings, and the game dresses itself to match. It doesn't care about its players, its marketers, or anyone else; it just gets on with what it wants to do. It's something you can easily see in the composition of the levels. Kane & Lynch 2 is not a Bioshock or a Half-Life 2; there are no calm, exploratory stretches where you get time to absorb the atmosphere and watch a little world-building. In fact, Kane & Lynch 2 doesn't have much of a world beyond its typically dilapidated but highly functional buildings. The action scenes coordinated around these locations are stacked back to back with little breathing room in-between. Just when one middling fight is over, another one starts up, creating these exhausting successions of wonky shooter fare in a way that reminds me of Spec Ops: The Line. Look at the way shooters like Modern Warfare 1 and 2 frequently tweaked and reinterpreted their game's base mechanics to make each level a spectacle in itself. Aside from a couple of outlying sections, such as the helicopter ride, Kane & Lynch 2 is the opposite of that. Part of its ability to deplete your energy so quickly also comes from the game not having as many clear and exciting short-term objectives as many other shooters. Its long-term objectives also lead to little payoff, with the game ending immediately after you hit the final checkpoint. It's so spontaneous that I thought I'd missed something when it cut to credits.

More shocking from a marketing standpoint is that Kane & Lynch's characters are obviously not people you'd want to be. There are plenty of games where you play antiheroes, even a few where you play bad guys, but ugly in games is usually Hollywood ugly. The characters are glamorised and have all the sharp edges sanded off to make them people who, at least for the purposes of the in-game fantasy, you can feel cool being. Kane & Lynch are not cool. They're not soldiers, or supervillains, or vigilantes; they're scumbags. When it's their name and image on the box and when marketing is king, it's amazing that these guys are allowed to be two greasy, middle-aged men, ineptly scrambling their way across Shanghai. The plot's events aren't even set in motion by some diabolical criminal plan of theirs; they're pushed into gear when one of them is careless enough to discharge a weapon into a gangland thug's girlfriend. It's even more amazing that this kind of product was able to be made not just once but twice. When this is a sequel that has a scene where two nude unpleasant men bolt around covered in blood, you wonder if maybe there is a sizeable audience which revels in the grindcore grime of Kane & Lynch.

What bugs me most about this title isn't its slapdash gameplay or its grotty look, but that the whole package doesn't follow Kane & Lynch more closely down their spiral of dishevelled panic. The overwrought shaking of the camera every time you run, the camcorder UI elements, the mechanic where you can fall down in combat, and even the game's low production values all help convey the raw but bumbling nature that characterises Kane & Lynch, but those elements are where that characterisation begins and ends. The game does something brave by printing these two grotesque, oddball characters right onto the box art, so it feels like it has little excuse for not including more stylisation based on them in its content. Kane & Lynch could be to AAA shooters what Wario and Waluigi are to the Mario series: recognisable, but slightly rotten and slightly out-there. These games could be the dysfunctional, shambling cousin of the cover-based shooter family. Instead, they're just another of the dime-a-dozen TPSs on store shelves. Thanks for reading.

Yeah, I found this game mind numbing, across the board not very good. I liked Shanghai as a setting and hearing Chinese songs in the title menu but that's about it.

Scumbag is old timey slang for a condom.

I really liked the style of Kane and Lynch 2 and it is a marked improvement over the original but yeah it's still not a great. Man I forgot how many just repetitive and bland cover based shooters there were last console generation. It's games like this that scared game studios away from making smaller non-AAA titles. Great review by the way.

You're fired

Yeah the gameplay was stale, but man did I love this game. It was so grimy, with its cheap handicam approach and claustrophobic spaces of Shanghai, IO nailed the Michael Mann look down better than anyone at the time (and maybe to this day). And the characters were, to me, very strange in a hypnotic way: two old shit bags who fucked up even more than in the last installment, and are on the run for survival. But it seems that everyone seem to forget that, for as terrible as they are, they have little pieces of redeeming humanity in their backstory.

Kane was a husband and a father before until he made a mistake that fucked that all up, and Lynch was isolated sap who suffered from mental illness. Two dirt bags full of misery and regret, who were drawn together by work, and later through betrayal and bond. Society had them marked for dead, and even though they would cross one another to get what they want back, all they had left in this world was each other. Kane and Lynch was by no means a good game, but it was something completely unique within the IO catalog where their brand is often exploring the bad guys in their video games.

Just like Max Payne 3 and its irrelevant alcoholism, it seems like a missed opportunity to not explore their disgusting traits and awful personalities more and try to, at the very least, endear these awful people to the player a little more.

@liquiddragon: The menu and credits music are some of the better examples of where the game could take its style. The upbeat pop thing that have going on there is ironic against the grimy backgrounds, but the game just isn't that smart about its aesthetic most of the time.

@bartok: Thanks. I did not know that about the word "scumbag" but I stand by my statement. I think games like Kane & Lynch scared off AAAs to some degree, but I think they were just more one step on an inevitable path. By the time these games came out, "B tier" had basically entirely dropped away and games like this one played it so safe and generic to begin with because of the rising price of AAA development and the fear of not recouping costs.

@cornfed40: If they didn't get rid of me for my Sonic the Hedgehog blog, they can't get rid of me for this one.

@ghost_cat: I think that, at least in this game, it's not that surprising that people don't connect with compassionate elements in the characters' backstories because the game almost never brings them up or shows ways in which they inform how the characters act. There is a small amount of focus on Lynch's girlfriend (Xu?) but there's not enough there to even work out whether Lynch just likes her in a selfish way or whether he's a good boyfriend to her.

@the_nubster: I totally agree. I think in some ways Max Payne 3 pulled off the collapsing dirtbag genre better than Kane & Lynch did, but still couldn't take it far enough. You can see that Max Payne 3 has these long montages of Max just throwing back all this liquor in his sadness which is the kind of thing that Kane & Lynch never lingers long enough on a character to show. At the same time, it's almost funny how Max Payne works out almost no other ways to explore Max's emotional pain beyond "booze montage".

@gamer_152: Booze montages and winks and nods to painkiller addiction.

That stuff hooked me almost immediately and kept my attention for the duration of the game, especially as someone who has struggled with alcohol both personally and with regards to family, but it was disappointing to never have that meaningfully effect gameplay. For all of Max's talk about being hungover and wastey-pants and being a fat loser, his ability to nimbly and impressively headshot dude after dude doesn't seem to suffer. It doesn't make for a traditionally good game, which Rockstar clearly puts above all else, but it would have been satisfying to see Max's slow recovery and redemption tied to a steady increase in his capabilities.

@the_nubster: You're right, the painkiller addiction and visual effects were part of the experience too. I would have liked to see both more from the gameplay and the story about the things Max was struggling with, but I suspect Rockstar are just too deep into making big budget blockbuster games to make the kind of "mechanics as metaphor" game that might do Max and his issues justice. It also seemed like a barrier that Max didn't have accomplices to interact with and that the game wanted him to seem very cool and macho, and so probably wouldn't want to explore his feelings too much.

I always felt there could of been something for Kane and Lynch. I have the second game, but have never played it.

I also wished Max Payne three gave more dimension to it's protagonist than regretful boozer/pill hound. There was a pale redemption at least, or at least an inner demon truce called. Waiting for Max Payne 4, and perhaps a deeper take than inner pain/lousy world. Come to think, Max Payne 2 tried that a little.

For some reason, I could always handle K&L's horrible people as leads better than the GTA games. In GTA (and Red Dead), they're always trying to garner false sympathy about their "getting out of the thug life" storylines, but K&L were just so far up their own butts that they were almost oblivious to how awful they were. Almost like a It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia thing. They are terrible, terrible people, but it's so overt and unabashed that you almost can appreciate it more.

As a side note, I still think Rockstar ruined Max Payne's character with MP3. Their handling of how he felt about Mona Sax and making him a complete douche just sucked, and was a slap in the face to the first two games.

Screw it, I've said it before and I'll say it again: I really don't like Rockstar or their games (except for Bully). Kane and Lynch is something I'd much rather play. Even the first one with its broken Cuba section.

@bybeach: I'm not holding my breath on a Max Payne 4. Max Payne 3 needed to ship 4 million units to break even and it did, eventually, but sold under 500K copies in its first month and was at the time considered a flop. Since then VGChartz has posted over 1 million in sales for the game, but if that's accurate then there's a huge discrepancy between units shipped and units sold. It would seem hard to convince stores to buy a new Max Payne in the same quantity as before, let alone the higher quantities that will be demanded by rising development costs. Even if Max Payne 4 does get made, with the general culture surrounding Rockstar's games and the huge price of development, it's unlikely to do anything to rock the boat too much.

@quarters: I think the way the leads in each game come off also has a lot to do with how the devs treat them. Kane & Lynch are played pretty straight. There are light moments of humour, but the game doesn't consider itself above Kane & Lynch. The two are grotty and brutal and the whole game just follows their lead. With the GTA protagonists I had a mixed experience. GTA V especially comes with some very big winks and nods, as well as a hard push on the satire. That stuff is really hit and miss, and when it falls down, it usually falls down because the game is too on-the-nose about the brutality or absurdity of their characters, or tries to push for laughs with them that it hasn't earned.

@gamer_152: Yeah, I can agree with that. I never liked GTA's satire (or Rockstar's satire in general), which is why I think I'm so turned off by them. However, Kane & Lynch very much is of the mind, "Hey, these people are awful, we're not making a statement on it, we're just showing you how it is". Feels more honest.

I'm still waiting for a game that allows us to play a manic, antagonizing, hypermasculine playable character and doing it while being unapologetic and serious about it. The point would be to show how far our empathy and understanding can go and how much we're willing to look at ourselves and see how fucked up our actions as humans can get.

This would be really hard. It tends to either go the parody route (GTA5), or the apathetic (the 'we're not sending a message') route (Hatred). I'll be weird and say I liked the first K&L game b/c they at least got the base idea down. That idea being that two unlikable pricks can work if writers were willing to work within the design of the game. Dog Days didn't capitalize on that base idea other than the admittingly cool effects. I'll be controversial and say I like the effects and the kinda detached feeling we're supposed to get seeing the world from their perspective.

It also would be really easy b/c of the fact that games are so detached from reality and yet want to mimic it. That's kinda why I like the weird camera effects Dog Days had. Games are naturally cartoonish and unrealistic. These over the top effects remind the player that they're playing a game and when you stop and think about it in this particular case, that's not a bad thing. Again, we're showing a cartoonish over the top version of a psychopath doing terrible things and likely doing them in a way that makes sense in a game's context. If our protagonist can take a trillion bullets to the chest, obviously we're not going to believe it's real. Yet, we can suspend our disbelief if we're engaged on some level, even if that level is disgust.

So to summarize it would be both really hard and really easy to pull off. The game would have to embrace its cartoony side while taking itself seriously enough within those confines to ask the player if they are willing to find humanity in what's pretty much mostly inhuman material to help strengthen their ability to empathize or to see how far they're willing to feel sorry for someone. So there would have to be somewhat of a tragic side to the character, but perhaps not to the point of misunderstood antihero.

Actually reading through that, it looks like it would just be really really hard to pull off well. We'd have to feel both attached and detached to the character and focus exclusively on that character. If we were to focus exclusively on Dennis Hopper's character from "Blue Velvet" and make that into a game, for example, and just focus on dialog trees or simple options; something like "Depression Quest" but with a psychopath instead of depressed person, I'd think that would work better than a third person action game. If you played "Depression Quest" you kinda felt what it would be like if you were in a situation as a depressed person, so perhaps a similar experience with a super hypermasculine antagonist would work. It would be hard though.

So yeah, that's my tangent on that. :P

Are Kane and Lynch some sort of Animorph dog or something? I don't get it.

I think @quarters said it well earlier; Kane and Lynch are a set of dirt bags that I don't mind because they are unaware of how terrible they are, and that has some appeal to it. Considering the dog shit of an ending in the second game, I would actually love to see a final K&L game where those characters finally reflect and see the abyss within themselves, and meet the end they deserve. IO games always have a style that sets them apart from other developers, and I think they can pull off a good closing act for these two deplorable dudes.

Yeah they're killers.

Disagree with a lot of this because the game really did have some unique features, but at least you gave your reasons. The games aren't entirely amazing, but some people just dismiss these games based on the history around them. You didn't talk about the really innovative multiplayer modes. The trailers for the game are great and give a good sense of the atmosphere. TrailerTrailer

For some alternative and more favorable retrospectives on Kane and Lynch 2:

https://www.inverse.com/article/16496-enough-with-hitman-already-it-s-time-for-kane-lynch-3

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/why-i-love-kane-and-lynch-2-dog-days

http://xanderkishblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/kane-and-lynch-2-anti-shooter-before.html

http://www.pcgamer.com/revisiting-the-bleak-bloody-world-of-kane-lynch-2/

And the first game:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-07-21-kane-and-lynch-dead-men-retrospective

There characters and atmosphere were some of the most interesting and unique of this genre. The two voice actors were great, and so was the interaction between the characters. Unlike some other companies games, it doesn't play too heavily into obvious movie references but only just uses just enough influence. There were some slightly funny moments in the game as well.

The gameplay was basic 3rd person action, nothing really bad but not amazing or anything, however the atmosphere voice acting really added to the game. The multiplayer did have great modes.

For many fans of Max Payne 1 and 2, the 3rd game was too big of a departure in style, tone, and writing. That makes sense because it had a different developer on it. Max Payne 3 just felt like it was trying to make some blatent, and wasn't as coherent with it's narrative.

The developers from this company really do have an interesting way of story telling and building game worlds and narratives. A third game that finishes out the story of Kane and Lynch with the same voice actors would be interesting.