You can't polish a turd but you can roll it in glitter
Maybe I was expecting too much, I thought that maybe after the failure of the first game they'd make serious changes for Kane & Lynch 2, sadly I was wrong. When a game has as many faults as Kane & Lynch you go away and start over, sadly the people at Eidos thought if they added some god awful screen effects and a wobbly camera this would hide the crap underneath, unfortunately it doesn't. The addition of effects designed to make it look like someone is following them with a faulty video camera may have sounded like a great idea at the time, in reality it adds nothing to the experience. If the game itself is below par no fancy effects will save it.
The gameplay itself is simple, move from one "whack a mole" gunfight to the next, they throw in the odd cut scene but it's not enough to break up the monotony. You know when the next fight is about to start, it's obvious because laid out in front of you are the obvious cover points, you know as soon as you enter that area enemies will appear. The AI is not good, all enemies behind cover do is pop up and down, others who find themselves somehow in the open will just stand there firing, you can easily kill them by waiting until they reload. On two occasions enemies took cover inside me, this after coming through the wall.
The graphics are mediocre, once you turn the awful effects off there is nothing special, I've seen worse and didn't expect much from a port anyway. There are options for AA and AF along with some other things so it's not all bad. It runs very well on my system (i7@3,4Ghz/6GB DDR3/ATI 5870).
To sum up, it's not as bad as the likes of Rouge Warrior but there is nothing here worthy of your cash. The characters try to give things a sense of urgency but fail badly, some of the voice acting is atrocious, one villain being voiced by the worse Michael Caine impersonator I've ever heard. I can see what they wanted to do, they wanted to create a cinematic gritty experience, the problem is it takes a lot more than graphical effects and a wobbly camera to do that. It's time they gave this franchise to another team, there is potential here but Eidos seem incapable of doing anything with it.
Eidos know you can't polish a turd, so they rolled it glitter.
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