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.