Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days

The dog's dinner?

The original Kane & Lynch was one of those games that had buckets of promise, but never delivered on it. The excellent story and interesting characters never had chance to come to the fore thanks to the clunky mechanics. But there was promise there. Promise that, judging from the pre-release material, Kane & Lynch 2 is set to deliver on.

It doesn’t. In fact, it’s worse than that. Not only does Dog Days fail to improve on the basic gameplay of the original, it saddles it with a messy and uninteresting storyline that strips away most of what made the original so interesting.

Before you can get to grips with any of that, though, you’ll need to come to terms with the unusual art direction IO Interactive has opted for, which makes the entire game look like its filmed by a Parkinsons sufferer carrying a CCTV camera. The third person camera wobbles and shakes uncontrollably in both gameplay and cutscenes, and the world is drained of most colour, instead replaced with over-saturated lights and fuzzy grain filters. It has a certain style, but it’s not one that lends itself well to the genre. Beneath the ugly filters- which can actually obscure the game at times – you’re left with pretty basic characters that wouldn’t look out of place on PS2, and some horrendously poor textures. On the plus side, IO has aimed for a 60 frames per second experience, but it doesn’t seem like the engine is really capable of sticking to it with frequent nosedives in the middle of the more heated action sequences.

If the original game was a bit clumsy in its execution, then Dog Days is equally so. The problems from the original – loose hit boxes, inaccurate weapons, poor navigation- are all present and correct. Your weapons will still hit walls despite the barrel –and your reticule- being nowhere near, any automatic weapon will spray a hail of ineffectual bullets over an area the size of a small country, and it’s still almost impossible to work out where, exactly, your companion is, or where you’re supposed to be going. IO has at least improved the sticky cover system, now requiring you to tap a button to snap into cover, Gears of War style. This is a good thing, since you’ll need to take cover a lot. The most common thing you’ll do in Dog Days is get shot at, since our two antiheroes are regularly pitted against dozens of submachinegun-wielding villains, who also seem to be much more accurate shots than the player. Inbetween being shot at, you might take a few shots yourself, and marvel at just how awful the weapons are – I found the best way to take down an enemy was to stick to using a pistol, since you at least have some idea where you’re going to hit. The shotgun also works, but it sounds so wet and pathetic that using it is quite disheartening. It doesn’t help that the controls are oddly mapped and feel very loose, either.

Then there are the frankly ridiculous set-pieces that Dog Days throws you into. The opening chase through the backstreets of Shanghai should be interesting, but suffers from the age-old problem that you can’t kill the person you’re pursuing – even if you ply him with several bullets to the head- before you reach the finale. Shortly after you’re instructed to escort a limo through a massive pile-up that’s become a shooting gallery, but when the limo likes to drive ahead of you it’s pretty difficult to stop the enemies shooting at it.

Of course, none of these issues are new to Dog Days if you’ve played the original Dead Men, but at least back then you had the strong story and characterisation to hold your attention. In contrast, the plot of Dog Days feels half-hearted and poorly explained, told through expletive-infested dialogue in growls and murmurs. The dynamics of the relationship between Kane & Lynch aren’t explored particularly well, and whilst you’ll generally be playing as Lynch (in single-player) there are few hints of his psychotic personality, brought across so well in the first game (the bank shootout, where the player controlling Lynch sees civilians as armed Police, has yet to be outdone). The only hints of Lynch’s unhinged character come through his constant mutterings, which are initially a little unnerving but their effect fades when you realise nothing seems to come of them. Like Dead Men, Dog Days is much better if enjoyed with a co-op partner, either locally or online, though the short campaign – barely stretching to 5 hours – means that your enjoyment might be short-lived, and the inclusion of an uninspiring arcade mode doesn’t really bolster this too much, and there’s little in the way of hidden gems to find in the levels to reward exploration. Just a linear trudge through mindless, loose shooting and cursing.

The actual multiplayer modes are rather more interesting, and it’s here that IO seems to have been more adventurous. Fragile Alliance is still an excellent team-based game type, with the robbers attempting to seize an item and make a quick getaway, hindered by a team of cops that swells whenever a robber dies, and successful robbers have the chance to shaft their teammates and nab the loot for themselves. Undercover Cop follows the same formula, but with a secretly selected traitor tasked with undermining the heist without being spotted. Cops and Robbers, meanwhile, is probably the most traditional team mode, following the same template again but this time pitting two human teams against one another, instead of players vs AI.

The problem is that there isn’t much of a progression system; money earned is used solely for buying weapons for the next round, and with the basic weapons proving pretty effective and the cash readily available, it doesn’t actually pay to shaft the rest of the team or be the traitor. Rounds are strictly limited to no more than 5 minutes, and are precisely scripted, so play out pretty much the same each time. Without the room for tactical variance, and without much reason to keep coming back, the interesting ideas feel largely unexplored.

Written by :

James Hall