As you can see from this review’s subtitle, Kane & Lynch 2 is a game that was clearly designed to be labelled with almost every pejorative ‘dog’ idiom in existence: a dog’s breakfast, sick as a dog, dog-tired, go to the dogs, and, appropriately enough, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
Yes, IO Interactive’s sequel to the original Kane & Lynch: Dead Men does little to improve on the mistakes of the original, and instead clumsily packs monotonous cover-based shooting with grainy graphics and a derivative narrative into a title that’s a long way from top dog.
Players take control of Lynch as he and sidekick Kane bastardize the traditional formula of ‘take cover, wait for enemy to pop up, shoot enemy, proceed’ and stretch it out into an entire 5 hour game (yes, all of 5 hours) as they attempt to evade the bad guys of Shanghai’s criminal underworld while bandying about genre-staple weapons in inaccurate, haphazard fashion and spouting stale dialogue in much the same way.
Sadly everything mentioned above is horribly implemented, most notably the bad guys who often kill you even when you’re cowering behind deceptively safe-looking cover, and Lynch who turns out to be a bit of a girl’s blouse as he falls down after taking a handful of bullets in comparison to the enemies who can absorb almost an entire clip before realising what that odd tickling sensation is. And yes, I’m all for a bit of realism in having a few bullets get through your cover now and then, but if you’re going to put a ‘cover and flank’ system into a game then at least balance it out.
One aspect of K&L2 that will no doubt be heavily contested by irate Generation-YouTube commenters is the choice of visual treatment slopped onto… er, I mean, considerately applied to the game. Going for that gritty realism vibe the third-person camera wobbles nauseatingly behind Lynch as he moves, and although this feature can be disabled it’s the awful grainy filter and desaturation that’s applied to everything that makes the whole thing look less “intense and realistic” (thanks, marketing drones) and more “why am I watching this through the eyes of a colour-blind epileptic wearing scratched sunglasses as he fights to retrieve the rabid ferret from his trousers?”
The biggest problem with this visual style is that instead of creating the rough ‘n tough atmosphere that was apparently intended, IO Interactive instead made the already shoddy graphics even worse; there are scenes when we’re talking embarrassingly PS2-ish textures here. Take note, all you pseudo-provocative developers: if you want to do coarse and edgy, do it through the art direction and not through a device that makes your already substandard graphics look even more so.
Also ‘bleh’ are the little touches like rapid hard-cuts during FMV sequences or pixel blurs on exposed genitals/messy shotgun blasts to the head. While these do fit in with the video theme alongside the camera movement and nature of the cutscenes, these effects end up feeling counter-productive as they actually soften the blow of the hardcore image the game is trying so hard to portray; would Tarantino’s ‘Hostel’ have been half as intense with blurred out bloodshed?
Add to all these annoyances the shortest single-player campaign I’ve torn through in ages, a mildly entertaining though dated multiplayer, a split-screen co-op with a chugging framerate and a very disappointing ending and you’ve got a game that you should think twice about before renting, let alone buying. It’s unfortunate that this wasn’t the superior successor to the original that we’d hoped it to be, and I do have to hand it to the devs for at least trying a few new things out, but Kane & Lynch 2 is a title that’s hard to recommend when there are far better alternatives out there like Army of Two, Uncharted, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand or even a rousing round of Solitaire.
Loading ...
