Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days review
Kane & Lynch return to show you that you know nothing about having “a bad day”. Since the original game, Lynch has mellowed and settled down in Shanghai with his girlfriend Xui. Kane visits to say hello to his old pal Lynch, before heading off on a gun-smuggling deal that will set him and Jenny up for life.
Within ten minutes of the intro, Lynch’s pursuit of ‘a little business’ turns bad in typical fashion. This in turn causes a chain of events which has the cops, the thugs and even the local military hunting them down.
Dog Days sadly lacks in the graphics department by quite a stretch. There are flat blurry textures, as well as cases of minimal details in objects. However this can be forgiven when looking at the destructible environment. First evident in a massive gun fight, the neat and tidy environment that was presented to you before the gun fight took place turns into a complete mess of dead bodies that you and your enemies have destroyed. If there was just one thing missing from the carnage, explosions and hot lead flying about everywhere, it’s the simple things such as objects catching on fire. Sadly cars that do blow up and catch fire are scripted, and it won’t happen to the regular cars in the same way.
The cut scenes are small and border on irrelevance in places, existing only to stop you being successful in your goal, or to end a level with minimum fuss and get you moving on in the game. In one scene Kane is trying to negotiate, almost creating some form of meaningful plot. But Lynch shoots the guy stone cold dead after just an audible sentence from them. While the reasoning is simple from Lynch, it does the game as a whole no favours.
Just like the game’s cut scenes, the story is minimal. It is a far cry from the original revenge and kidnapping plotline that saw Kane & Lynch globetrotting in pursuit of a former gang of Kane’s. But it is a pure rollercoaster of guns, bullets and dead idiots who get in your way, and it ends just as abruptly as it starts. With just five hours of continuous gameplay from start to finish in single player, it’s a good job IO Interactive added online co-op as well as the local co-op mode.
If there is one good thing that comes from the lack of single player story, it is that the game becomes a faster paced co-op story, which sees you and either a friend or a random player go from start to finish multiple times and wonder where the hours went. Just like a dog, the co-op gets it teeth into you and doesn’t let go.
This brings us to the reason for why a majority of fans buy Kane & Lynch in the first place; the original multiplayer. Fragile Alliance returns in all of its glory, with you running maps as a team in an attempt to steal four million dollars. Every round you are constantly at odds with your team mates, trying to grab as much cash as possible and escape. That is unless a team mate gets greedy and wants your cash, gunning down players and escaping with all of the money himself. Revenge comes in the form of respawning as a cop and attempting to stop the criminals from escaping with the cash.
But the developers have now added a new mode in the form of ‘Undercover Cop’. This could well be the most addictive mode of the game. Teams can either end up shooting each other from the off set, or will sneakily wait, taking you out near the end of the round. The good thing with this mode is previously in fragile alliance, players turned on players that became traitors and blocked untrustworthy team mates, even though it was an element of the game. Things simply descended into Mexican stand offs in the spawn rooms. Now players are brushing off ‘traitors’ in this mode as it’s the main focus and it makes for much better games.
There is however a drawback in the lobbies now, as you can only start a game when it is full with eight players. In ranked matches your play type is tracked and alerts players that have a dislike for traitors. It informs them that this player will have a higher percentage of turning on you, causing them in most cases to instantly leave.
Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days does do a hell of a lot right, but the things it does wrong are as clear to see as the main lights of the stores in China themselves. If you find yourself able to see past the low grade graphics to appreciate the finer mechanics of the game, and if you don’t feel short changed by the lack of story in exchange for replayability and online co-op, along with the refreshing online multiplayer modes, then you won’t have such a bad day after all.
-
Lysergio
-
will
