Seeing Kane and Lynch back on screen dredges up some contradictory emotions. The original third-person crime spree shooter was, at best, mediocre. An ineffectual attempt at coordinating chaos in a criminal gang. It was meh.
But it was also grimly funny, had character and, if you squinted, you could see what devs IO – makers of the phenomenal Hitman games – were attempting to do.
When your game is largely focused on psychopaths, greedy mercenaries and complete bastards, camaraderie will only get you so far...
Right away, we’re certain that Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days’ “gritty” shaky-cam look is going to divide players. We’re actually divided inside our own brains. Throughout our recent hands-on, we alternated between really digging the unique look, and also being annoyed by it. There’s no question that it’s refreshing in a videogame context – even though we’ve all seen this visual style plenty of times in movies, it’s arresting to see it in a game, and gives the scenes of running through the narrow alleys of Shanghai a frantic, desperate feel...
Want realism from your entertainment? Great graphics aren’t the answer. Neither is pixel-perfect framing, nor capturing the perfect shot on screen. In IO’s eyes, true realism isn’t what you’d imagine. There are plenty of reasons why Kane & Lynch 2 exists, but the main one is Youtube. User generated content is far and away IO’s biggest influence: gritty films snapped on camera phone and uploaded onto websites; wobbly cameras, pixelated details and occasional compression issues...
Like many videogames Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days is in love with the movies. There are nods to action classics such as Collateral, but Denmark-based developers IO Interactive are as intrigued by the people behind the camera as the stars in front of it. Inspired by the erratic camera work and often shocking nature of internet clips this shooter sequel plays out like a YouTube video nasty. They’re calling it a ‘docu-shooter’, and it’s easy to see why...
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