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...
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