StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Kane & Lynch 2 is yet another extremely short game that makes no sense. It's a high-lethality cover shooter with somewhat twitchy controls, but never really gets hard.

The gimmick of the distant, phonecam-style camera doesn't really impact the game (although the actual presence of a cameraman is inconsistent. It gives the game a unique look but is just a collection of post-processing effects (largely just greening up the dark lines in textures and blurring light sources). The gunplay is oridinary, although it's refreshing to not have a game full of American guns, and the plot makes absolutley no sense and has no beginning, middle or end.

The multi is same as the first game: pretty cool in concept but doesn't really work in most groups. It has a basic unlock system and would be a cool UT3 gametype.

The one joy of the game is playing it with your Taiwanese China-hating partner and butchering literally hundreds (even in coop I have 800 kills) of Chinese soldiers, gangsters, police, and ocassionally civilians.

Yeah, the shortness of the game is really annoying. It's like four hours or so. It's odd because it feels like they both ran out of ideas and became repetitious and shortened the plot to non-coherence.

There's even interesting character stuff they COULD do, but the whole game feels rushed. Would another ten corridors with cover attachment points really have taken that long?

I played the demo and felt it was pretty boring. The visual style is nice but ultimately a gimmick and the shootyness was standard whack a mole affair.

I also liked the selection of non-western guns though.

Is Kane still a colossal idiot like in the last game (giving a highly sensitive hostage, whom he has not properly tied up, to a self-admitted psychopath who previously killed a roomful of hostages)? Does he have any sane reason to even work with the aforementioned self-admitted psychopath (again, who killed a room full of hostages and never, ever bothered to get his prescription filled when on the move)?

Otherwise, Stark's review of it as a poor game is not surprising. In the last game, most of it was spent trying to shoot people not using cover properly with inaccurate rifles. Sometimes you might even want to use your band of idiots in something resembling a squad, but that's a futile effort.

The story had some interesting potential and tried to go places, but sadly never could get loose of its grip of grittyness for a moment. A psychopath and an idiot might for a fun story setting, but that would require some light-heartedness or a sense of humor. Something that probably is against the writer's principles or something.

Pretty much all the character stuff is gone; Lynch isn't really insane anymore (he just yells a bit) and Kane doesn't even want to be there. It's a very, very unfinished plot.

It's disappointing, because I thought Dead Men had some interesting ideas and did some interesting things. In principle I liked all the levels up to the stuff in South America, which basically turned into a generic shooter, but it was kind of cool to see a shooter try and do something new. Unfortunately, the game was obviously pretty weak in execution. Dog Days seemed kind of promising because I thought the devs would learn from the mistakes in the first game, and they had a really cool art direction with the 'lol youtube' stuff. It's a pity it's still so mechanically weak and largely unfinished.