I finally got to playing Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days – a game that I wanted to play ever since it was announced. I’m a bit slow with this, perhaps, but at least I can do something I’ve planned from the start – make a double review. I played the original game when it was released, so with this one out, I wanted to make a kind of a comparison of games. Now, with both of them completed, I can talk about them without fear that I misremember anything. Are the games as bad as some say? Are they as good as fans say? Why is the camcorder in 2 never running out of battery? Okay, I’ll skip the last question, but will try to answer the first two.
Kane & Lynch: Dead Men was released in 2007 and had a bigger impact than IO Interactive or Eidos expected, for all the wrong reasons. That Gamespot review, the firing, the creation of Giant Bomb… I guess, these are causes enough for people to immediately assume that the game wasn’t good. Though, to be fair, there’re enough reasons to criticize the game.
The concepts are fantastic: two charmless yet unpleasantly charismatic bastards, lots of unapologetic violence, really gritty setting, the story that intentionally withholds key information from the player, creative usage of cooperative mode for the story, Jasper Kyd as a composer. Reading the list itself makes me go – wow, a game with all this, developed by the same people who made Hitman, and it all resulted in an average title.
This is a third person shooter with a cover system. Yet the cover works automatically and only in select parts of the map. You can’t reload manually. You have a squad, yet they can’t do anything and miss enemies standing right in front of them. You get a squad of about 10 people in one of the later levels and all of them die within 10 seconds of the first shootout. This is insane.
You can’t really fault what it tries to do – there’s a lot of variety, lots of memorable moments. New situations for each character (especially felt via cooperative play). Bank robbery, dark Tokyo nightclub, prison escape, Havana jungles, construction set. Locations change, events excite, but the gameplay is consistently annoying. And we get a really cool stylish dark story with amazing soundtrack, memorable characters and terrible gameplay.
Three years later we get Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days and has an even colder welcome from the critics and the players. In fact, even fans of the original seem to hate this one. Were mistakes from the original left as is? Actually no, most of them are fixed. Issue is, lots of other things are gone as well, while some of the new annoyances are introduced.
Dog Days doesn’t have a dark grim story, memorable electronic tracks and the gritty yet cinematic style. Instead we get badly compressed digital video, disjointed story, extremely rough narrative, minimal industrial noise ambience mixed with pop tunes from the radio. Instead of a story, in the conventional sense, we get a series of bad events the characters get into, with no structure, proper setup or any sort of resolution. And those, who loved the story of the original, are sure to be disappointed. Those, who loved how unique cooperative experience was in the first game will be disappointed as well – coop in this one seems almost like an afterthought. Apart from not having anything unique to it, it’s incredibly badly implemented with horribly jerky animations and constant model clipping.
Yet, the gameplay is so good. There’s no adrenaline to use on partners, so you can get up after being knocked down yourself, and get up into cover. Shooting and taking cover is far superior. Most cover is destructible, which can be annoying, yet fits the style and the mood perfectly. The AI for both partners and the enemies is considerably better, though the squad system was completely dropped.
I’ve seen people complain about the visual style of the shaky cam and digital compression. I guess it either depends on people themselves (some people tend to get nauseated quicker) or on the system you play the game on. I played on PC with a smaller screen but higher resolution and it felt great. Perhaps a console version, running a lower resolution but on a bigger TV screen would feel far worse. Another thing I’ve seen people complain is how difficult it is to shoot enemies with the gamepad. I haven’t tried it, but given how bullet sponge even the mostly naked enemies are, I can see how this can be a problem. Another important thing to mention is that the PC version costs 20$ on Steam…
Speaking of that – for a 20$ game, I loved the experience, yet, I can see people purchasing it for the full price it was originally released for and hating it. It really doesn’t cost the typical 50-60$ full price. Yet, even with a lower price, and considering the game as a singleplayer experience (not a lot of people play multiplayer and I mentioned the quality of coop), Dog Days won’t be a game for a lot of people.
Two games about the same characters. Two games with the same basic gameplay. With the similar in grim mood setting. Two completely different experiences. First game is fun to watch and listen to. Second one is really fun to play. Maybe, there will be a third time where everything clicks? These characters deserve to get a good, complete, consistent game.