Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days is a raw and cruel criminal shooter, in which the players have to survive even more intense plot.
Following the two heated criminals from the Game World in the Gloomy Shanghai Crime World. Kane & Lynch 2 - an ugly game in almost every sense. She urged aesthetically, she urged thematically, she even ugly mechanically - a clumsy and chaotic shooter from a third party with a hippet of cover system and a thicker than asbestos soup. But the most interesting thing in all this is that most of this deformity (although, of course, not all) is deliberate, which is an exciting example of how the developer explores its own mistakes and misses through another creative work.
Original Kane & Lynch (with a subtitle Dead Men) was a third party shooter, inspired by cinematic criminal epiks, such as the "heat" of Michael Manna. She told about two novice robberies of banks, Misanthrope Kane and a psychopathist Linche, which differed mainly to spoil their talent. Unfortunately, the game turned out to be deeply mediocre, with a tasteless presentation, an uninteresting shooting of covers and the plot, which was too much relied on the best works of other artists to really stand out.
Most developers would calmly leave a duet in virtual purgatory, but IO Interactive decided that Kane & Lynch deserves a second chance. However, instead of expanding and improve the concept of the previous game, IO took over the improvement of all its worst elements - clumsy battle, an empty plot and ugly aesthetics. As a result, oddly enough, it turned out a much more interesting game than its predecessor.
The action of Kane & Lynch 2 occurs in Shanghai. Lynch invites Kane to China so that he helped him conclude a deal to sell weapons organized by the criminal boss named Glaser. However, before going to the transaction, Lynch decides to recover debt from the local gangster, which leads to a chain reaction propagating Shanghai's criminal world to the heart of the political infrastructure of the city. The action is transmitted to us using a manual chamber, although the game does not explain who holds the camera and why Kane and Lynch allow you to shoot yourself, participating in increasingly cruel shootings.
It is clear only that it should be the worst portable camera from ever created. In many games, the world is displayed as if they look at it through the lens, portraying the camera artifacts such as glare, blur when driving and chromatic aberration in an erroneous desire for graphic realism.In Kane & Lynch 2, this idiosyncrasy is turned into a deliberate aesthetics, which actually makes the game less attractive. Color contrast is terrible, muted colors are washed out almost to monochrome, and bright colors, such as neon signs, create glare causing migraine. Meanwhile, the image is often buggy and pixelized, as if the player looks at streaming video with a bad connection Wi-Fi. Io will even imitate the slope and fluctuations of the camera when it follows the movements of Kane and Lynch, and this movement is so unpleasant that literally causes nausea.
This camera style can be easily discarded as a wonder, but it is this wonder that I allowed IO interactive to transfer many other aspects of the game. The plot of the game looks like a roughly mounted video YouTube, with a cold discovery and even colder closure. We do not give any context of events, except for the dialogue between Kane, Lynch and several peripheral characters. For most of the game, Kane and Lynch do not understand what is happening, as well as we, blindly walking forward in the hope that the situation will clear up in a indefinite moment.
This is a striking difference from the first game, in which a lot of time and effort was spent on creating a plot and characters. Dead Men sought to become a virtual Heat, presenting itself as a tragic criminal epic. Dog Days has no such claims for greatness. In accordance with his recording made on the ambulance hand, its actions are meaningless and disposable. There are neither morality, nor messages, only violence, generating violence.
In "Doggy Days", there is also much less sympathy for the main characters, they have been considered villains from the very beginning. And even not capable villains. They failed the entire plan by the end of the first mission, and do not even realize this until it becomes too late. In the remainder of the game, they are fighting exclusively for survival, making increasingly cruel actions and suffering from this.
Starting with this initial error, the game unfolds as an increasingly impressive catastrophe sequence. The fighting is moving from the fight against gangsters in T-shirts on Shanghai backyards to battles with police and military at airports and abandoned shipyards. Kane and Lynch unsystemantly stumble in each of these shootings, often fighting on the floor, and the lens of the chamber is smeared in the blood. At times, the game becomes too cruel even for the invisible editor, which pixels victims of particularly terrible shots in the head (the effect that, oddly enough, makes the game even more fiercely).
It is almost like self-definition of developers, as if IO punishes himself for the arrogance, which she demonstrated when creating Dead Men. The creators definitely want to punish Kane and Lynch for the damage they caused the studio reputation. In the middle of the game, the couple is captured to the minions of the corrupt policy.They are tied by naked to the chairs and slowly try to cut off the skin with a razor. This is a completely terrifying scene that only their subsequent escape surpassed, after which they start naked, bloody to repelly in the Shanghai shopping center, devoid of everything, except for their own desire to survive.
During the release of the film "Dog's Days", he was condemned both behind the scale of violence and for his simplified and meaningless character. Today, playing in it, you can notice something amazingly honest in how the game did not flinch from his challenge cruelty. She clearly does not like any of her main characters, and she does not expect them to like it. There is no glory or achievements that could be obtained from the blood rivers arising from the player's pistol. Kane and Lynch come out of the game with empty hands and scars for life, both physical and spiritual, and the ending deprives them of feelings of completeness, not to mention satisfaction.
It may be possible to interpret as a statement about how or why we consume violent media, as a question that players get from such a game when it does not invite any opportunity to win or feel satisfaction from the events. But I perceive Dog Days rather as an opening of Dead Men, as a study and reflection of IO interactive on your own artistic failures. Her dignity lies not in the message or morality for the player, but in the catharsic study of developers on how sometimes everything goes terribly, terribly wrong. This does not in any case do Kane & Lynch 2 Great, but it makes her very decent game.
