I'll start by saying the gameplay itself is just okay. It's a basic 3rd person shooter, nothing more or less. I thought it controlled okay not like the best feeling thing in the world but it still felt alright.

The visuals and story are where this games shines. It just looks and feels ugly which is an amazing thing to experience in a game. Especially at this time where everything felt so sanitized and standard. The game has an ugly camera filter but it really enhances everything and makes the controls more understandable. Everything feels and looks low budget. The world is ugly, the characters are ugly, and the story is ugly. But you know not every game should be clean, gorgeous, and smooth. Every once in a while a game should be abrasive and tough to stomach. That's what helps make games more than just a toy when they can be used to express other types of emotions. I'm not saying every game needs to be like this but it's good when one is.

The main multiplayer mode is also really cool. It's a heist where you need to cross a map with a bunch of cops to escape with a bunch of "teammates". But the intresting thing is one of your teammates is an undercover cop who is trying to stop everyone else from escaping. It's really neat to see an attempt at a social deduction game this early compared to Among Us especially in a "mainstream" release. Even with Among Us success most modern mainstream devs still haven't tried making a main multiplayer game\mode a social deduction game.

I will say if you picked this up for full price back in the day I could see why you'd be upset since it's not very long and not the most replay-able game in the world. But now that you can get it for dirt cheap? Do yourself a favor and experience something different.

Это ад. Это зловонное дерьмо. Это Кейн и Линч 2.
Сколько раз до этого я жаловался на затянутость игр IO Interactive, но я и представить не мог, что их самая короткая игра (прохождение заняло у меня чуть меньше пяти часов) окажется одной из худших, что уже само по себе достижение, ведь речь идёт о сортах говна. Здесь можно привести аналогию с фильмом Интерстеллар, где на одной планете 1 час времени был равен 7 годам времени земного. Каждая минута игры становится всё мучительней в геометрической прогрессии. И констатируется это даже главными героями, через чьи уста IOI озвучивают самоосознанность собственной садистской сущности.
Визуально здесь плохо абсолютно всё, просто всё. При чём намеренно плохо. Смехотворная претензия на артхаус выливается в зрительное непотребство с постоянными потоками всевозможных выделений в объектив, трясущейся тошнотворной камерой, световыми бликами и прочими артефактами, а часто и вовсе понижением битрейта, словно смотришь прохождение игры на ютубе с отдалённым деревенским интернетом.
Геймплей же, в свою очередь, пробил очередное дно, ведь предо мной предстал худший представитель тира с укрытиями, после которого даже прошлая часть серии кажется манной небесной. Я искренне не понимаю, кому может нравится здешний садомазохистский Duck Hunt в 3D пространстве с перебежкой от одного укрытия к другому, при этом находясь под непрерывным огнём. Это крайне мерзкое и отталкивающее ощущение, не предоставляющее геймеру ни вызова, ни развлечения - только неподдельную агрессию на издёвку датских извергов.
Это Кейн и Линч 2.
А 2 означает 2/10

hands down the coolest formal presentation ive ever seen in a shooter at this sort of scale. even if the gameplay isnt anything groundbreaking or even necessarily interesting the overall experience that culminates from all the unique audiovisual factors makes this a total thrill ride. i dont give a fuck that its basically on rails and involves pretty much just finding cover and then shooting, its sick as hell. it's sort of unreal how immersive the camerawork in this game is, even between cutscenes and gameplay, which I was curious as to how the game would pull off. the sloppy shot composition and unsteady operation blends perfectly with the blurry, shaking mess on the screen when you run, the video bitrate decreasing when the gunfights become especially chaotic, and even the audio clipping depending on proximity to loudness. so fucking cool dude. the attention to detail on this level even goes as far as having a fucking fisheye on the lens, not even mentioning how the highlights get easily blown out and the light refracting at like every possible turn lol. god dude. im begging for more games to tackle this kind of found footage model, even down to the way this game just throws the plot out of the window in order to hone in on the snapshots of recording. even if the story doesnt really have any diegetic relation to this form, it adds so much in the way of atmosphere and feeling. like this shit feels gross dude. seeing corpses with their heads pixellated out because you blew it off with a shotgun is a wild thing to put in your game. cruel voyerustic nasty stuff. rules. ugliness is beauty style is substance babie lets go

It's not the best shooter out there, i know!

But the style is immaculate. I wanna breathe this game in like a gas and trip out, dude. And the soundtrack? Maybe the most insanely good and goodly insane experimental music (if it can be called that, im not sure) i've heard in games right next to Drakengard's score. What a maniacal piece of art. This whole game is, actually, a piece of art, that should be displayed in a museum with thousand screens capturing each 10 meters of it's levels.

Put this thing in my veins, duuuude.

all the way back in 2014, i had heard a lot about this game from different video game reviewers, usually with some video title like "the worst game of all time" which resulted in me finding a strong interest in the title. i would watch a lot of videos on it and found its reputation to feel a little weird, since at worst it looked generic. later that year i chose to play the first kane & lynch and i thought it was okay, it was a weird little third person shooter game but i ended up really liking it. i then chose to play the demo of kane & lynch 2 on xbox 360 since i wasnt willing to pay for the game, and again, i did not get why this game is as hated as it is. my interest in the series however promptly faded as i moved onto other things.

fast forward an entire decade, and as a result of a joking whim with a friend, we decided to play this game in full. over time, i had largely forgotten about my previous experiences with the two games and the impression of "worst game of all time" sat again in my mind, choosing to believe i just "didnt get why it was bad" as a kid.

the game quickly struck me with its horrible gunplay, nauseating camera and weird (albeit really cool) aesthetic. shooting at people feels no different than shooting at nothing, its hard to even tell when youre actually doing anything half the time. the game feels extremely obtuse and uncomfortable to play. i sneeringly said "this is all meta kino, kane & lynch 2 is a violence bad masterpiece" not thinking too much of it.

yet the more i played, the more my sneering comment just felt like it was coming true. the sheer grotesqueness of the game, the edginess of the dialogue, with its endless and excessive swearing and shouting, it all just clicked in the chapter where kane and lynch run around butt ass naked. i realized that, completely in spite of how intentional or unintentional it may be, this game made me feel the exact same way as i did when i first played drakengard 1.

after the aforehand mentioned chapter, i found myself entirely engrossed in the game. i couldnt find it in myself to mock it anymore. my friend and i almost found it funny at just how seriously we both started taking it at a point. realizing the entire plot starts from a single woman being killed by our protagonists, one who is unnamed, and doesnt have a single scene beforehand. the death that feels completely weightless from the perspective of both our psychotic protagonists, AND the violence numbed player, one typically inclined to find themselves playing a shooter game like this.

there is no such thing as a weightless death. the sheer amount of dissonance between the significance her death has, and the significance felt across the entire game are worlds apart, and defined entirely by how normalized violence and killing had become in gaming (and media as a whole) at that point in time.

in conclusion, kane & lynch 2: dog days is a meta kino violence bad masterpiece. it effortlessly communicates its message through its gameplay and aesthetic alone. my 10 year long journey with this duology has randomly been brought back into my life at a time when i can appreciate it for what it is.

kane & lynch 2: dog days is an ethnic masterpiece.

angry joe gave this game a 3/10 though so idk if i can keep liking it. most of my opinions are shaped by his so i cant really think anything else :/

This is a game I got in some PC games bundle of some kind forever ago. I couldn’t even try to remember which one if I wanted to. But recently a friend of mine got gifted it from a friend of theirs (who very possibly got it from the same place I got it and just still had a key kicking around XD), and she asked me if I would be willing to play through it on stream with her. Both loving streaming with friends and having no idea what this game was (and confusing it with Max Payne for like 2.5 weeks before we actually streamed it XD), I of course agreed~. We played through it in co-op on stream over the course of about 3.5 hours. We played the PC version of it through Steam in English on easy mode.

Kane & Lynch 2 is a sequel to the first game, but that’s a game I have never played and only know the story of via reading the wiki entry. From what I’ve been able to gather, though, this game seems to treat the ending of the last game with some ambiguity. Lynch is living in Shanghai with his girlfriend, and despite how badly their last job together was, Lynch needs Kane’s help for one last weapons deal. Kane really needs the money, so he agrees. Everything goes from bad to worse really fast when a shootout ends up killing the daughter of a powerful gang kingpin, and Kane & Lynch need to wheel, deal, and shoot their way out of the massive sea of shit they’ve landed themselves in.

Narratively, K&L2 wants to be something like an edgy, late-2000’s thriller/action movie, but it has none of the writing competence to actually pull that off. Sure, it’s got nudity, sex, torture, racism, but it’s not remotely trying to say anything with any of it. It’s just doing it to be shocking because it knows that that’s what edgy, serious dramas do. Both Kane and Lynch just have virtually nothing to their characters, and the story is more so just a sequence of events happening until its over. I’ve read that the devs say the poor quality of some things is intentional, but if they’re telling the truth, they’ve done a terrible job of it. There’s not enough substance here to be remotely called satire or parody of anything. Satire requires clarity of purpose, but I’m not even sure what they’d be trying to be parodying with the quite racist, sexist, vapid action movie they’ve turned into a game.

Nothing drove home to me more that the writers simply have no idea what they’re doing than the ending. If they wanted to steal a note from something like the Sopranos or tons of other famous “men wrapped up in organized crime” stories, then the obvious place to end the story is at the end of the penultimate level. When Lynch has just let his feelings get in the way of business, and robbed them of their one tiny chance out of all of this hell. That would’ve been the classy time to cut to black. But instead, we get a whole other level before the credits where they make a very underwhelming escape through an airport and just take off after forcing their way onto a plane. They actually do escape, which does a hell of a lot to undermine the more obvious possible takeaway from the story, that being “there’s no easy way out of it for men who live their lives like K&L do”. K&L2’s story puts them through the pace of an action movie that would’ve felt generic 20 years earlier well enough, but it’ll leave you as quickly as it comes. While it’s a story that may unintentionally say some things about the culture and development environment that made it, K&L2 as a narrative isn’t trying to actually say anything, which makes it pretty boring to do anything but make fun of.

Something else that makes the game pretty boring outside of making fun of it is the mechanics. Even for the inundation of cover shooters we got after Gears of War, this is a VERY underwhelming one. I’m not even particularly a fan of the genre, and that was still something super easy to see. Guns feel terrible to use and have no kick or impact at all. It’s difficult to even see if you’re hitting the enemies in front of you the animations and player feedback are so poor. You have regenerating health and can take cover behind all sorts of things. You can only carry two guns at a time, but that hardly matters much when they all feel so awful to use. Level design is also extremely linear with no secrets or optional paths/routes to speak of, so it’s almost literally a “corridor shooter” in many regards most of the time. The camera is also TERRIBLE and hella nauseating, especially when you sprint. One viewer of the stream described it as “a camera dangled on the end of a slinky from a helicopter”, and I think that fits the bill pretty well. That’s another very deliberate-feeling choice, and they certainly succeeded well in making an awful camera, so good on them, I guess.

It may be a factor that we were playing on easy, but the enemy AI was extremely unintelligent. A very winning strategy we found worked a lot was that the AI tended to laser-focus on to the first person they spotted, so one person running forward and getting all of their aggro can allow the other player to run forward past them, completely worry-free of enemy fire, as they take them out by just walking around their cover.

And that leads me to another thing: For a game with “[Guy] and [Other Guy]” in its naming scheme, it’s a pretty crappy co-op game. This felt much more like a single-player game with a tacked-on co-op mode than a game made for co-op. When your buddy gets down, you have mere seconds to go get them up before they die and you get sent back to a checkpoint. The players also don’t look distinct enough to keep you from firing upon your buddy. We both spent some time playing as each character, and while Lynch is pretty distinct looking with his very balding head and long hair in the back, Kane just looks like a guy in a suit. There we tons of times the Lynch player fired upon Kane because they just thought he was an enemy because he looks so much like the guys you’re fighting against. It’s a problem with the uninspired/bad level design as well, but even the handful of times they split you up, it feels very perfunctory. One player has to fight a ton of enemies while the other guy gives supporting fire from far-ish away, at least until that other guy giving support gets ambushed and killed by enemies out of nowhere with powerful shotguns.

The presentation of the game isn’t terribly nice either. Granted, this is one thing in particular the devs say is intentional of the things that people say are bad about the game. The game is very grey-scale and drab looking, and the human models look like downright hideous playdough people (although I think the latter element of that is due to the game being a PS3 game from 2010 than anything else). Like I said earlier, I don’t think they really use this bad stuff they did “on purpose” to any meaningful effect, but I’ll give them an A for effort that they did make a game that looks quite unpleasant. The music is entirely atmospheric and forgettable. The voice direction is also just okay, but they don’t have a ton to work with, so I’d say the VA do a fine job. Sure, they got guys to actually speak Chinese for the Chinese soldiers you’re fighting, but there’s also some very sloppy voice direction work with things like how Kane and Lynch say some names. At one point, one guy tells you the crime boss you’re fighting is named Shansi (pronounced more like /shang suh/), but both Kane and Lynch (who LIVES in Shanghai and has a Chinese girlfriend) say it like /shang see/, which they’d have no reason to do unless they were reading it off of a script and just hadn’t been told how to pronounce it.

One last note on performance: It runs terribly. Now I’m willing to chalk this up at least a little to how we played it. PC ports were often pretty bad in 2010, and I’ll give the game the benefit of the doubt that it runs better on the console hardware they designed it for as well as what PCs were more commonly like back in 2010. But in the 3.5 hours it took us to beat it, it crashed or disconnected at least 4 or 5 times, and if even one player crashes/drops out, it kicks the other from the level, so there were a good few levels we had to redo significant chunks of while we just hoped it didn’t crash again. Animations also glitch constantly as well, but it’s hard to say if that’s a performance bug or if it’s always been that way. At the very least, the Steam version is a pretty crappy way to play K&L2 in 2023 :b

Verdict: Not Recommended. Sometimes I’ll play a game with a bad reputation and find that it’s nowhere near as bad as people say. This is not one of those times. Kane & Lynch 2 is a painfully mediocre shooter with a miserably boring story that completely deserves its bad reputation. It’s at least not SO awful that you can’t even have fun playing it in co-op to laugh at it (as we had a pretty good time streaming it together, though more in spite of the game than because of it), but I feel like that’s quite clearly damning with faint praise. Unless you just like experiencing bad games from the 360 generation, or unless you simply must experience something so bad for yourself, this is a game to leave disliked and forgotten in the dustbin of history.

A special thanks to my EldritchZoe, though, for playing through it with me and giving me such a fun time with such a bad game <3

Kane and Lynch 2 takes a completely different turn from its predecessor. The first game can be classified as an action movie about heists and revenge, while this sequel is a "found footage" action film with an atmosphere reminiscent of "Pseudo-snuff" movies.

The gameplay improves compared to the previous installment. You can now take cover with a button, and your companion's AI (Kane in this case) is generally better and immortal, relieving you from worrying about him as a problem. However, the game doesn't offer anything noteworthy in terms of gameplay; it's a functional but generic third-person shooter.

The game introduces interesting features that give it a "unique" touch, such as its camera. The entire story is presented as if we are watching found footage, so while playing, you have a camera on your back simulating a digital video camera, creating the sensation that someone is recording you. In my opinion, this implementation is well done, and I never felt nauseous throughout the entire game. You can deactivate the camera movement option if it becomes an issue.

In terms of audio, the game lacks a soundtrack; instead, it relies on ambient sounds where all you hear is the noise of the streets, people screaming at your atrocities, gunfire everywhere, etc. This adds to the game's darker and more depressing atmosphere. The graphics are significantly improved compared to the first game, which seemed like a PS2 game running on an Xbox 360.

The story is brutally raw, depicting the journey of two bastards spiraling into pain, stress, and misery, refusing to leave a world they know has only brought them suffering but still persisting. This aspect kept me engaged the most.

Overall, it's a mediocre but entertaining game, lasting less than 3 hours, so you don't feel overwhelmed by the lack of variety in the level designs. It has other issues like enemies seemingly appearing out of nowhere and occasional instances of bullets passing through enemies, but for me, it's an "okay" game.

Got this cuz of Jacob Geller’s description from an older video about how it portrayed “true, uncompromising ugliness”. And while that is certainly true for the visual/audio style and some of the story beats, it doesn’t really change the fact that it’s most abrasive qualities are it’s only interesting ones.

This isn’t much more than a really mediocre 7th generation cover-shooter with a genuinely impressive presentation. And I wanna be clear that it is impressive as it’s a pre- The Last of Us / pre- Spec Ops: The Line video game that successfully adopts a cinematic visual styling that enhances both the cutscenes and moment-to-moment gameplay. The digital grain that gets more intense in darkness, the blinding lens flares, the fact that the camera shakes so much when running or when in a gunfight that it feels like the cameraman is always trying to catch-up with the player; all of it is top-notch. I just can’t help but think that if this aesthetic was applied to a different game that had a more engaging gameplay loop, or even if the writing could match that same artistry, then this could’ve been something really special.

Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days is a game that is principally disinterested in answering any questions about morality, but in doing so it's able to leave you with a lot of really important questions regarding violence and the 'ugliness' of life that a game like Spec Ops: The Line is only able to achieve through its hamfisted, constantly in-your-face and tactless attempts to make you care about anything you do.

Kane & Lynch 2 does not give a shit if you care or not. It's fully committed to presenting ugliness to you and leaving it as exactly that: ugliness.