There’s not much room for prickly games in the modern gaming landscape, because abrasions hemorrhage cash. Companies and consumers hold fast to the familiar, but I have little sympathy for those who hide away in aesthetic bunkers.

Games like this are an all-out assault on the foxholes of the picky children.

An ugliness pervades Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, but it was an intentional aesthetic decision, and one that has imbued it with a specific kind of timelessness not enjoyed by its contemporaries. There’s reason to believe a remaster would potentially ruin the alchemy behind its very being.

This game’s not about redemption. It’s not about friendship. It’s not about a higher purpose. It’s about shaky, noisy, low bitrate dv footage of two fully naked men covered in bleeding cuts massacring their way through the bootleg dvd stores of Shanghai.

Kane & Lynch 2 is a laser-focused four-hour experience, but you’ll probably make a decision on its merits within the first four seconds of gameplay. I was all in. It’s divisive, and while disliking it is understandable, dismissing it is wholly undeserved. After all these years I still haven’t played anything like it.

Anyway what do you think the chances are of us getting a Kane & Lynch 3?

Edit: I did not intend for this review to denigrate or delegitimize people who dislike this game. I don’t feel like I should delete the review, but I don’t want people to get the impression that disliking this game means you just “don’t get it” or something, or that I am extra enlightened because I fell in love with the blurry Michael Mann game.

I stand by my subjective belief that this game is a phenomenal work of art, but it is a flawed game. Every game is flawed, and people can rightly criticize those flaws. For me, the pros outweigh the cons. For others, they don’t. Is it just offensive? Is it all style, no substance? I’d like to think it’s something more than that; a commentary of sorts. A strange one that has a little bit of its cake and eats it, too, but in a way I think actually works.

This review is not a reappraisal because I have always liked this game; I didn’t ‘come around’ on it. That said, not everyone who hated it at the time (or now) is some kind of backwards puritan, and it’s wrong and in bad faith to assume that. But dawg you know a game is divisive when the review distribution is almost a flat line. Anyway this game doesn’t need to be a battleground and I’m sorry, I think I made it worse. Let’s just go back to loving Ecco the Dolphin, as we all do without question.

there's a lot said already abt the hypnotically repulsive audiovisual presentation with the frantic camera and barebones controls, it made me feel tweaked out and paranoid in a horrifying way and it rocked, but the thing worth talking about for me is the structure of this game, how vitally spartan its character is. how utterly, necessarily devoid it is of much sympathy for its leads. i skimmed through a playthrough of K&L1 after playing this, which i have no desire to ever play, and it just felt very of its time. a pair of antiheroes make a huge mess of things and argue incessantly and ruin lives but you gotta love their camaraderie and attitude!! and then the women in their life dare to nag nag nag at them about all the fucked up shit they get put through because of them until they inevitably get shot, because they talk too much

the second game inherits their disgusting personalities and their capacity for misery--in fact increases that aspect to a fever pitch--and you might look at it as just following in the boring footsteps of its predecessor with a more interesting aesthetic going for it. but the difference is how unsettlingly off things feel from what you'd expect. the cutscenes are so curt, there is hardly any kind of relatable stakes for the characters other than some vague deal to further imperialism (they dont care abt that part obviously why would they). everything happens with hardly any dramatic rhythm, just hot headed banter and death, with things getting worse and worse. the misogyny is still here but even that has a different tone; the women in kane and lynch's lives this time become little more than convenient excuses for them to continue their evil rampaging, not the motivation to do better that they probably tell themselves they are to help them sleep at night. they're in a hell of their making.

the bluntness behind the narrative helps make the bond between the two MILES more interesting. lynch's schizophrenia isn't exploited for :twisted: funny comedy this time but instead to render him as a pathetic crazed animal with a gun. and the stroke of genius of basically ignoring how K&L1 ends gives kane's more levelheadedness by comparison a delusional sociopathic underpinning. they scream at each other about how much they ruined each other's lives (much like the women they love in the previous game hmm [thinks really hard abt this]) yet at no point in the game does that tension come to a head between them like the first game would tease. it always evaporates away awkwardly. there's no bro moments of "heh you're alright" or anything like that ever in sight because they do not deserve that, they just drop their in-the-moment tantrum and go back to doing the only thing they ever know how to do. this is because, despite how they are unable to actually feel love or not destroy things, they ultimately understand each other better than anyone. they NEED each other so bad. AND YET!!! not even this is portrayed with much more than a kind of pity, if that, it's just a human tendency to prefer not being alone in your cosmic punishment. it's nothing to get too attached to.

if this game has anything that could be called a positive human emotion it wants to hone in on, it's this, and it is so incredibly compelling in its smallness to me that it sticks out beyond the rest of the genre subversion in the game to heighten it further. even a couple of rabid dogs will feel loyalty towards each other, when they know neither of them's going to heaven