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 & 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