Cute fast-paced shooter that seems mechanically very simple, but pushes its concepts to the limit. A little too much sometimes.

Lovely Planet starts off really strong, with a colorful abstract world and some fun music playing as you make your way through speedy obstacles courses. It's very satisfying piecing together your route to the end, to take out every enemy while reaching the goal as fast as you can. The game doesn't initially seem all that deep, but as you progress a lot more gets added to your plate to manage. Discovering stuff like being able to parry enemy bullets with your own was exciting, and it later becomes essential in later levels as you'll end up quickly parrying bullets one after another.

The game has a big spike in difficulty a couple worlds in though, which i wouldn't necessarily mind if it wasn't for an annoying lack of information. The game doesn't have a crosshair, which i actually kinda liked in the early levels since it forces you to pay attention, and messing up isn't a big deal. A lack of shadows also leads to a lot of poor depth perception, which makes certain obstacles like the bombs particularly hard to deal with. All this combined with the high amount of precision the game expects you to perform, ends up feeling extremely frustrating.

If you've got a couple hours though, its definitely worth a shot at least to try the first 3 or 4 worlds.

What if shooter but was an incursion to hell.

The most present and conscious camera I've seen. No climax, no build-up, no conclusion, no nothing. Just a disgusting reality permeating the experience.

Also, WTF is up with the sound design and soundtrack?????

so many reviews of this game (going beyond just this site) read like a shopping list of grating SFX, because in the moment it's very fucking hard to feel like you ever fully have a grasp on the situation. your brain is being force-fed new stimuli constantly, and the game makes no effort to actually help you decipher any of it, so you resort to isolating individual contributors to the chaos in the hopes that it'll help you ground yourself. almost constantly guns are going off, and if bullets are being sprayed then you're probably taking damage, even if you're in cover. whether that's the result of enemies being much better shots than Lynch or their desperate attempts to constantly flank you changes by the minute, and the fact that you can never really get a fix on how many bullets kill this guy at this range means that the player is probably too busy determining if everyone from the first wave is dead to notice that waves 2 and 3 are entering the room. at that point you've lost whatever control you may have had - you don't have the time or ammo to figure out if the enemies are finite or if they'll just pour into this room endlessly. if you've ever played a shooter where you can be "suppressed" by enemy fire, this is every shootout in K&L2 - sitting there as bullets and debris fly past you faster than you can process, hunkered behind cover that won't last forever, waiting for your chance to make something happen while these two losers mutter to themselves and scream at each other. sometimes it's important screaming. it's usually not.

not to suggest that the misery stops when the shooting stops. if you, a hypothetical non-player of K&L 2, were under the impression that this game might ask you to walk up to someone and talk to them to progress the plot, i am sorry to be the one who tells you otherwise. all of kane and lynch's quiet moments are quickly upended by gunfire in a way that feels less like a clever surprise and more like a message from the developers: what else did you think could happen? what else exists for these two, how could they possibly outrun this forever? shooting and screaming is all they know how to do, and they still manage to fuck that up despite their assurances that "things could've been alright if not for this, if not for you". sure, they've ruined each others' lives, but in truth, i don't know if either of them needed the help.

i probably wouldn't argue with someone saying the game is hateful. it doesn't really seem to hate the player, though, which i think is what a lot of people who have never played it take away from these reviews. no, all of the ways in which it inconveniences the player set the tone, making the game feel more like a playable LiveLeak video. there's the association with LiveLeak's classic subject matter, of course, but also with the sense that you're getting a dispassionate look at something as it exists in the real world. watch these two destroy a city, their bodies, their relationships, and know that it's not being scrubbed or retouched for you - this is what's out there for men like this.

at the time of Army Of Two, 50 Cent blood in the sand, Stranglehold, Homefront, Uncharted or even the first Kane & Lynch, commercial video games seemed to point to a mindless mass future in which firearms and killings in suburvial environments no longer than 6 hours , with a compulsory multiplayer it sounded like money and almost all of them celebrated themselves unaware of their imperialist premises.
I have always had a fascination for suburban spaces as a setting for drama or action, but I am a bit pissed off by the approaches that see them as a simple playground for violence or misery pornography, which is exactly how it is usually seen under American lenses.
so why not crash the van into the avenue of American shooter and, for once, honestly present what happens here? no context no motivation no satisfaction, just a graphic document in Shanghai, a city often seen by Westerners as a playground for pleasure or shady business, with a conscious camera alerted to cinematic intentions and aesthetically unsightly, ireespectful with the eyes and the hands of the player but, curiously, more visually respectable with the deaths, censoring genitals and disfigurements (taking notes Naughty Dog?) and I don't know what the hell is wrong with the sound.
maybe because the IO interactive anthology doesn't know many more verbs than "kill", you know, the hitman saga, freedom fighters (lol) and they know it, they wanted to take a chance with an exercise on the shame of some "antiheroes" in a "field of games"

Also, play Reciever, it is good and also faithfully presents the use of a firearm

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

I always found this game fascinating. I really liked what they did but I could never articulate what It was that made it interesting to me beyond surface level aspects. I read an interview and watched a GDC talk with the art director of K&L2 and it provided a lot of insight into what makes this game click for me.

Kane & Lynch 2 doesn't look pretty, no character is likeable, the music sounds like it's falling apart and dying, and it ends before you know it. From what I can gather is most of what's on offer is deliberate. The game is built to just be an experiment; It's anti-fun and anti-game. The whole thing is bleak, depressing, and brutal. Everyone wants you dead.

Most game's would have a puzzle or some sort of mini game that breaks up the constant combat. But K&L2's downtime is showing the underbelly of Shanghai and some vacant or depressing environments with some Silent Hill-esc music right before you are thrown into more combat. The weapons feel inaccurate but because you can get ammo consistently, not landing all your shots accurately feels like an intentional decision to make it frantic and overwhelming.
The gameplay is reminiscent of similar games within the genre, but everything around K&L2 is anything but the norm for third person, cover based shooters. The combat is tiring, relentless, and you're always outnumbered.

The visual style of K&L2 turned out great. I love the commitment and accuracy to make the game look like it was shot on a cheap camcorder. The game has poor sound quality, visual glitches/artifacts, poor shot composition, blown out lighting, muted colors, and sudden cuts with no consistency. The game is both beautiful and ugly at the same time. It's kind of an achievement to make your game look and sound so appalling on purpose.

What's great to me is how much of the pre-production research and design goals made it into the final game. It's not common for a title to come out from a big publisher that's experimenting but also made to be unpleasant when you play or look at. When the team is aware that some people won't like it, but do it anyway because they feel it's interesting and different is something I find commendable.

definitely my favorite dual protagonist third person shooter revenge story that takes inspiration from snuff films. played on hard which felt like the right focus on scrappy escapes & the importance of sprinting to the flank in gaps of cover fire. playing this & 50 cent blood on the sand within a year or two of each other has given me an appreciation for the 7th gen TPS--like gears, which is to really say, like time crisis, cover is a means of well, covering yourself while the AI launches their assault; the offense moves you should be making are sprinting to the flanks, picking off who you can in transition, then using the cover from the flank to launch bullets in behinds. as a kid i used to play these games in this pop shot trench warfare style & man that shit was boring. when ur sprinting screen beet red camera shaky hip firing a shotty with 3 shells left....thats the good stuff.

definitely best sprint button ever btw. genuinely comedic that 60% of the dialogue of the final stretch is like

lynch: (sounding like he just sounded himself with a cheese grater) fuck! fuck! fuck! fuckkkkkkk. this is never gonna work. we might as well put a bullet in our brains. do whatever you want. its over for me. i have fucking nothing left. piece of shit. i'm literally cocking the hammer and putting the barrel in my mouth
kane: hey man one of us needs to go around back and provide suppressing fire. can you do it?
lynch: ok....(realizing there's 100 rounds left in his LMG and 10 warm bodies) ok yea for sure 😸 I can do it 💪

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre of video games, a hellish, unspeakably ugly, chaotic, visually incomprehensible, nihilistic probing into the very mind of its own insane protagonists desperately trying to claw out of a world of shit (and betrayal) while constantly making the situation worse and worse. There is no positive character development, they learn nothing, its just kill, kill, kill or be killed, white, Chinese, man, woman, dog, cop, civillian, politician, it doesn't matter, from the gutters of Shanghai to the high-rise skyscrapers blasted through by machine guns its all the same. A constant assault to your eyes, ears and brain. playing it is pretty much the video game equivalent of getting your face smashed into broken glass and barbed wire. But make no mistake, I have a deep and disturbed fascination with it. There is no other another big budget title that is THIS commited to its psyhcotic aesthetic and depthless depravity. Much like Drakengard this will leave you withered and exhausted, questioning whether the entiere medium of video games is nothing but a huge mistake, that should be erased by God.

I love it.