In absolute awe of the nearly raw, undercooked nature of this game. It's weird, it's ambitious, it fails on multiple fronts. It's an RPG Maker game before RPG Maker existed, a borderline avant-garde experiment from a time when you had to call a factory and physically manufacture cartridges to get a game on the shelf.

More than anything: the combat. It's different, that's for sure. It's easy to see what they were going for, the positioning, unit facing, action delays. And… most of it doesn't matter? Combat is trivial until the final chapter, moderately challenging at best from then on. Status effects are plentiful but largely irrelevant, action timing is so very odd. Sometimes opening a menu allows another character to go, sometimes a unit will take 7 active turns to unleash an underwhelming move. Opponents need to spend time to reorient, but you do not, despite the numerous enemy moves that change your facing. You have a plethora of abilities on each character, most of them meaningless. The non-linear nature means everything before the finale is the exact same difficulty. Everything is just… there. A pile of ideas.

So it's a good thing the rest works. Yasunori Mitsuda's Yoko Shimomura's boss theme rips right out of the speakers, gets you hyped every time even though you know you're in virtually no danger. Every character has their own musical identity, each era is sonically unique. The themes slowly reveal themselves, the plot hook setting in as the chapters move on. The different genres have different mechanics, the dialogue has different fonts. Different artists for every scenario, different takes on the same message, an ending that pulls it all together. You see the credits no less than nine separate times, and they never let you skip them, treating each as a proper endroll.

It's uneven, a mess, and a reminder that Squaresoft's RPGs were almost always full of the same odd choices and missteps. More so here, but it's easy to point out in almost every title of theirs from the era. They took risks and then polished the results, the flaws harder to see in the resultant sheen.

This game is a piece of art. I don't think I've ever played any survival horror game as unique as it. I pretty much like everything about it. Amazing visuals and art, great spine-chilling soundtrack, and a very intriguing but also nightmarish story that reminded me at times of the works of Junji Ito and Kazuo Umezu. There was really only one aspect of the game i didn't particularly care for, and it was the puzzles. The puzzles are just way too hard and obtuse, but I actually admire the Project Siren team for having the guts to make them that way. The whole timeloop/stage-select mechanic was extremely confusing at first, but I grew to enjoy it. The british voiceover was also quite off-putting, but after a while I found it to be a bit charming. Siren will probably be a game I'll revisit down the line, as it has easily become one of my favorites.

the most violently mediocre indie rpg ive played in a while. as everyone else says the visuals are very strong, the combat is okay (i hate turn based combat and only started to burn out on this system around the 9 hour mark, which is HIGH praise from me), but the story is so soulless that i shelved the game out of sheer boredom with the paint-by-numbers narrative.

it even has some fun stuff. the town with the tavern where everyone lives in denial of their grim fate and you aren't allowed to speak the truth is an interesting premise for a thematic exploration of living in denial of ugly truths, but you spend like 5 total minutes in that space. the pirate that breaks the 4th wall constantly isn't awful in theory, but she and the rest of them are all so irritating with their dumb poses and catchphrases that its impossible to like them. every single character is so generic that its not physically possible to feel a single emotion in response to anything they do.

sucks that the games weakest element is so weak that it makes the rest of the experience a genuine slog

It's good, actually.

I'm someone that got really disappointed, frustrated and baffled with Wolfenstein II, and even though this game is still not what I wanted, I was able to really enjoy it for what it is.

Playing with my bestie, and even doing some offline play, there was a good amount of fun to be had. The level design was handled by Arkane and as such we have very open ended, but not outright open world, levels, with lots of shortcuts, items to find and different encounters to get into.

Most of the game will be spent doing side content instead of the 5 story missions at hand, but I really didn't mind cause that's where the strenght is this time instead of the story. The gunplay is nearly identical to Wolfenstein II except now placed in levels that aren't frustratingly small or unfair, and while you can't dual wield as many guns, the upgrade system (which isn't actually grindy) can make any gun very reliable, especially the machinepistol and shotgun, so that it isn't missed at all.

The RPG mechanics in this game aren't actually that deep. Some enemies will not scale to your level from below so you need to get some level ups before getting to certain encounters, but you always have the option of finding an alternative route or taking them down with some more challenge. Leveling up actually doesn't take much effort, and even just running around shooting anything will net you some good XP. The guns are upgraded with currency you find or get from completing missions and you get more than enough to have a decent arsenal in the first couple of hours. What's most important is getting your skill points and weapon upgrade coins spent, you don't even have to think too much about it, just look at what you like and get it. As long as you actually upgrade whatever, enemies will not become bullet sponges and the game actually remains fairly balanced.

Something very worth noting is that everything scales for each player independently, both on their level and difficulty setting, so asides from those few encounters with enemies that have set levels, playing with someone that's not on your same level will not drag you down, this feature is actually extremely well implemented and I'm surprised it's never mentioned.

The big thing where this game fails in comparison to other Wolfenstein games as of late is story, but really not due to "cringy" protagonists (I really thought they were fine, and way less annoying than any real teenager I'm likely to find), but simply due to it being a very straightforward and short plot. That's really my only big complaint, the story could have been better, but it's not nearly as terrible as Wolfenstein II's (seriously, THAT should be your example of tone inconsistency making things hard to take seriously).

I guess I should mention the microtransactions too, and I'll just say, they're so easy to forget while you're just playing and are never in your face. Very few select items are tied to it, none of them relevant to progression. CAPCOM has been doing way worse on their singeplayer games for years, so if they can do that I just find this case very inoffensive.

I quite enjoyed playing this, both with a friend and alone, and certainly think it's worth at least a run on especially with how cheap it usually goes for on sales now. I think people are too harsh on it because it's not Wolfenstein III, but it's at least way more consistent than II with decent level design, an actual final boss, and characters that aren't pissing on New Order with their writing. I actually hope Wolfenstein III adopts the more open ended design and considers a lighter tone like found here if they're still gonna go with what II was doing. Either way, please chill, this game wasn't made to replace Wolfenstein III and it's not the future of the series like many wanted to assume it was just to be angrier at it.

Theoretically, this game has aged about as well as a carton of milk that's also 20 years old. The voice acting - sans a stellar performance from Charles Martinet - is mostly typical of the time, being hilariously hokey. Overall, the graphics look bland, the controls and camera are quite clunky, and you could argue that the game either holds your hand or leaves you a fish out of water.

And yet, the story and writing are so batshit in the most brilliant way, and there's a massive "a-ha!" factor that plays into puzzles and plot elements you can figure out on your own. There's a satisfaction to exploring around and talking to people, and realizing "oh yeah, this plays into something happening elsewhere!" Not to mention, even if you screw up and run out of time, you have the power of knowing what to do more efficiently and the foresight of letting you skip cutscenes you've already seen. I did "have" to look at a walkthrough two times, but both times with a reaction of "of course, I should've thought of that earlier!" Puzzles in this game are insane, but not in the moon logic sense - within this game's rules, solutions always make complete sense.

Also, while I do think the graphics lack color, there are some really cool effects and animations for the time, such as weather, clothing textures, and particularly, certain time periods utilizing "filters". 1902 has a monochrome overlay, the 1580s look sepia, yet all the while, Eike is in full-color. It's really cool.

It's a game that could totally use a massive polishing-up, but none of its flaws really make me want to walk away. It has this strange energy that makes me adore it, make me want a movie, even a remake. As long as they can get Charles back, that is.

I got this game hoping it to be a like ps2 era character adventure platformer. It indeed was, but I found it extremely sauceless. Nothing really drew me in, just a bland pixar wannabe. The whole mechanic of throwing your pikmin dudes and then pulsing just feels off to me, i know other games you would just have to shoot an arrow or magic bolt or something. Anyways I saw you could get a mask and I thought you could get masks to put on for different powers, but no, it gave me detective vision. I then immediately quit and refunded.

im jus gon copy and paste my steam review

also ive played thru dis game like 10 times im pretty sure so take my fuckin word for it

a misunderstood masterpiece
kane and lynch 2 was released in a time where games like uncharted, army of two, and gears of war were the standard for third person shooters at the time. games where you played as a quippy asshole who kills a million guys but youre still good and likeable

kane and lynch 2 did not follow dis

in kane and lynch 2 you play as da most disgustin, repulsive men who hate each other, doin ugly horrible things, ruinin eachothers lives, and as a result dats what da game is. its disgustin and repulsive, da camera shakes when you run, it looks like an MPEG video, when you get shot da screen depixelizes, you SHOULDNT aim down your sights, da guns are deliberately inaccurate, Lynch is yellin constantly from PTSD and his schizophrenia, Kane is pissed off at Lynch and at his life, and ultimately doesnt care about anyone but himself. dis is usually where people (people who even like this game) say dis game is "deliberately bad" but dat doesnt apply here and anyone who says it does is a moron

theres a scene about midway thru da game, after Kane and Lynch escape torture and are runnin around China naked with cuts all over them bleedin everywhere where they stop in an underground mall, and Lynch starts havin a breakdown. you cant feel bad for him, you cant, and Kane starts talkin to him about how he "needs" Lynch to go thru with dis deal from Glazer with him, "one last deal," so he can "get out the game," and as fucked Lynch is even he realizes how selfish Kane truly is. but who else does Lynch have to rely on? get some clothes on

when i first played kane and lynch 2 it was on PS3 with my homie veronica, it was on sale for $3 and i played it on my old 90s HP monitor, we got to da helicopter setpiece, where you hijack a helicopter and start unloadin machine guns indiscriminately on offices in a huge tower
due to my monitor bein so old, it has speakers, and when things get too loud, it clips like HELL, and starts makin dat sound like when your earbuds are screwin up but way louder and basically perpetually. i wish everyone could experience dat part dis way

another thing people either completely ignore or misunderstand how huge of a design choice it is, is da fact the game is based off graphic liveleak videos
dats WHY da camera is like that, dats WHY da game is so short, dats WHY da gameplay is chaotic, dats WHY da story is so sparse and told in inbetween shootouts and loadin screens with shots of shanghai, dats WHY da entire game is how it is. its a design choice dat runs so deep into the game yet no one realizes it, for whatever reason

i wanna credit my homie veronica for showin me dis game, and for part of how i initially describe da game in dis review
id recommend everyone should go back to dis game, after almost a whole decade of retrospect, and how ambitious it is, i think it deserves it

Blowing someone's brains out with a close-range headshot in Kane & Lynch 2 made me considerably more uncomfortable than any gore-obsessed shooter ever has. I know for a fact that the model's head is perfectly intact and they've just slapped on an obligatory blood splatter decal atop whatever unsuspecting flesh caught the blow, but pixelating the carnage as the body slumps to the floor made me feel as if I'd just seen some low-resolution footage of something real, something that had been edited just enough to make it onto some unsavoury websites visited only by the morbidly curious and the sociopathic.

Following Lynch around the streets of Shanghai with the shakiest handheld camera known to man; complete with the visual artifacting, poor directional audio and overwhelming ambience that comes with it, is an absolutely horrid experience replicated with intent by few others in the medium.

You could argue that Kane & Lynch 2 is a bad game, hell you'd probably be right, but I'll be damned if it isn't something truly special in a way very few other games are.

It's basically an art-house version of Max Payne 3.

In the opening of the first mission in Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, the eponymous duo meet up on the streets of Shanghai. Lynch sticks his hand out for a handshake that Kane does not reciprocate, before Lynch puts his hand down without comment. Lynch offers surface level niceties and makes small talk with Kane, which he responds to with curt refusals and unnecessary aggression. This initially makes Kane look unlikable and selfish, until Lynch drags Kane along against his will for an unrelated personal vendetta, revealing that he's just as selfish and self-serving as Kane is, only dealing with the other because he needs him to get the job done. There is no compassion, there is no bond, there are only two unlikable, selfish men who drag each other down with every self-serving action they take until their shortsightedness destroys whatever they were fighting for in the first place.

Kane & Lynch 2, on paper, sounds like the kind of fun buddy-buddy crime thriller you'd see in a theater. Two down-on-their-luck career criminals with one humanizing aspect each (Lynch's new girlfriend and Kane's estranged daughter) join up for that "one last job", before things go south and our wacky leads are in over their heads in a foreign land, and epic shootouts and action set pieces occur henceforth. However, there is no joy here. The eponymous duo have no camaraderie like you'd expect, only dealing with each other for their own personal gain, but much like a toxic relationship, neither can fully live without the other. There are no rousing speeches, no begrudging acceptance of true friendship, only bitching and moaning about how much everything sucks and how much they despise each other, and yet they continue to fraternize, because who else do they have? They continue to escalate situations to unnecessary heights as they shoot thousands upon thousands of criminals and private military contractors in the concrete jungle of Shanghai. The endless stream of violence without pause or reprise is almost supernatural in a sense. Kane & Lynch are in a hell of their own creation: a drab, eternal labyrinth of urban architecture and endless gunfights in the hostile underbelly of China's criminal underworld. Just as suddenly as it starts, it ends without fanfare or conclusion. We were privy only to the vignette of time the game wanted us privy to, and in a way, maybe it's for the best. Kane & Lynch don't deserve closure.

What makes this plot work is the visual style in which it is presented. The camera is characterized as a perverse, unaddressed third-party observer to the action that unfolds. In cutscenes, the angles are often candid and much too close for comfort, as if the camera is trying to record the action without being seen by the characters in the story. Scenes often start suddenly and end just as abruptly, sometimes mid-dialogue, as if the battery had died before the scene could finish. In gameplay, it shakes as if in someone's hand when you run. Headshots are instantly pixelated out, blood and rain splatter on your shitty camcorder lens, bright lights create lens flare and loud noises such as shouting and explosions peak the audio and ruin the bit rate. When you die, the camera takes a tumble, the audio is suddenly cut-off without fade and the timestamp is presented without comment, before you are instantly thrown back into the action without any pause. We are neither Kane or Lynch, we are simply observers to their reckless and violent actions.

The gameplay is something I admittedly can't give too much comment on, because this is the first Third Person Shooter I've ever actually played, but I will say that it works incredibly well in-tandem with the visual presentation. The guns feel appropriately weighty and have a real OOMPH to them when you fire, alongside the recoil. You have to scramble across arenas scrounging for ammunition while making sure that you aren't getting riddled with bullets by the hundreds of gunmen you'll encounter, who are just as smart as any player, attempting to flank you and take you by surprise if you aren't careful. The cacophony of bullets whizzing by overhead, overpowering the character's speech and assaulting the player's senses makes every firefight intense. The admittedly tedious nature of it all syncs well with the duo's growing exacerbation at the sheer amount of people being thrown at them in the span of the story's 48-hour chronological window.

Kane & Lynch is an ugly, exhausting, visual anathema I had to walk away from constantly due to the sheer over-stimulation I was being bombarded by. But I think it's critical reception (in part due to it's predecessor's controversy), is largely unwarranted. It's a visually striking and unique experience that has yet to really receive the critical reevaluation other games in a similar vein from the 7th console generation received. It's a game very much worth the 4 hour commitment it asks of you.

Digital photography capturing the heavy caliber plowing through the neon-infested air of Shanghai; fuck your eardrums and motion sickness.

Dead Men was clearly inspired by Mann's Heat in some set pieces: the bank heist, the nightclub - which was my favorite part of that game by far - and the shooting in the streets of Tokyo. It had some redeeming qualities but other than feeling like a homage to Mann it didn't get many things right - the dialogue comes to mind.

Dog Days while still being heavily inspired by Mann's cinematography - the use of digital photography in films such as Collateral or Miami Vice - feels like its own thing where everything fell right into place.

The emulation of digital photography is very beautiful and creative - the depth of field, the bokeh, grain (actually noise!), the use of overexposure and a really smart choice of color grading are implented masterfully but Kane and Lynch 2 goes beyond this to present us with very distinct visuals and a nauseating mood: the invisible cameraman struggling to document all of this. To add to this, the camera glitching when you get shot, the hitmarkers getting displayed on the bodies you shoot instead of on your invisible crosshair, the display of water droplets and blood splattered to the lenses were a nice artistic choice as well.

Ironically, this beautifully-crafted digital camera presents us with very ugly things - two psychopaths, sweat shops, corruption, poverty, mutilated persons, innocent people dying and dead naked women in the middle of busy streets. In all of this uglyness, there is some regard for human decency and some elements are masked by pixel censoring: namely these naked women and when you deface the face (sorry) of someone with a shotgun.

It all feels like a long hallway through the deepest place of hell - the nauseauting feeling of a camera struggling to capture this, the worst of human uglyness, the linearity of the levels and the thunderous sound of bullets coming from everywhere - it almost makes you want to vomit.

There's no pretensions about morality in Dog Days as opposed to some dialogues from the first entry - both protagonists just accept what is happening and just push-on as they follow the "the end justifies the means" ethos but for purely selfish gains. There are many moments where this can be seen but one of the best is when they find some hostages in the back of a shop, one of them acknowledges their existence but the other screams something along the lines of "it's not my problem!" which perfectly fits their characters.

Another thing I thought was cool was the fact that most "cinematic moments" happen through gameplay mechanics and with what you are presented from the beginning rather than a cutscene which feels very honest.

It all feels like a collage of violence since you usually don't see what happens behind Kane and Lynch going from one place to the next, you are just placed there to shoot people and get to the end of this nightmare.

On the sound design, it follows the sound signature of Mann's deafening bullets but at the same time it does its own thing by allowing the environments to play the rest of the soundtrack - I simply love it. All of the vocal tracks being in Chinese only enhance the soundtrack if anything.

As for the gameplay, it refined the movement and shooting of its predecessor - a pretty standard third person shooter but I enjoy those so nothing to complain about.

There is nothing else like this in existence and it's still surprising that Square Enix gave all this creative freedom to IO Interactive.

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

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.