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.