A game so committed to nausea, bitterness, cynicism, and pure seething hatred, it will leave you a worn down husk.

Kane and Lynch 2 is about two of the world's most wretched men on Earth turning Shanghai into a military hell on earth as they piss off a corporate overlord with command over the various Shanghai gangs/Paramilitary Units/leading up to the actual Chinese Communist Army as Kane and Lynch become less human as they keep going long after the initial starting point that set everything into motion (an arms deal in Africa) goes belly up, Lynch's girlfriend gets horrifically murdered and the camera lingers on her dead face agape with horror and blank, cold, dead eyes.

The visuals are some of the most uncomfortable within a game, not from the graphical quality itself, but the presentation. There are vertical bars from lightsources, there is digital distortion when the cameraman (it is established to be a cameraman/documentarian) is near an explosion caused by Kane and Lynch's war horse actions.

There is a heavy machine gun that if you are listening with headphones is so loud and abbrasive it will make your eyes vibrate.

There is no good ending for these miserable men, only delaying their inevitable downfall with violence as they escape Shanghai after ruining it, to poison wherever else they land.

While it isn't great gameplay wise, it's rather pedestrian for the late 2000s/early 2010s, the visual kitsch and pure commitment to misery is something that if experienced I genuinely believed changed me, and may change you.

Or I've become so desperate for new feelings in the video game medium that this game's reputation has gaslit me into seeing it as a grotesque piece of transgression fueled art when it's just a bumshooter from 2010.

Either way, it's stuck with me when I went back to play it all these years later.