Pseudo-Third Person Shooters are here to stay, and in particular the gun-and-cover sub-genre is rising in popularity. Strolling further down The Path of Obvious Statements, it is also a shoo-in that franchises are “the next big thing” in gaming. Kane & Lynch: Dead Men earned a good reception so it would have been simply criminal in the age of franchises for Kane & Lynch to not stage a return to the gun-and-cover arena with a sequel. It appears common sense (cents?) has inevitably prevailed and here we are in the latter stages of 2010 with a sequel which officially marks the advent of the Kane and Lynch franchise.

Kane and Lynch: Dog Days - FRIENDS FUR-EVER!!

Kane and Lynch first made acquaintances during their mutually beneficial escape from death row and they formed an unexpected but necessary brotherhood in arms. Since the “Venezuela incident” in Dead Men, Kane and Lynch have gone their separate ways, with Lynch trying to start a new life in Shanghai with his girlfriend. At the beginning of Dog Days Kane arrives in Shanghai to meet up with Lynch to do one more job, which will hopefully allow them both to retire on the proceeds. Through a series of events stemming from an unfortunately misdirected placement of bullets, the duo end up on the run from the city’s gangs and corrupt authorities, trying to find a way out of Shanghai and out of the mess they’ve landed themselves into. This thrusts the players into an action-packed romp through the seedier sides of Shanghai, combating thugs, mugs, cops and grunts, with a few unexpected twists and turns along the way.

Gameplay in Dog Days is frantic and intense. Kane and Lynch pretty much just move from one exotic (read: seedy Shanghai) location to another, shooting scores of enemies while ducking and weaving from one form of cover to another. In Dog Days you’ve got to be very conscious of the sort of cover you pick because if it’s made of lightweight material, chances are it will splinter into nothingness when you least expect it and if it’s concrete, make sure it’s wide enough that you’re not partially exposed. If there’s too much heat on you, grab an explosive cylinder and toss it into the fray to disperse the mobs. The first key to survival in Dog Days is firepower, and the second is co-ordination. There’s two of you and you need to make use of that numerical “advantage.” Sometimes a choice needs to be made about splitting up to outflank the enemy and draw fire from each other, or to stick closer together in the event that your buddy needs to be revived. These sorts of choices are made amidst the heat of battle and all the while your enemies are processing the best manner in which to outflank YOU - in Dog Days if you want to play sit you’ll most likely wind up playing dead instead!

The new camera style might be a-paw-ling

Arguably the most decisive approach by IO Interactive to Dog Days is the incorporation of a new visual style inspired by documentary films and the advent of online user-generated content. According to a press release this was done “to deliver a fresh perspective to the words ‘intensity’ and ‘realism’” and certainly the presentation is intense and realistic, but I did wonder if this added realism was simply barking up the wrong tree. The lens flares and gritty artifacting can be appreciated and admired in moments of calm but when you’re in the heat of combat and you need to sprint to cover, the haphazard bouncing and shaking of the imaginary cameraman racing to keep up behind you starts to feel a little too realistic and in fact quite disorienting. Likewise the specks of moisture that collect on the “camera lens” while you’re knee-deep in gang warfare and are the designated target for their sniping practice tend to be much more of a hindrance than an awe-inspiring appreciation for realism. Nonetheless, this is a venture into intense reality like never before and although you can enable steadycam this serves to detract from the gritty ambience.

Visual innovation aside, a very deadly flaw in Dog Days is the control system. Some save checkpoints are dispersed very far apart in between challenging gunfights so when your dying buddy is in need of a quick revival and you’re boxed in a mere two metres away behind cover the last thing you want to be doing is a tango with a street lamp, but you may as well get used to it because sometimes the controls will fail you and you’ll be better placed just to enjoy the artful ballet while your buddy expires into his dark demise!

Say what?

A strange paradox for me is that I can handle gore and violence in video games but when it comes to foul language I can’t. Dog Days definitely has bucket-loads of both but for the most part the violence is handled in a more tasteful manner than the language. One aspect which goes well with the realism and documentary-styled approach to the game is the mosaic pixel censorship of horrendously violent scenes: if you manage a headshot with a shotgun at close range, the corpse is censored to hide the associated gore - a nice (and ironically tasteful) touch befitting a war correspondence news feed. The language, however, does not enjoy the same censorship and this was a problem for my wife’s sensitive ears (not to mention mine). I understand IO Interactive’s intention to go for realism and everyone knows that at Criminal School 101 students get bonus marks for interspersing their prepositions, nouns and verbs with colourful obscenities but it would have been nice to at least offer a “beep” censorship option for the nut jobs like me that get easily offended by such vulgar discourse.

Fleas not welcome!!

Dog Days also seems to have picked up a few bugs; some of these bugs we’ve even encountered post-patch: loss of sound and system crashes (especially painful when you’ve completed a chapter and the game freezes on the final cut-scene). I also strongly recommend not dying during a checkpoint save, because otherwise you could become stuck in an uninterruptable loop of death.

Another personal peeve - but it’s not a bug - is the inability to resume a co-op story mode from where you’ve previously left off. One has to select the chapter to start from and this means starting the level with none of the weapons you’ve collected from the previous chapter (the difference between being thrust into a gunfight with an assault rifle or a pistol). It’s little things like this and the always-standing-up-from-behind-cover-when-you’ve-revived-your-buddy-just-to-get-your-head-blown-off that detract from an otherwise entertaining co-op experience.

The story mode is well paced and long enough to give you good value: as with most games of the gun-and-cover sub-genre, Dog Days is even more linear than y = mx + c, but based on what Dog Days aims to be, this doesn’t take away too much from the enjoyment and there are a few additional surprises in the story mode to help reduce any risk of monotony rot.

On the multiplayer front, Dog Days offers a good menu. There’s still Fragile Alliance mode (grab as much money as possible while escaping police forces and possibly traitors) as well as the new Undercover Cop and Cops & Robbers modes. The former follows the same fashion as Fragile Alliance but now includes a randomly selected player whose job is to covertly prevent the rest of the team from escaping. Cops & Robbers is your more typical team-based capture the flag flavour of Fragile Alliance. A small note for South Africans here is that there is some lag when playing online but it’s still playable, although I had difficulty in finding any available games besides Cops & Robbers.

Do we have a bone to pick with Kane & Lynch?

It’s difficult to say whether you’ll enjoy all the nuances of this game and there was always a danger that the new graphical innovations would be a case of the tail wagging the dog, but thankfully the actual gameplay itself is very entertaining and the storyline is interesting enough to keep you intrigued, although it’s short-lived and mostly anecdotal. The game is basically a series of levels with the same concept: run to cover, shoot, loot…rinse and repeat. The documentary-style camera certainly brings a new sense of “in the action” to the gun-and-cover sub-genre but there’s a possibility the handheld camera effects of bobbing and weaving may leave you feeling nauseous after extended periods of play and the jury’s still out as to whether or not the deliberate artefacting and grainy view enhances the experience or detracts from it (the age-old debate of realism vs. gameplay).

The multiplayer aspect is a lot of fun, and having played through the story mode in co-op I can confidently recommend the game if you have a buddy. There are hosts of online options which will extend the longevity of the game with some good variety (and some interesting new modes) to enable Kane & Lynch 2 to establish its own dedicated online fan base.

All-in-all, Dog Days is good fun and this proves that sometimes you don’t need to teach an old dog new tricks. If you can tolerate the bad language and sometimes bad (albeit deliberate) graphics presentation there’s another decent co-op experience waiting for you.

The Good: Multiplayer; co-op story mode
The Bad: Bugs; controls aren’t quite refined
The Good or Bad (depending on your tastes): Documentary-style camera; gritty realism

Purchase:

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