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How many times has it happened where a game sells over a million units, and is still called a failure in the eyes of most fans and critics?  You can probably count on one hand the number of times.  Yes, issues over review payola and overall poor game mechanics hobbled the once-considered gem at the house of Eidos.  However, selling a million plus units normally means financial success, and therefore Kane and Lynch was bound to have a sequel.  Most will just want to know if the second attempt raises the bar for the franchise, and to that, I can say yes.  However, if you were looking for a significant shift for the franchise, you might want to keep looking.

Without going into too much detail from the first title, Kane and Lynch went their separate ways after they completed their tasks, but seem to have remained friends over the years.  Kane has continued to do the odd job, while trying to make amends with his daughter, while Lynch has calmed down considerably from his psychopath ways in the first game.  Lynch has relocated to Shanghai, China and has settled down with a Chinese woman that seems to keep him balanced.  He continues to do odd collection jobs here and there, but for the most part, has left the deep criminal lifestyle that caught up to him in the first title.  Of course, nothing can stay stable for these two, and when they both meet up to complete one final job for Kane, everything falls apart and they are on a scramble to save their lives, as well as Lynch’s girlfriend.

While the story is somewhat interesting, I found it to be far more pedestrian than the first title.  It seems that the characters were caught up in a far more interesting drama the first time around, whereas this time, I was lost half the time as to what the plot was, and how the hell it involved my two characters.  A lot of it comes out of never really having a strong heavy to play the bad guy.  We have a major crime boss that is upset at a particular action we take against his family, but we never really see or hear from him until the near final climax of the story.  Not exactly the way for a big boss to flex his stuff in my opinion.  Thankfully, the story is never a necessity for a title like this, as it is more about combat and, in a new twist, a stunning visual palette.

IO Interactive seems to have taken the criticisms over the graphics in the first title, and this time around, have created a full on orgy of sensory overload.  Out are the stark, clean streets of corporate America, and in are the grungy streets of Shanghai, awash in bright neon and bleeding florescent lighting.  It seems that someone has been watching a lot of Bourne movies, as we have a full on shaky-cam following our every movement.  Cut scenes have cell phone buzzing in your speaker to simulate the interference that can happen, as well as the mosaic effect when you blast someone in the face at close range.  The whole graphical feel to Kane and Lynch 2 is like a textbook work for any aspiring art class student, as it mixes all of these real world video artifact items to give the game a “Down on the street” feel.  You capture a sense of the hard, dirty world that exists in Shanghai, as you leave the main streets down back alleys into the bowels of the criminal underworld.  I loved every minute of the visuals, and was rather upset when they stopped rather abruptly.

Yes, in what will surely end up regurgitating the price to time value, Kane and Lynch 2 weighs in at about the four hour marker to hit completion of the single player campaign.  My problem with the length was more along the lines that I could not even tell you half of what actually happened in that campaign, and I was surprised at the abrupt ending of the story.  It seems like there was a lot of indecision as to how to end the main story, and someone threw up a mad libs sheet for the conclusion.  Yeah, I wanted more, if only to make sense of the main story.  Also, when you ask someone to pay $50 for a PC game, most will look at the time to price ratio to see if it is worth it.  Fortunately, there is a solid multiplayer component that should add a lot of value to your experience.

Fragile Alliance was the big item that the first Kane and Lynch brought to the table, but atrocious net code, mixed in with a less than stellar implementation of the Games for Windows LIVE system, killed any enjoyment that you could get from multiplayer.  IO Interactive stepped away from the half baked Microsoft system and moved to Steamworks and it does make for a better, more reliable multiplayer session.  A full slate of multiplayer modes is present as well, adding Cops and Robbers and Undercover Cop modes to the already fantastic Fragile Alliance.  The multiplayer experience in Kane and Lynch 2 is like a breath of fresh air for multiplayer in general, having a team of players pull off a large scale heist.  But at any moment, you can turn on your teammates and steal their cash.  This basically makes you a target of everyone else on your team that is still alive, but it can make you exponentially rich, adding a nice risk/reward to your standard team deathmatch.  All of this multiplayer mayhem is unfortunately, underused at the time of launch, as there were few matches available, and on several occasions, I had to wait 5-10 minutes to get enough people to start a match.  Having to wait to play a fast paced game of Fragile Alliance is a sad experience indeed.

Bigger still in the problem department is the horrendous hit detection system when you fire weapons in Kane and Lynch 2.  I totally get it when someone is standing across a 25-40 foot expanse and my spray of bullets is doing little damage.  It is the nature of using a fully automatic weapon, as you spray and pray with a hail of bullets.  What I don’t expect is to have someone at a 10 foot radius survive a 30 round burst from an assault rifle.  Or, how about a shotgun blast to the face at 5 feet away, and watching the man in a t-shirt and jeans continue to advance from you, as if he was wearing a Bill Lambier face mask.  At other times, I found myself lining up solid shots, only to watch the rounds go wide, even with a sniper rifle.  Worse still, is that the computer seems to never run into these hit detection issues, and in later missions, you feel as if you are just walking into a meat grinder, dying repeatedly until you capture a lucky break.

Kane and Lynch 2 is not a perfect game, far from it.  However, I had a lot more fun with the title than I did the first time around.  The super stylized look with, the shaking camera and bleeding lights is a blast to look at every time I load up the game.  The multiplayer adds a ton of replay value to the title, making for a good title.  A few patches will help streamline some of this issue, but until that happens, Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days feels average at best.  Sure it is light years ahead of its pedigree, but it is still lapped by almost all of its competition.  Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days receives 3 out of 5 Aeropausonauts.
Check out Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days and other PC reviews at Test Freaks