E3 2010 Showfloor Preview: Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days
June 17th, 2010 | Written by Anthony Perez | Topic: PlayStation 3, Previews, Xbox 360
One liner: One of the bigger surprises at E3, the sequel to Kane & Lynch: Dead Men has an engrossing level of style and polish.
For those of you who don’t know, there was quite a bit of controversy surrounding Kane & Lynch: Dead Men (Google it if you like). The aftermath led to mixed reviews for the mediocre game, which we scored a 5.9. In fact, we said it was “barely worth a rental.”
Three years later and, well, times they-are-a-changin. Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days starts off in Shanghai, where the somewhat schizophrenic psychopath Lynch, is cooped up and living with his girlfriend. He’s the muscle for a ex-patriot who has a “big job” for him. The job proves to be too much for them to handle and so Kane joins up. After seemingly pissing off the entire Shanghai underworld and the local police, Kane & Lynch are on the run for survival.
Dog Days takes the series in a new and much needed visual direction. The original game sported a very generic look (pictured here). For Dog Days, developer IO Interactive adopted the handicam YouTube-style look of movies like District 9 , and the effect really envelopes you into the action. Peering over cover, for example, tilts the camera with an unsteady hand that is never as jarring as in movies like Cloverfield, but disorienting enough to suck you into the intensity of the moment.
With the game only a couple of months from release, Dog Days fortunately feels like a very tight and polished product. The enemy AI is smart and constantly harassing you, either by popping in and out of different cover spots or by moving to a better vantage point depending on your position if they recognize when you’ve camped in a spot for too long.
You can get the drop on them if you play smartly. In one situation, we found a fire extinguisher lying on the ground near a wall in a restaurant where we were being completely overwhelmed by enemy fire. We picked it up, tossed it in the air, shot it, and used the momentary distraction to find a better, closer cover spot from which to take out our aggressors.
Luckily, you’re a gritty fighter. Rather than the screen flashing red or being knocked out until your buddy saves you after you’ve taken too much fire, a convention that’s been popularized by many third-person shooters over the past couple of years, you instead have the ability to take a couple of desperation shots at your enemy while you drag yourself to safety. It’s an effect that’s similar to “Last Stand” in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, and it makes the action that much more intense.
We are really excited about what we’ve seen from Dog Days. Many of the sequels we’ve seen here at E3 such as Dead Rising 2 and Crackdown 2 have looked too much like their predecessors with only a couple of features tacked on. Dog Days has obviously undergone much more work and is now a genuinely compelling action game. We’re hopeful that this sequel can help the series move past the ghosts of its pasts and jumpstart the franchise anew when it releases on August 24th.
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- Review: Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days (Xbox 360, PS3)
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