Kane and Lynch 2 Review

Kane and Lynch 2 is a mixture of many underwhelming and poorly implemented gameplay elements. Even the nifty visual look style and the occasional funny line of dialogue cannot prevent the game from being generally unimpressive. You play mostly as the bald fat man Lynch who along with Kane comes into trouble by accident. The entire police force of Shanghai descends upon you at every turn with no anticipation of a peaceful arrest scenario by either side.

Yes Lynch is naked, he is still going to take a dozen bullets before dying

The single player is insanely short, barely longer than a movie and the story fizzles out into a simple escape scenario during the second half. The AI has a whole range of issues from plain daft behaviour to jerky and erratic animation transitions that makes the combat clunky. Problems compound themselves if you somehow find another person playing this game online. The most crucial part of a third person shooter is the combat but the game doesn’t even seem to get that right.

The combat in Kane and Lynch 2 is occasionally satisfying but mostly repetitive and lacks the smooth feel of most third person shooters. Cover mechanics are here but they don’t work so well when the cover doesn’t always protect you from attacks. The AI is so deadly accurate, when it isn’t being brain dead, that if your chin happens to be visible to the armed police 100 feet away then you’ll lose more than few hairs on it.

There is a lot of shooting but without the small cross placed on enemies you probably wouldn’t know you’ve hit anything half the time. Most of the game is a shooting gallery and you’ll move between rooms and face more police forces that come out of nowhere. If you take enough damage quickly you get knocked to the ground and can crawl around or get up to cover. At least when you drop to the ground you have a chance to recover and attack enemies closing in. The biggest problem with the combat is the AI and how they behave during combat.

Visual style includes bleeding lights and artifacts

Enemy AI have cat like reflexes even when it comes to being shot in the head. More times than I can count police or gang members would react faster than superman after being shot and instantly snap into a cover position. Then of course just as quickly move between cover, not only does it look poor but it makes the combat a chore when you can’t possibly track these erratic movements. Your foes and civilians also have the brains of a well constructed brick.

If the artificial intelligence was smarter the combat might also be more fun. Yes the enemies sometimes take cover on the wrong side on an object. Yes they will sometimes stay in cover until you walk up to them and pat them on the back with your sub machine gun. Chinese civilians and Kane himself did get in my firing line more than enough times to generate several swear words almost as if I was Lynch himself. There was even one guy who decided to keep eating his burger even though there was a shootout in the streets just seconds previously.

Most third person shooters give you grenades to blissfully toss over cover, but that would be too easy for Kane and Lynch 2. Instead you can throw canisters or fire extinguishers that are placed wherever the level designers could be bothered putting them. All you need do is throw them and press the attack button to instantly have them blow up; it doesn’t matter if they have moved behind and object. The problem with this mechanic is that the implementation is exceptionally poor. One of the opening areas in the game is a car park with a fire extinguisher on every supporting pylon, in total there were more in this underground car park than the entire rest of the game.

This car park has too many fire extinguishers

The game is not without some good features, mostly related to the characters and the new graphic style adopted for the sequel. The visual style is a handheld digital camera which causes lots of visual oddities on your screen. Lights streak or double up as though you see them through a lens and you also get digital artifacting which appears as blocks. Heavy shaking occurs during strenuous activity and for Lynch this means just about any activity. Despite being excessive at times it does give the game a certain unique feel and does successfully bring you closer to the action however bad it is.

The dialogue and story is also not without flavour but sadly deteriorates during the second half of the criminally short three hour campaign. In fact the opening level features the better parts of the story and dialogue. The first action segment is actually the funniest sequence that has Kane and Lynch chasing a man down a street who is also dragging along a half naked woman behind him culminating in a surprising finale. Escape is pretty much the only objective during the later levels and the common sense action also disappears.

The end levels become somewhat ludicrous in terms of the action. On a helicopter, which you have recently taken over, you circle a high rise building only to discover hundreds of police and armed personnel. Many  are armed with rocket launchers (naturally) and they have occupied the very floor you are circling. You then use your trusty machine gun to take out not one but two helicopters while in flight. The game should have retained the semi realistic feel of the first half of the game instead of retreating into a silly game of shoot anything that moves.

Lynch takes on yet another helicopter midflight with his machine gun

Kane and Lynch 2 is certainly built for coop which unsurprisingly leaves a lot to be desired. The erratic AI movement now becomes extremely problematic in a situation where there is lag between you and the host. It wasn’t uncommon to shoot an enemy and have him die a second later or have him appear somewhere else completely. At least the levels are generally designed for two people with flanking spots and ample cover locations. Some scripted sections even seem to fail as the man who was running away in the first level actually ran towards me a few times, naturally invincible to bullet damage.

The problems with the coop interconnectivity extend sadly to the pretty lacklustre multiplayer games. Fragile alliance (which can also be played against bots offline) tasks your team of criminals to take out some police or gang members, steal some loot and then escape. In multiplayer you can shoot your own team at any time steal their cash as a traitor. If you die you can come back as a cop and seek revenge on the person who betrayed you, or just stop them from escaping.

Do not adjust your screen

There is very little satisfaction repeating the same objective on the same map in this mode. In arcade mode without the human component I couldn’t imagine anybody not being bored after a few rounds of facing the same enemies in the same locations who get harder each time. After a few rounds online you’ve seen it all anyway, betrayal, loyalty and just good old fashioned failure. The erratic laggy movement of AI and friendly players makes the whole game feel sloppy and escaping with loot barely nets any reward only allowing you to buy weapons for the next drab round.

The whole idea of having people on your team kill you at any time is overrated considering there will seemingly always be griefers. It only really successfully generates high levels of vengeance when you get murdered and become a cop. Most cops high tail it directly to kill their betrayer before dying amongst the other criminals. Relying on that one idea as the basis of the multiplayer success is the reason why there are more humans currently in space than there are playing Kane and Lynch 2 online.

At least dog days has dogs

Kane and Lynch 2 is extremely short and very little of it is worth replaying. Occasionally funny dialogue and a unique visual style do not make a game. The coop is sometimes broken but mostly just full of lag and lacks polish. The multiplayer is also very boring and lacks long term depth. The online population is also extremely tiny, coop and multiplayer combined, so you probably won’t find a game to join. Although K&L2 is not completely flawed it has far too many problems for it to be worth recommending at anything but the lowest possible price point.