Kane and Lynch 2 - Dog Days

[englishbob]

Quick 90 minutes impressions from last night. (Xbox 360)

Visuals - Nice, I like the style. A lot of work has gone into making Shanghai look very conviencing, and it works. Lighting and attention to detail are high. Its aiming for 60fps so the texture quality is lower than 30fps games, but the videocamera style is excellent

Audio - Poor. The guns just sound wierd, the audio is out-of-sync a lot of the time, not sure if this intentional. For example, there is one scripted sequence of a NPC bashing a door in with an axe, and the audio lags so far behind. No music either, that doesn't bother me as it adds to the atmosphere, but may bother some.

Presentation is top notch. Small things like different main menu screens all go a long way. Due to the nature of the gameplay (a lot of running), you just may not take the time to look at all of the things that have been put in there.

...and to the gameplay. Played the demo? Thats about it then. The gun play is OK, its just not up there with the best of them I'm afraid. Its above average but nothing special.

The story is pretty good actually, the setup is easy to understand and to plot logically pans out well so far. The script blends good stuff with bad stuff, the voice acting ranges from great to below-par, and sometimes it jars so suddenly (see a warehouse shootout with a van) its difficult to understand what just happened.

There are a lot of multiplayer modes in this, played a quick match called Fragile Alliance. This was again just OK, nothing special. Maybe after doing the SP I will get stuck in some more and find out if there is anything there that makes it a keeper.

Bottomline, if you liked the demo, you will no doubt like this. However if you had any nagging doubts about the demo, there are still going to be in this full release, and your better off skipping it.

[ChrisF]

Quick 90 minutes impressions from last night. (Xbox 360)

Isn't that pretty much how long the game is anyway?

Did you experience any of the bugs that Giantbomb were? i.e. long freezes whenever you shoot anyone with the shotgun.

[englishbob]

Isn't that pretty much how long the game is anyway?

Did you experience any of the bugs that Giantbomb were? i.e. long freezes whenever you shoot anyone with the shotgun.

Not yet. Not sure how long the game is to be honest, I stopped reading the internet for that ****e. "OMG Only 5 hours Single Player!! Pre-ordered cancelled" all the time, only to find for me its at least 3 times that long because...

(a) I'm not really that good at games to be able to breeze through the whole thing without getting lost or getting killed
(b) I don't continually hammer the START button to skip the story sequences**

** Unless its Bayonetta!

[mikewl]

Really wish there was an option to turn off the awful muddy/grain effects, it really makes it look like crap.

[englishbob]

I think they hide a multitude of sins though, such as pop-up and texture quality. I think if you'd turn them off, you would turn off the game!

[GarageNation]

I wanted to like this , but after playing the demo i thought it was ****e

[mr_woo]

Just finished this in coop and I have to say that I loved it. But **** me is it short, 3 - 4 hours in total, bloody hell.

That's my only complaint really. Everything else was superb in terms of the core - gunplay, graphics (for what they were aiming for) and especially sound were all top notch. It's a great shooter IMO. It's made with heart as well, you can see the care IO have put into it. Bits in the game were

->Open Spoiler<-

you are running around naked and bloodied and Lynch has a breakdown in the tv store. The voice acting and interaction of the characters was great, you wouldn't see that in many other games, especially a shooter

I'll take a game like this over festering pieces of rotten **** like Army Of Two The 40th Day any ****ing day. My only real disappointment is the lack of story really as I loved the story in the first game up to Cuba. It was a fun, not too shabby crime story. Lynch was also toned down a good bit and I'm wondering if this is due to the complaints about them being unlikeable in the first game (which was the point). They also need to work on their coop, it should be drop in and drop out and they should let you restart from checkpoints you've passed if your friend loses a connection. Admittedly the levels are incredibly short anyway but if they split the levels up into chapters a bit for selection in coop that'd be nice. It saddens me though that noone has even mentioned the sound, it has easily some of the best sound design I've heard in a game this generation. Absolutely fantastic stuff quite frankly and IO did a great job. Looking forward to playing the multiplayer modes and Fragile Alliance Arcade, loved them modes in the demo.

It just seems to me that the game has been treated a bit too harshly and I'm still baffled at Eurogamers score but whatever, I'm not gonna insult anyone or take a silly hissy fit. It's not absolutely perfect and there's some typical IO jankiness in their but it's by no means a bad game at all. Then again I guess I'm alone in this one really with how much I liked it. I just hope it sells well enough to get a Kane and Lynch 3 after they've released the new Hitman game. I'll be there day one.

[Eight Rooks]

Nope, Eurogamer's score is spot on, though for the wrong reasons. I love the look - only found one point where it's actually distracting, and I think despite the cheap tech the atmosphere is astonishingly good.

Other than that, this ****ing thing might as well have been designed by monkeys. One long corridor after another, arbitrary barriers all over the place, terrible level design (oh, look, yet another open space with a suspicious amount of waste high concrete walls everywhere! Horrible, cheap pedestrian reactions and terrible AI ruining the set pieces... and ghastly trial and error firefights where they just swamp you with waves of enemies so you're reduced to spray-and-pray with no room for tactics whatsoever. You literally get to points where you walk over the spawn line, they rush you, you die and you just have to try this over and over until you can run back to cover fast enough. It's awful. If you enjoy it, you're simply very easily pleased and/or (like me) are sitting there crying tears of rage wishing something that looked so distinctive could actually be good. No excuses.

Oh, and the story's **** too. No character development, nothing remotely plausible or believable about any of it, most of the plot doled out in voiceovers where we only get half the conversation... I simply cannot believe how shockingly lazy this entire game is. It's as if they spent two years creating the look then got the rest of it wrapped up in a couple of weeks.

Haven't touched multiplayer. I doubt I can be bothered. It'd be exactly the same reaction if I'd got this for free, let alone full price. No more, Io. I don't like the Hitman games, so I'm basically never buying anything first day from you again. I gave you the chance to fix what was wrong with the first game and you basically made nigh on everything under the surface many times worse. No more.

So close to being something brilliant, yet so far, and it enrages me the bad reviews are basically focusing on what should have made the game great because it makes it that much less likely anyone will do this kind of thing properly. Why, Io? Why? How ****ing stupid are you, honestly? Biggest disappointment this year, without question. I want to see the end, because playing through it makes me dream of how good the game could have been, but I'm not sure it's worth the aggravation. Oh, well. I made the mistake, I wasted my money... but yes, like I said, I'm not buying anything from Io again until some time after release, if ever.

[Dazzyman]

First console game I played in 2months (taken a break apart from a few hours on starcraft 2) and all I can say is I want punching in the balls for buying this on impulse. Had it since Wed and its been sat on the shelf since Wed night. 2hours was enough for this boring pos. It's even worse than the first one ffs. Oh and if you get motion sickness dont bother!

I started playing Mass Effect 1 again after it (as yet to do 2) and that looked next gen compared.

Bleugh

Be off for tradin when I can for Tiger get his wood out 11

[mr_woo]

Nope, Eurogamer's score is spot on, though for the wrong reasons. I love the look - only found one point where it's actually distracting, and I think despite the cheap tech the atmosphere is astonishingly good.

Other than that, this ****ing thing might as well have been designed by monkeys. One long corridor after another, arbitrary barriers all over the place, terrible level design (oh, look, yet another open space with a suspicious amount of waste high concrete walls everywhere! Horrible, cheap pedestrian reactions and terrible AI ruining the set pieces... and ghastly trial and error firefights where they just swamp you with waves of enemies so you're reduced to spray-and-pray with no room for tactics whatsoever. You literally get to points where you walk over the spawn line, they rush you, you die and you just have to try this over and over until you can run back to cover fast enough. It's awful. If you enjoy it, you're simply very easily pleased and/or (like me) are sitting there crying tears of rage wishing something that looked so distinctive could actually be good. No excuses.

Nothing wrong with the level design, it's perfectly fine. The cover fits the areas really well and they don't stand out as being there for the sake of being there. It really does feel like you are tearing through the ass of the ****holes of Shanghai.

As for the gunfights whilst the AI wasn't exactly clever there were a number of times they would flank me and my coop partner and of course the thing they'd do when they would charge at you, but they'd never get near us, we just killed them with ease. But the gunfights we never found to be trial and error or spray and pray. We were able to flank them, get above them etc and take them out and use the fire extinguishers effectively. So we're not easily pleased, we're just hot ****

[averybluemonkey]

Again I'm another who didn't find any trial or error issues, died maybe 8 times in a single playthrough on solo, normal difficulty. Only hit the freezing thing a couple of times when blowing up cannisters and figured it was an intentional effect, like the explosion whiting out the camera. Absolutely love that section you mentioned in the spoiler tags Mr Woo, so did not see that coming. That ending though, dieing to play the next game now!

[mikewl]

Wow this game was short, not sure eactly but it took me about 3 hours on co-op to blast through this.

[Jebus]

Only played a little bit of this round a friends house, but even in co-op this seemingly defines the definition of "average". Had to turn off the "camcorder" effect as well as I just couldn't play it like that, same as the demo.

The swearing feels over the top to me as well, I mean, I get that they are rough but it just felt gratuitous.

[Neon Ignition]

Finished this yesterday and whilst technically sound it feels a bit lazy. It's incredibly short and the multiplayer is fairly straight forward. Despite its length I didn't find myself hankering for more missions as it's all so grey and repetitive. The youtube effect is decent at first but eventually becomes annoying as they've over egged it with a sea of lense flare and distortion effects thats never ending.

For me, the definition of a 5/10 game.

[englishbob]

Yep, even for someone like me, this is a very short game, on Normal difficulty at least, about 4 hours spent I recon, did it over two nights! What sort of ending was that?

Unlike most, I really thought the visual style was THE best feature of the game. The gameplay itself was average, the sound average, the story and script were average (except at the mid-point where things really did go a different way and the game was all the better for it, while it lasted).

Its a true 5/10. Multiplayer doesn't interest me in the slightest, the maps are small and the game is round based, and there isn't a lot there to hold the interest.

Ebay here it comes!