years

At first blush, it’d be easy to take Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days as just another third-person action shooter of the Xbox 360 era – a period absolutely replete with such games. To be honest, that description is certainly true of its predecessor – a game probably now more broadly remembered for its role in one of games media’s largest scandals. But the sequel is something more – something special, unique, and worth remembering.

15 years old today, the most famed aspect of Kane & Lynch 2 has aged well. Revisiting it briefly for its anniversary, it’s obvious that it’s an aged shooter of a bygone era with all of the mechanical foibles that framing brings – but this is also a game that does and says things that few in the decade and a half since have attempted.

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Much of this is about the aesthetic of Dog Days’ presentation. Broadly speaking, it’s shot in a way intended to be candid. The camera shakes like it’s being held by some poor spectator battling a relentless avalanche of adrenaline. In a time when games were pushing for an increasingly cinematic look Kane & Lynch’s bloodied misadventures aren’t shot or framed with any heroic portraiture.

At the same time, presentational touches suggest the curation of the footage. Colours blow out as if you’re viewing the action off a worn-down VHS tape, and techniques are deployed to make your interactive decisions in gameplay infect the visuals. Looking directly into the brightest neon lights or burning incandescent bulbs makes the footage flare. An explosion doesn’t just fulminate in Kane & Lynch 2’s world – it rips through that camera lens too, the footage warping and distorting as a result.

Audio will outright cut out from time to time, or distort amidst the most intense action. The shakiness of the camera sells the chaos of events: weapons can routinely feel inaccurate, encouraging you to spray indiscriminately. All of this tells a story about this world, Kane, Lynch, and their situation.

The most graphic violence is presented with a pixelated blur, like some sort of overworked censor is desperately intervening in real-time to prevent you from getting too grossed out. You’ll squeeze the trigger to blow someone’s head off and instead of carefully-modelled ultra-realistic gore spluttering out the head disappears behind a mesh of pixelated suppression.

Censor this.

As is often the case with such censorship, the way your imagination fills in the gaps is far more visceral and brutal than anything Kane & Lynch 2’s developers could’ve cooked up themselves. The vibe is deliberately evocative of some sort of eastern European horror film that’d be refused classification for release in the UK. It feels like you’re watching something on LiveLeak.

Back in 2010, Kane & Lynch 2 was one of those ‘Marmite’ games. Some people understood and appreciated what it was shooting for more than others. Some failed to see its merit and were just pretty disgusted by what it presented. You can look at the review scores from back in the day to see this. This very website awarded Dog Days a 4/10 and compared it unfavorably to Army of Two: The 40th Day, another co-op shooter of the time. But here’s the interesting wrinkle now: Army of Two is now largely forgotten, but a certain stripe of sicko still speaks fondly of Kane & Lynch 2. In this sense I feel the years since have been kind to this game; it has been revealed as a sort of cult classic.

One thing I love the game for with today’s hindsight is how it manages to be both unique from and reflective of its era in the same breath – which is difficult to do. A lot of that reflection is in the violence. You can’t look at Kane & Lynch 2’s cover-based third-person combat without considering Gears of War, right? The setting, too, is loosely evocative of Stranglehold’s bloodied Hong Kong gang wars. But where those games are simply about being ‘awesome’ – chainsawing through aliens and slow-mo John Woo flipping one’s way to mass murder with the occasional bit of hamfisted introspection in a cutscene, Kane & Lynch 2 is something else. You don’t feel like an awesome badass playing this game. In fact, you often feel dirty.

This can almost entirely be credited to the game’s aesthetic and that utterly genius choice of camera. At the time, in the review period, I remember marvelling that in many ways it was probably the world’s first ‘true’ third-person shooter – by which I mean, the game’s camera angle genuinely appears to be presented from the viewpoint of a third person who stands astride the titular antiheroes quaking and cowering, squeamish as they spill pint after pint of blood on the streets of Shanghai.

It was the vest of times.

Somehow this combines with the video nasty aspect and draws the player in – you perceive being closer to everything taking place on-screen, gameplay and cutscene both. The interactive violence is unpleasant, even if the action is scintillating. The narrative is worse; an escalating cycle of suffering and torment that only gets worse as the story wears on.Every chapter delivers another narrative fist to the gut. It grinds on you, and Kane & Lynch 2’s four-hour runtime feels like an admission of fact: any more of this horror show would be too much. The length of two films, experienced over a stomach-knotting night or two, is perfect. So that’s what it is.

This differed from many games of the day – Amy of Two: The 40th Day, the other major co-op third-person shooter released in 2010, is double the length. Kane & Lynch 2 doesn’t feel deficient, though – it’s the right amount of game for the sotry being told, and I don’t remember as much hand-wringing over that as we today see with shorter games like Mafia: The Old Country.

That difference slots into a broader theme, which is that there’s something to be said about Dog Days in relation to the other games of the time. The Xbox 360 and PS3 era was filled with ultra-violent shooters pushing boundaries. This game is in many ways the most ultra-violent and unpleasant of them all. But it takes no pride in it; these protagonists are not awesome dudes. They’re horrible, in fact. In this sense a gauntlet is casually laid down, and a commentary is made on the nature of adult games.

Yes, Kane & Lynch are mass murderers – but this game is honest about that, and not in a way that is cynical. They have body counts akin to those of Messrs Drake, Yuen, Rios, Salem, Fenix, and whoever else – but unlike those guys, they’re not awe-inspiring heroes. They’re real pieces of shit. In this, I hold Kane & Lynch 2 alongside Spec Ops: The Line as a shooter of this era that actually had something to say about the inherent violence in much of gaming, without a smirking quip or badass brofist in sight.

Making something so relentlessly brutal and miserable is a choice – and I think it speaks to IO Interactive’s strengths as a developer, both then and now. Agent 47 has always been a more positive sort of anti-hero, carefully bumping off billionaire assholes and warmongering generals before they can do even more harm, living in a fantastical and beautiful world not dissimilar to that of James Bond, which makes IO a perfect pick for the next 007 game. But Kane & Lynch are something else entirely.

When you’re done playing Dog Days, there’s not the same sense of satisfaction as other games. If anything, there’ll be a sense of relief that the cavalcade of misery is over. You’re free of these characters at least – even if they aren’t free of their disconsolate lives. At the same time, like some of the best disquieting horror movies, the experience is still ‘fun’ – albeit the sort of fun that leaves you with a vaguely queasy feeling.

It’s a totally unique experience. It’s brutal, grim, and strangely gripping. The fact it remains so 15 years after release, with not another big-budget game like it in sight, perfectly underscores why it is so special. So, happy birthday to Kane & Lynch 2 – except nothing about this pair is happy. Have a miserable birthday, guys.

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