Kane & Lynch 2’s grainy camcorder Shanghai still outclasses its gunplay

Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days dropped Adam “Kane” Marcus and James Seth Lynch into Shanghai, handed the camera to a nameless operator, and made the whole thing look like it had been shot on a phone by someone running for his life. IO Interactive built a third-person shooter around that idea in 2010, Square Enix published it for PlayStation 3, PC and Xbox 360, and the result is a game whose look is still more memorable than its shooting.

Trailer, via kaneandlynchofficial.

A Camcorder in the Shanghai Underworld

The pitch is simple. Kane and Lynch reunite four years after Dead Men for an arms deal, planning to split the money and retire. Lynch has built a new life in Shanghai with his girlfriend Xiu, working for an English-born expat named Glazer. The deal would also help Kane’s estranged daughter Jenny, who survived the first game.

Then a simple job goes wrong. The pair go to threaten an informant named Li “Brady” Lung, a chase through gang territory follows, and Brady’s girlfriend is killed in the crossfire at a wet market. Brady then calmly commits suicide. That death is the hinge the entire plot swings on, and the game knows it.

The presentation is the point. Dog Days is framed as footage from an unnamed cameraman who follows the two men through the story. IO Interactive said the visual style was inspired by documentary filmmakers, user-generated content and the look of camcorder footage, with in-game camerawork drawn from hand-held cinematography. The game uses unprofessional editing, jarring jump-cuts and fast cutting to make its cutscenes feel rougher than a normal shooter’s. The camera sometimes falls — when the player dies, and during certain cutscenes. Some violence and nudity is pixelized on purpose.

The game also intentionally censors some of its violence and nudity through pixelization.

Lynch Takes the Lead

Players control Lynch through the campaign, backed by Kane, except in the last mission, where control switches to Kane. Online co-op lets a second player take Kane. The PC version does not support split-screen co-op, unlike Dead Men.

The combat is cover-based and lean. Players carry two of any weapon grabbed from dead enemies, but cannot swap weapons with allies the way they could in the first game. Health regenerates. Players can be knocked down and get straight back up. In single player, allies are invulnerable and cannot be given commands, which removes any reason to watch out for them.

That last detail says a lot. A game about two men who cannot trust anyone has made its partners indestructible and mute. The tension the story keeps promising does not reach the controller.

Hsing, Shangsi and 48 Hours of Hell

The plot escalates hard. After a limousine ambush by Brady’s gang, Kane and Lynch learn their attackers answer to a crime lord named Hsing. They raid his sweatshop headquarters and capture him. Under interrogation, Hsing reveals that the girl who died with Brady was the daughter of an exceptionally high-ranking Politburo official called Shangsi. Anyone friendly with Kane and Lynch is now a target.

Glazer’s men turn on them. Kane and Lynch kill their former associates to keep the truth from Glazer, then escape the police and Hsing’s gang. Hiding in a restaurant, Lynch tries to call Xiu so they can flee Shanghai. She does not pick up. A Chinese SWAT team arrives instead. The pair fight to Xiu’s apartment complex, find it held by Hsing’s men, and reach Xiu with Hsing holding a gun on her. Kane wants to kill Hsing immediately. Lynch hesitates, fearing for her.

The game sells this as 48 hours of hell, and the structure backs it up. The problem is that the campaign is short and the shooting is ordinary. The camcorder gimmick, the jump-cuts, the deliberate pixelization — those carry the weight. Strip them out and Dog Days is a cover shooter with two unpleasant men and a body count.

What the Camcorder Trick Is Worth

This is where the game splits. The visual language is genuinely doing something. Music and aesthetics are used to reflect on the violence and on the psychology of Kane and Lynch, which is more ambition than most 2010 shooters bothered with. The pixelization is the sharpest idea in the whole thing: a game that shows you a killing and then blurs it is making an argument about what you came to see.

But ambition is not the same as execution. The invulnerable allies undercut the survival story. The inability to swap weapons with your partner removes a small piece of cooperation the first game had. The plot races through Hsing, Shangsi and the Politburo reveal so fast that the stakes never settle.

Dog Days is a better idea than it is a game. The documentary framing, the falling camera, the censored kills — those are worth the time. The shooting underneath them is not.

KEY FACTS

• Release year: 2010
• Developer: IO Interactive
• Publisher: Square Enix
• Platforms: PlayStation 3, PC (Microsoft Windows), Xbox 360
• Genre: Third-person shooter, adventure
• Modes: Single player, multiplayer, co-operative
• Playable leads: James Seth Lynch (Jarion Monroe), Adam “Kane” Marcus (Brian Bloom)
• Setting: Shanghai, four years after Kane & Lynch: Dead Men
• Critic aggregate score: 6.9/10 (IGDB, 7 outlets)

IO Interactive · Kane & Lynch 2 · retro game review · Shanghai · Square Enix · third-person shooter