Kane & Lynch: Dog Days Review (360)

A gritty crime shooter that could have been so much better.

Kane & Lynch: Dog Days is a third person shooter published by Square Enix, who are probably better known for their RPG games than their third person shooters. It follows on (although very loosely, or so I’ve read) from 2007’s ‘Kane & Lynch: Dead Men’, a game which is described in Xuiryus’ review on this site as feeling “half finished” & “Sub-Par”. While it seems that the developers have fixed some of the issues the first game suffered with, some still remain and others have cropped up.

The game is set in Shanghai, where Kane & Lynch are reunited to carry off one last weapons smuggling job for a typical ‘cockney gangster’ type named Glazier. Before the job can be started something goes horribly wrong and Kane & Lynch find themselves on the wrong side of the Chinese mob, and the entire Shanghai police force.

I did enjoy this game while it lasted

The game is played out in third person, and the game played like a cross between an old James Bond game and ‘Gears of war’, but much clunkier and harder to control. A cover system is integrated, where the player can duck behind walls and scenery to avoid being shot at, and blind fire certain weapons at enemies, but the controls are very temperamental, and if you don’t press A in the exact right spot facing in the right direction Lynch will just stand there like a lemon & get shot several times. Even when in cover, it seems like the enemy AI becomes much more accurate, and I found myself dieing more often in cover than if I just crouched behind a wall and aimed my crosshair around the corner.

The other main issue I had with the game was its length. The first time I completed this game it took around 4 and a half hours, and even when I played through it again on the hardest difficulty setting I managed to get through it in an afternoon, despite dieing much more often because of the absurdly temperamental cover system.

I have to give credit to the writers though; I really enjoyed the game’s story, even if it is a little typical of the genre, it’s well written & the characters are really believable, with superb attention to detail. At a few points during intense gun battles you can hear Lynch muttering obscenities & threats to himself in a believably psychotic style. The cut scenes use a shaky-cam flip phone style, which adds to the brutality & grit of the game. This can of course be turned off, but I chose to keep it on, as it added to the atmosphere.

It’s probably also worth pointing out that this game contains quite a lot of graphic violence (the first thing you see upon starting the game is a man who bears uncanny resemblance to comedian Bill Bailey being slashed with a razorblade whilst tied to a chair naked) and while some scenes are censored/pixelated, it’s definitely not a game for the faint hearted.

One of the big selling points of the game is its co-op feature, where you can team up with a friend to complete the campaign. I didn’t actually get to try this feature out, but judging by the length of the game in the single player mode, I can imagine that in co-op it would last a couple of hours at the most. The arcade mode is a nice addition, but limited to one gametype, which involves doing the same thing over and over again on the same map until you die three times. I think that much more could have been made of this.

Overall, I did enjoy this game while it lasted, but it’s impossible to overlook the badly integrated cover system & fairly poor AI, and if I was paying £40 for a game, I would want it to last more than an afternoon. The game’s story is fantastic (but not for the faint hearted) and the graphics are generally acceptable, but sadly the pros don’t really outweigh the con enough to warrant spending full price on this. I’d recommend waiting for this one to come down in price before going out to get it.