Kane and Lynch haven’t seen each other since the events of the first game “Dead Men”. They reunite in Shanghai to complete an arms deal. Kane seems to want to give up his criminal life and attempt to repair his relationship with his daughter, so he sees this as his final job. Instead of going straight to the hotel, Lynch says he has a job to do first. However, they seem to have their bad luck from the first game, and end up being pursued by the most powerful man in Shanghai.
You are basically anti-heroes since you are playing as criminals, and have to shoot many cops and rival gang members. There’s plenty of violence and swearing like a typical gangster-style film. Lynch is the focus of this sequel, but he is much less chaotic here.
The game plays like a third-person cover-based shooter. The enemies still feel quite bullet-spongey, as does Lynch. They have removed the random accuracy that was annoying in the first game, so now the accuracy is much improved but differs based on the type of gun.
There is now a dedicated button to snap to/away from cover so the cover system seems more reliable. Most cover can be destroyed. There’s a dedicated button for reload (In the first game, I think you could just press the A button, but that also picked up weapons. I did see some reviews claim you couldn’t reload at all). You can no longer use grenades, but you can throw fire extinguishers as a makeshift explosive, or blow canisters in the environment. Just like the first game, you will be constantly switching weapons in order to have enough ammunition.
The revive mechanic has been replaced too. In the first game, if your team members fell, then you had to revive them. The AI would never revive others apart from you. You revived each other by injecting with adrenaline which basically had a cooldown. In this game, I wasn’t sure how the mechanic worked. You could often just tap a button to get up and hide behind the nearest cover, but other times you were killed. Kane also revives himself.
Squad commands are gone, but I never had a problem with Kane’s behaviour to make me want to use such a feature. He was a big help in fights, and moved correctly to the next objective. Since they removed the commands and you don’t have to revive Kane, many times I only concentrated on what I was doing, so I do miss the team aspect that was in the first game.
The first game had a few bugs, and there are a few here. You seem to have to play offline due to the crash in the main menu (is it trying to contact a non-existent server?). There was one cutscene that seemed to play extremely slowly, but a reload seemed to fix it.
The game’s difficulty seemed much more consistent, rather than the massive difficulty spike towards the end of the first game.
The graphics are much improved, particularly with the textures. Environments have a lot of detail too, with a vast amount of objects in the scene. Often I found myself stopping to admire the scene. There’s a mix of environments throughout the game, although you are always in Shanghai, including: market, sweatshop, shopping center, streets, office building, and airport.
There seems to be a stylistic choice as if they are being filmed, with a shaky cam following them around. The shaking can be disabled in the menus, but you can’t do anything about the cutscenes. Other effects can be disabled via the config launcher. I don’t think it makes sense to have a camera-man following them story-wise; the camera man would be dead within minutes. Still, it’s an interesting aesthetic to see pixelated censoring for any nudity or for characters when they die from a head-shot.
The game fixes a lot of problems with the first game, but then it loses some aspects of what made it unique. Lynch’s crazy mental state made for some humorous scenarios in the first game, but his subdued personality here removes a lot of character. Kane and Lynch still have a lot of bad luck which puts them in constant peril.
They travelled to several countries in the first game, but here you are stuck in Shanghai. It’s a nice environment but you don’t get as much variety. In the first game, the revival mechanic got quite annoying by the end, but at least it was a distinctive element.
Dog Days is a better game mechanically. However, the character development isn’t as good and it is still a short game.