Bad Dog
The first Kane and Lynch game, infamous as it is, was little more than a mediocre shooter. The game was plagued by dumb AI, shoddy cover mechanics, and inaccurate weapons. While IO Interactive's developer diaries for Dog Days claim to have fixed these issues, this is not so. Instead, IO has hidden the flaws of the original game beneath a unique presentation and hoped that people would overlook them. Make no mistake, though, Dog Days is hardly better than the original.
The biggest problem with Dog Days is, ironically, also its biggest selling point. The game looks like an internet video, as if it were being filmed by someone following Kane and Lynch around with a hand held camcorder. Like the Bourne movies, Dog Days makes heavy and effective use of shaky camera work. Like in a low-quality video feed, lights are oversaturated and loud noises come across as mostly static. Unfortunately, while this effect looks cool during the cutscenes, during actual gameplay it's infuriatingly disorienting. The shaky camera effect can be turned off in the menus, but the most distracting thing about the presentation is the blood splatter that appears on the screen when you get injured. It essentially blinds you with a bright red tint, rendering escape extremely difficult.
Coupled with some of the worst gameplay I've experienced in a shooter, the low-fi presentation renders the game much more difficult than it should be. Weapons fire erratically, especially early on in the game. Characters seem to have a mind of their own sometimes, spraying bullets around like, well, madmen. This is made more frustrating by the fact that many enemy characters actually have more health than you do. They also have an advantage in numbers, with many battles devolving into masses of enemies pouring in from all angles until you just wish the shootout would end. The higher enemy health and numbers were probably implemented to accomodate for the fact that the enemy AI is a bit loopy. Highly trained soldiers and police officers will not hesitate to run around crazily or stand right on top of a pile of their friend's corpses waiting to die. The friendly AI makes the enemies look like geniuses by comparison, though. In certain portions of the game, you are supposed to take a stealthy approach. This is impossible to do in the single player mode, however, because your partner AI will immediately attack any enemy he sees, even during stealth sections.
As if poor shooting and lousy AI weren't enough, Dog Days completes the trifecta of failure with a mediocre cover system. Sometimes you can move around behind cover, other times you can't when you obviously should be able to. A lot of the so-called cover in the game is too small to protect you, leaving you open from strange angles. The addition of destructible cover is neat, but it can't make up for the fact that taking cover can just feel wonky sometimes. Nowhere is this more evident than in the "get up in cover" function. You see, sometimes during combat you will be hit so hard that your character will fall onto his back (a cool concept in theory, but it just becomes annoying by the end of the game) and you'll have to press X to get up in the nearest cover. Half the time, your character will take cover on the wrong object or the wrong side of the intended object and get blasted. It was a cool concept, but it's implemented poorly.
Further tarnishing the game is the number of instant deaths that you will encounter. Because there are so many enemies in any given shootout, and because your health is so low, it is extremely common to walk around a corner, take a bullet to the face from who-knows-where, and drop dead. That's "a bullet," as in one singular shot fired by a straggling enemy. Out of every death I faced in Dog Days, I'd say about a third of them were instant deaths, another third were because the poor cover system and crazy visuals had disoriented me, and the last third were entirely my fault. I know it sounds petty to complain about dying a lot in a game, and it must sound like I'm exaggerating the number of unfair deaths, but it really is quite bad. The frustrations inherent in the game can be lessened by playing co-operatively, but that's only because being screwed over with a friend is less aggravating than being screwed over by yourself.
Speaking of multiplayer, Dog Days features an enhanced version of the original game's Fragile Alliance mode. The idea behind this mode, that players can ultimately turn on each other for a chance at greater rewards, is a really cool one. The first few matches you play will likely induce some paranoia, but eventually the maps begin to become predictable. There are only a few spots on each map where it makes sense for people to turn against their team mates, so you'll learn to recognize these spots and be on your guard. A few addition modes switch up the rules, but the online play isn't going to hold your attention for a long time.
In terms of visuals, if you strip away the shaky camera and blinding lights, Dog Days is actually very mediocre looking. The characters and environments are blandly rendered, although the urban Chinese battlegrounds themselves are actually very interesting. Blasting your way through video stores, airports, and apartments is definitely better than slogging through another Middle Eastern warzone. The audio fares better than the graphics in that the unique presentation actually adds to it rather than detracts. The dialogue is written and spoken in a way that sounds natural rather than scripted, a feat which the vast majority of games fail to achieve. This may result in a less than compelling (and actually quite predictable) story, but it makes the game feel different. Overall, I have to give props to IO for taking an interesting direction and sticking to it wholeheartedly, even though the presentation detracts just as much from the game as it adds.
With Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days, IO took the wrong approach to making a sequel. Instead of fixing the problems of the original, they tried to hide them behind a glossy presentation and pretend that they didn't exist. Sadly, the AI is still as unintelligent as the weapons are inaccurate, and the six to seven hour campaign becomes tedious and repetitive before it's over. If you simply must play a co-op shooter, buy Army of Two: The 40th Day (it's not as bad as you might think) and skip this failed experiment. This was a chance for IO to improve the image of gaming's most infamous duo, but instead they have tarnished it further.