I guess I should have known what I was getting into. Everyone who played
this when it came out said it wasn't a very good game. I was still
interested in playing it though, because of some of the things they were
doing with the presentation, and how it seemed different from other
games. So I got it for fairly cheap, and it turned out to not be a very
good game. I didn't hate it, but I did enjoy it less than the first
game, and while I still found those other things interesting, they
weren't enough to really care what is otherwise an unexceptional
cover-based shooter and nothing else.
The game is ugly, possibly the ugliest I've ever played. I don't mean
the technical work done by the artists, which is fine if unexceptional. I
mean the creative direction of the game is grotesquely ugly. The game
is designed to look like it was filmed on a cheap video camera, with the
image shaking constantly and becoming distorted and the colors and
lights separating. It doesn't really make sense because there's no one
who would be filming them, but it adds to the brutal, gritty feeling of
the story, which is also hideous. Some time after the first game, Kane
and Lynch meet in Shanghai to pull off a deal that will let them leave
their violent pasts behind once and for all, so they can just spend time
with their remaining loved ones peacefully. Of course that isn't really
in the cards for a duo as messed up and dysfunctional and psychotic as
those two, and it all goes to hell as they just try desperately to get
away with their lives. You follow them as they run away from cops, get
captured, do anything to survive and just go through hell over the
course of the brief campaign. I appreciate how far the developers went
to make the game and its characters entirely irredeemable, though I wish
it was accompanied by something more fun to play.
Because while Dog Days is a functional shooter, it's not a very exciting
one. The original game wasn't exactly the bee's knees, but it had
interesting moments. There were high speed getaways and moments of calm
and high-concept heists, and the shooting itself had elements like the
command system and having to watch your team's back to make sure you all
made it. Dog Days is ducking behind walls and shooting dudes as they
pop up, and that is it. Almost every single encounter follows the same
basic formula, and there's little to separate one gun fight from the
next. There are explosive canisters you can chuck at enemies and shoot
to blow up, but there are no grenades, and their absence is irritating.
Maybe it wouldn't make a lot of sense to find military equipment like
that when you're just shooting gang members in back alleys, but
eventually you reach a point where there's no reason the designers
couldn't have added them if they wanted to. Even if you aren't good at
killing enemies with grenades in shooters, they're still useful for
flushing them out of hiding spots and stuff like that. As it is, the bad
guys in Dog Days have a tendency to scurry around from cover to cover
and stay hidden for too long, which drags out fights and makes the bread
and butter (or in this case the bread, butter, and everything else) of
the game more annoying than it should be.
You play mainly as Lynch this time (in single player, co-op mode is back
and probably works I guess), and for most of the game it's just you and
Kane, with fewer instances of other supporting characters coming along
and no ability to tell them what to do. Once in a while a character
might suggest something that could make a battle easier, but there just
aren't enough tools in the game to sustain the existing shooting
mechanics even to the end of a notably short story mode. I honestly have
no idea how such a bare and short game ended up taking two and a half
years to release, unless they had to scrap a concept with much grander
scope and then realized they just had to come out with something. Again,
it wasn't awful to play and I found the darkness of the story and some
of the visual touches intriguing enough to keep going until it was over,
but it seemed like a lost opportunity when many acknowledged that the
first game had issues but still had elements worth a closer look.
Instead IO Interactive decided to drop all those elements and simply
make one of the most boilerplate third person shooters in years and
dress it up with an absolutely hideous aesthetic. An attention-grabbing
aesthetic, but a hideous one nonetheless. I don't hate the idea of Kane
& Lynch yet, but I'm definitely glad IO's returning to the Hitman franchise for their next game.
