Unemployment Project #20:
Blog number 20 and its going to be a fun one. I recently completed Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, a poorly received Xbox 360 era third person shooter from IO Interactive and published by Square Enix. Kane & Lynch as a series is largely forgotten today, but at one point it was infamous for being the catalyst for the creation of Giant Bomb. To give background on this, the first game (and the second) heavily advertised on Gamespot and when Jeff Gerstmann, a writer for GS, raised complaints about the marketing and gave the game a low score, he was removed from Gamespot, causing a mass of controversy that lead to his founding of Giant Bomb with Ryan Davis. I am a huge Giant Bomb fan, and honestly until I played Dog Days, this is all I knew about the series. Dog Days was actually one of the first planned targets for this blog as a few months ago I heard it recommended as a game ripe for critical revaluation, and I am here to tell you, reader, that Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days has the juice.
The video game industry, especially AAA games, is ripe with dull trend chasing, and obsessed with overly focus tested, easily digestible games. Dog Days is the antithesis of this, I have no idea how a studio approved of this game, and the idea that this game received an overly pushy marketing campaign is bizarre. Dog Days is a dark, dirty downer of a game, with oppressively bad vibes, and while it does not always hit the mark exactly, its clear that IO had a great vision for this game. When Dog Days is firing on all cylinders and putting its best foot forward, there is really very little like it. So lets talk about what this game is, and why it failed.
Dog Days follows Kane & Lynch, a pair of murderous career criminals through a 48 hour stretch of their lives following Kane's arrival in Shanghai, where a shakedown goes wrong and the pair have serious hit taken out on them. The first mission of the game is the failed operation and the rest of the game is the attempt to complete a planned arms deal that would get them out of the country. Its a very simple crime premise but it stands out immensely in the bizarre way it is presented visually. The game is heavily inspired by liveleak, found footage and snuff films, and it immerses you in the dark mood exceptionally well. The entire game is shot behind Lynch as though an unseen cameraman was following him with a handheld shaky camera. When you sprint and shoot the camera reacts as though someone behind you is reacting to these actions and trying to follow close behind. In addition the entire game has a filter over it making it look like CC TV footage and in bright areas you even get tons of streaky lights and digital artifacting. Adding to this aesthetic greatly is a feature where any gore or extreme violence is censored with a classic blocky digital censor effect, and this trick is so effective throughout the game. When you get headshots or killed at close range the game slaps the censor effect on and it feels... gross. Grossness is absolutely the feeling the devs want you to be feeling throughout the game, even in the gameplay and setting. The nonstop gun violence of your rampage results in massive firefights in dirty crowed locales, with the slums, sweatshops, alleyway and sketchy stores of Shanghai all adding to the mood. Everything is wet and dirty, even before you arrive, and the game constantly puts populated public spaces in your path. People are constantly screaming and yelling, Kane and Lynch included, who frequently freak out about how fucked they are, how everything has gone wrong, how much pain they're in, and often how they want to give up and die. Civilians are frequent caught in the crossfire and pile up as you move on with no punishments, no second thoughts. Bodies are a considered object in the games cinematography, nothing despawns, so gunfights end up with a sea of corpses. People go limp when they die and slump uncomfortably, or worse still, wounded enemies sometimes drop to their knees and attempt to crawl to safety. This trick has been in many games trying to elicit discomfort, but Dog Days takes another step, as wounded enemies frequently stand up and get the jump on you, eventually conditioning you to shot prone potentially harmless enemies. The gunplay is actually a definite weak point of the game, all guns feel bad to use and are ineffective at any range, but this often adds to the mood as gunfights devolve to crouching far from dug in enemies behind makeshift cover just hoping not to get shot. The music is droning bizarre synths, often sounding like strange machine noises that aren't immediately recognizable as songs.
All of these bold, player unfriendly choices add together to make a game that is far more concerned with projecting its dire mood than being fun. Its easy to see how many of what I am calling the strengths of the game were initially hated though I would be wrong to call the game anything but flawed. One major point I need to talk about regarding how this game came to be know as trash, is that this was a full price, heavily marketed shooter that can easily be beaten in 4.5 hours and offers little outside of interest outside the story, considering the weak shooting and gameplay mechanics make optional content feel like a chore, and honestly thematically bizarre. This gross sleazeball of a game should not have a team deathmatch mode, let alone a coop arcade mode. The story modes short length isn't even a problem now that the game is incredibly cheap, but was a fair criticism at the time. That being said, the game should absolutely not be any longer. The quality of the story falls off twice, and builds to a complete anticlimax that I strongly suspect had some publisher and marketing influence.
On that note, I think there is an interesting theme throughout the game, the idea that this horrible experience could and should all just end with the rampage being stopped. All of the violence in the game is pointless, Kane and Lynch come out with less than they started and every minute the game runs after an early point stretches disbelief that these men are still standing. There is a very interesting effect in the game that makes me wonder if some of that is intentional. When ever you die, the game flashes with a breaking of the metaphorical camera the game is shot on, and displays the time stamp that you reached in the 48 hour span of the games story. Your progress throughout the game is checkpointed by a flash of the current timestamp to remind you how much in-story time has passed, so the death timestamp is not out of nowhere. I suspect part of the motivation behind this timestamp, is that it shows how far into the rampage your luck would have carried you. By the end of the game, with the very low player health, you have died dozens of times and the time stamp hammers home that this whole adventure would fail, it would fall apart so fast and nothing would be accomplished. As you go on you see more an more fantastical escapes from Kane & Lynch avoiding their fate. The game should have started earlier in the day and ended earlier too, and honestly they should have died at the end, but its gotta be a franchise right?
The fact that a game with such artistic vision is basically buried inside a dime-a-dozen Xbox 360 Third Person Shooter, one quickly doomed to the bargain bin and forgotten almost entirely is sad. This game should be the first thing recommended when someone loves Spec-Ops:The Line, its the only game that evokes a similar feeling, but it almost manages to do better by being more understated. The ending of this game massively falling off means I can't call it a masterpiece, but this game is great and I kind of loved it. So few games even attempt something like this, and I would love to say more about it. Maybe Ill make a video or something someday. Definitely check this out if you like strange games with horrible bleak vibes.
