by Long: K&L 2 is interesting. It’s one of those games that tries to be a super-serious, hardcore, gritty, gang-war, weapon-selling, drug smuggling simulator where you’re never sure if the antagonists are heroes, or just a couple of tough guys out for themselves in a world that’s filled with horrible things.
Now, we’ve all seen or played this plotline at one point or another before, but the difference between K&L 2 and say, GTA, is that in GTA I can never take the plot or the environment seriously, even though I get the feeling you’re meant to. Let’s be honest–you only do the missions in GTA because you have to, and really you’re just planning the next hooker bar you’re going to shoot up. Here’s where K&L 2 gains my respect–it maintains a more or less completely immersive experience within the environment I’ve described–it doesn’t relent in being an uncomfortable gritty world where the mire is as thick around the heroes as it is the world they live in.
The environments in this game are superb–not strictly from a graphical sense, but from a design standpoint. Layouts feel natural and detailed; desks are lined with believable objects, streets are filled with restaurant tables and stacked chairs. It truly feels real, as you wander through the city streets and in cramped buildings.
The problem is that in its essence, K&L 2 is merely another cover-and-shoot game. It starts off with you interrogating some guy, which quickly leads to taking cover and shooting a bunch of dudes. It then cuts to a car crash where you take cover and shoot a bunch of dudes. Kane and Lynch decide to go visit the gang boss that is harassing them in hopes of figuring out what’s going on–all the while taking cover and shooting all his dudes. You’re at a restaurant… suddenly people bust in and you take cover and shoot. Mechanically speaking, while the game isn’t horrible, it’s nothing new or particularly engaging.
That’s not to say that the game is easy–staying true to its sense of immersion, it’s actually somewhat difficult. You never really feel powerful as you hide behind every piece of cover you can, and if you think you can run into a room and reliably gun everyone down like some superhero (or villain) you’ll quickly find yourself flat on your back in a puddle of your own bodily fluids. That being said, one rather unrealistic feature is that you can soak up more bullets than an elephant could, but considering the intelligent and coordinated attacks executed by your enemies, you need to in order to make the game playable while you learn your way around.
Kane and Lynch are interesting characters, in spite of not really saying much about themselves. I’ll admit to having no clue about any of the previous plot concerning the duo, but the two of them have an uncanny unspoken chemistry between them–something that oddly might be described even in the short time that I saw them, as a trusting love. That being said though, very little of who they are, what they do, or what their motives are, are revealed to the player early on. I have no doubt that there would be some interesting twist, some dark reveal near the third act of the game’s story, but I haven’t played far enough to see it, and I’m not sure I’m really motivated to do so.
In closing, I feel that K&L 2 would probably have made a much better under-funded TV show than a game, if they could somehow have kept the same feeling the game provided and just cut out 80% of the “running around and shooting guys” segments. Kane and Lynch are interesting characters, and I would love to see more of them… I’m just not sure that I’m willing to fight through bloodbath after bloodbath to find out. I would recommend that those who enjoy cover shooters with a gritty, uncomfortable, Pulp-Fiction-like atmosphere give it a try, but otherwise you might, like me, find yourself wishing you could just walk through the well-built streets of China, listening to conversations between Kane and Lynch instead of the sounds of bullets and the F-bomb being dropped every-other sentence.