It was also a visual signature of content without a sender. This gave the aesthetic a sense of impending doom. “Almost to the degree where if you saw a video of especially poor quality, you wondered what terrible thing was going to happen next. “In our search for the new aesthetic we looked to the web, where videos of violence for instance usually had a poor MPEG quality to them,” Poulsen tells me. Visuals are distorted by compression artifacts, lens flares cut the screen, explosions overload the microphone, loading screens show a buffering throbber, nudity and extreme violence are pixelated. Kane & Lynch 2 is especially remembered for its art direction: it looks and sounds like an old YouTube video, like amateur found footage.
Kane and Lynch are just trying to survive, and their survival has no meaning. Its protagonists are villains without development, mechanical progression or redemption, because Kane and Lynch live in an endless present with no past and no future, where violence is bleak and pointless: civilians are common collateral damage in your gunfights and, at the end of it all, there’s neither glory or a sense of closure. Weapons are imprecise, even when carefully aimed, the explosive objects you throw always seem to land too far from their targets and the game can be frustratingly hard at higher difficulties. It’s messy, dirty, repetitive and unsatisfying, and gameplay mechanics don’t try to make violence desirable.
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Neil Druckmann claims that Naughty Dog doesn’t “use the word ‘fun’” when talking about The Last of Us, but the puzzle-like sandbox arenas of The Last of Us: Part 2 are fun indeed - you can creatively choose how to kill your foes, and its homicides are elegantly designed, as easy as pushing a button. “What if the gamer really just wants to get perfect headshots and kill and destroy, and we remove the veneer of justice and heroism that games normally use as a vehicle to give players this fantasy?”īut all these games (even the mechanically mediocre Spec Ops: The Line ) tried to have their cake and eat it too, critiquing violence while keeping it an entertaining activity. “In a way, the characters and their actions represented the dark side of the players,” Kane & Lynch 2 ’s art director Rasmus Poulsen tells me via email. BioShock, Nier, Hotline Miami, The Last of Us, Spec Ops: The Line and, later, Superhot all interrogated the role of violence in games in difference ways. Kane & Lynch: Dead Men and Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days came out in a period when shooters, and video games in general, began to question the violence that had come to define them.
In retrospect, its aesthetics, urban spaces, and vision of video game violence still differentiate Kane & Lynch 2 from most video games in its genre. Critical reception was initially mixed and the game was quickly forgotten, but in the intervening years critics have gone back to explore its tones, its visuals, its politics and its settings, reevaluating it as a cult classic. On August 17 th, 2010, Square Enix and IO Interactive released cover-based third person shooter Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC.
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