The first Kane and Lynch was a very average third-person shooter. Within the gaming industry it ended up being quite a controversial title after a well-known gaming journalist gave it a low score and was subsequently let go by a major online publication. Could this publication have been taking money from the publishers of the game with the expectation for the editor to bump the score up? Well… we’ll probably never know the entire story. To the average player the most memorable thing about the first game was it’s curse-filled dialog or perhaps its very mediocre gameplay or maybe its sub-par graphics. Obviously, the first Kane and Lynch was not a good game at all. So does the sequel improve upon the first or is it simply a lost cause?

You really don’t have to know much about the original Kane and Lynch’s storyline to play this game. Just know that both Kane and Lynch are a couple of really bad criminals who haven’t seen each other in a few years. The sequel takes place in Shanghai. Lynch seems to be on some Prozac or some sort of good drug that has at least somewhat settled him down. He even has a steady girlfriend. He goes to pick up his old friend Kane who is involved in some sort of shady arms deal. Of course things quickly go awry when the pair stop to take care of an informant. The shady criminals seem to have angered every gang in Shanghai along with the police and thus you spend the rest of the game pressed against cover, returning fire and killing everything in sight as you try to get the heck out of Dodge.

Kane and Lynch 2 does a great job of establishing this gritty, dark atmosphere. Much of this is due to a filter making the game look like it was some sort of video shot for YouTube on a lousy camera. There are all sorts of nice touches to this from the pixilated lighting to the camera being ultra jittery when you run forward. This gives the game a very unique visual style. That being said, the graphics themselves are nothing to get excited about but the presentation is nifty.

The game’s voice-acting is top-notch with all the voice actors doing a great job. Like the first game, there are tons of four letter words so make sure the kids aren’t around when you play this one. The music is fine and suits the atmosphere though nothing really stands out at all.

If I had to compare the gameplay (and perhaps the overall experience of Kane and Lynch 2) to another game I would actually say it reminded me a lot of 50 Cent Blood in the Sand. Everything here is a competent third-person shooter but some of the level designs aren’t that great. The variety of weapons are also limited and though you can pick up items such as a gas tank and shoot, blowing it up the lack of any sort of grenades can make shootouts more annoying than enjoyable. Often times the enemies are content to simply stay in their position rather than advance forward, forcing you out to take a barrage of bullets. The single player game is incredibly short and most anyone will be able to breeze through it in four to five hours. The online co-op mode doesn’t help this because when a player drops out, the game automatically ends.

Speaking of online modes, there are a variety of them here including Fragile Alliance. In this mode all the players start on a team together as criminals who are going in to grab as much money as they can and escape within four minutes. Of course, together you’ll have to fight your way through cops. But if a team mate gets greedy they can kill any of their members and attempt to get out with the money themselves. Players who die respawn as cops who can attempt to take revenge on the person that initially killed them. Undercover Cop is probably the best of the online modes. Here one of the players is an undercover cop. Their goal is to take out their “team” without being caught. Cops and Robbers mode is basically a team based shooter where one side plays as cops, the other as robbers as they try to grab as much cash as they can. Sadly, with only six maps all of these modes are lacking pretty bad and even though the cash you gather can buy a variety of weapons I felt that the incentive to keep playing just wasn’t there.

Kane and Lynch 2 is a decent third-person person shooter that has a unique visual style but its short length, average gameplay and sub-par online modes make it a game that you should probably rent rather than buy.

STORY:  6
GRAPHICS:  7
SOUND:  8
GAMEPLAY:  7
TILT:  6.5
OVERALL:  7

-Jason Glasco