Review by:Tony Mitera

Though markedly better than the original, Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days hasn’t fully gotten the franchise out of the rut that it started in. The gameplay still centers on the two titular criminals, this time fighting shoulder to shoulder through the underbelly of Shanghai. The game’s art direction is quite creative, to a fault in some specific ways, but the majority of the game is a bland mix of gunplay that plateaus far too early in the rather short campaign and wafer-thin multiplayer offerings.

The game is set some time after the events of the first, with you playing as the unhinged psychopath Lynch who has settled down somewhat with a woman in Shanghai. Kane arrives just before the two embark on a deal that goes bad when Kane guns down a rather important figure in the Shanghai criminal world, which ultimately puts the pair squarely in the crosshairs of not only the local crime bosses but also as wanted men from both the police force as well as the military. The storyline is always present throughout the game, but really just takes a back seat to the almost non-stop gunfire you’ll be engaged in from start to finish.

The overabundance of action is not a problem however, but rather how underwhelming the weapons perform. Lynch is certainly not a hardened marksman, but nearly every weapon you pick up in the game is woefully inaccurate. Even when carefully shooting while crouched and from cover shots will fly wildly off their mark, and when these bullets do hit they deal a surprisingly low amount of harm. With enemies making fairly effective use of cover and flanking tactics most of the first half of the game consists of expending the majority of your clip fruitlessly against targets until you land the eight shots to finally drop them. The second half of the game grants you access to military grade hardware, which packs a stronger punch and have much smaller accuracy deviations.

The campaign mode whisks our pair of antagonists through a fairly diverse set of locations, but its lacks any truly memorable battles. Barring a pitched gunfight from the side of a helicopter and some interesting fights in an apartment building the game bounces around the premise of gunning down nearly identical waves of foes without ever really doing much to differentiate the battles. Barring the cover system that lets you safely trade fire against the flank rushes of enemies the game really doesn’t have much to spice up its gunfights.