One area that the game absolutely excels in is in its presentation and art direction. The entire game is styled around the standpoint of streaming video and guerilla journalism from the lens of a handheld camera. The camera shakes wildly while running and is never quite stable, though it can be turned off for those who tend to get motion sickness from such flailing camera angles. The graphics themselves can get streaming error style artifacts when the camera rapidly turns or when the player takes damage, which really makes you feel like you are playing an interactive Youtube video on a less than perfect connection, though without any of the negative connotations such a thing brings. Even when in normal circumstances the video quality has a purposefully erroneous look to it at times, like an encoding job gone wrong. It’s a certainly unique direction for a game to take, and makes the proceedings all the more gritty and raw.

The return of the Fragile Alliance game mode is an obvious boon to the multiplayer side of the game, which pits a group of players against the AI as they protect barrels of cash. The real fun is once the cash has been collected however as then players can either work together to secure their hauls from the police counter attack or simply gun each other down to steal other player’s stashes from each other. The Undercover Cop mode is largely the same; only one of the players is randomly chosen to play as an undercover cop and tasked with trying to stop the robbery in progress. The Cops and Robbers mode functions as a more basic team-based mode pitting the two sides against each other. While the multiplayer modes are certainly entertaining, mostly due to the paranoia that saturates the first two modes as to who will turn on who, it can be quite hard to get a multiplayer game going unless you can get people to be patient and wait for the lobby to fill up.

The overall feeling of blandness still saturates the gameplay despite how much the art direction tries to spice things up, and it’s a burden that the game never truly shakes. The multiplayer certainly gives it the best shot the game has, but is hamstrung by equally shallow map selection and player count. The second half of the rather short campaign is where the single player of the game begins to improve, but it never quite reaches any yardstick above that of being merely passable. Though the game really doesn’t have many outright flaws to speak of, Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days really doesn’t have anything to really latch on to either.