Hello one and all. It's been awhile since I properly blogged. To be honest, there isn't enough interesting going on right now (notice how I'm not talking about Starcraft 2 because everyone else is, even though I agree, it's a pretty cool game which I am playing right now). I also just finished FEAR 2 which I am not going to write a review of because there is only one thing I can say about it - it's a waste of time.
I'm here to talk about something worth talking about, which is the demo of the upcoming Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days.
First of all, get it here on Steam.
Then read my words on it. I implore you to.
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I never liked the first 'un. I gave it a try sometime ago, and although it had a pretty cool concept, gritty hardened psycho killers doing bank busts and stuff... the sheer bugginess of the game ruined it. I gave up early on.
But IO Interactive is back to finish the job with a sequel promising to blow people's minds. And boy, has it blown mine.
The demo opens with you sat for mere seconds in a Chinese restaurant before the shit hits the fan, police crawling out of the woodwork and spewing bullets everywhere. The camera is nauseatingly shaky, a rip-off and a good one at that, of modern day gritty action films like the Bourne series. It's so frighteningly close to the action, you'll have intensity coming out of your nostrils.
The most awesome thing was how hard the game was. I played it on medium and died real quickly over and over just by sticking my head out at the wrong times. The cops know how to shoot accurately and you go down real fast. It's the kind of shooter I've been waiting a long time for. The kind where you have to man up, no hand-holding, no arrows pointing you in the right direction, no forgiving health regeneration and the game laughing at you for sucking balls.
The guns have nasty realistic recoil and you spend much of the time sitting tight in cover from the hailstorm of bullets. All of it adds to the immersive grit. Cover works fine, although it could be a little more sticky. It was too easy to come out of cover which is not what you want to do when a bunch of cops are punching holes in the wall to get at you.
You run through some windy back alleys and dinky shops of underworld Shanghai. It's so dark and grimy I felt I needed a wash after I was done playing. No joke. Although I haven't been to China yet and can't say how accurate the setting is, the devs really gave it a strong presence. So graphically, the game is aces. There is even some nifty film grain. As for the back and forth dialogue between Kane and Lynch (who you play this time round), it's as explicitly-laden and gruff as you'd expect from two criminals you wouldn't want to cross paths with. That you can co-op the entire game makes it even more epic. I would describe Kane and Lynch 2 as Time Crisis on steroids, and without retarded protagonists with impossible hair and good looks.
The demo was also kind enough to throw in a multiplayer quick match of one mode - Fragile Alliance. In it, you and everyone else play bad guys on the same team, stealing bags of cash and working together to escape AI cops. But here's the catch, there's an individual leaderboard at the end of the round, so it's the person who survived with the most money that wins. Which means you can also kill your teammates and take their bag of cash. Everyone is free to back-stab and be back-stabbed. It's an interesting dynamic on an otherwise already exciting cooperative cop vs robber experience. The backstabbery is exactly the thing you'd expect from a game like Kane and Lynch, so kudos to the devs for emphasizing it.
The multiplayer's lobby system is fine but I don't know how the devs plan to keep online games lag-free. I hope it'll be like Modern Warfare 2, matching up people with the same connection speeds. I experienced major lag and lengthy load times when I tried multiplayer, and it ended disappointingly with disconnection after a short spurt of fun (it was definitely fun though). But hey, I'm just happy IO Interactive dished out a decent-length demo, and they should polish things anyway before the game's release 19th August.
Definitely a game I'm now eagerly anticipating.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fI50l2_0sE&feature=fvst
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