Perhaps even more vividly than Spec Ops: The Line, Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days emphasizes violence enacted upon incidental, innocent bystanders to underline the inherently destructive capacities of its protagonists. During shootouts on the city streets of Shanghai, you’ll aim in the direction of enemies raining down hell upon you, but you’ll also inevitably and indiscriminately shoot into innocent crowds because Kane and Lynch are no heroes. Inwardly and outwardly, these are unattractive, toxic men who end up doing nothing else but hurting other people. Kane and Lynch are ugly, sweaty middle-aged men pricked with unseemly scars and resembling rabid swine in their bloated, greasy physiques. In expressing such ideas, Dog Days provides a raw awkwardness to its images that allows players to literally align themselves uncomfortably close to the game’s characters. Like the Michael Mann films it draws from-Collateral and Miami Vice being the key texts here in contrast with Kane & Lynch: Dead Men’s Heat-this game is coldly presented and interested in rough, dreary themes of desperation, informal power structures, and the unhealthy inability of characters to express emotional vulnerability to move past grievances. Dog Days is fundamentally about violence administered by detestable figures in an unresponsive world cut off from the familiarities of a civil society. Forget Grand Theft Auto V these are true, unrepentant criminals not meant to garner any appeal. Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days is a proper game about crime, centralizing wretched, heinous criminals well beyond hope for moral recovery. In part one of this essay, I closely examined how the game communicates its bleak tone through aesthetic strategies, and this notion also stretches over to gameplay and characterization.
I hope to do the folks at IO Interactive some justice in lifting up a game that’s far better than what the general games culture will have you believe, and to recognize how such works themselves are constantly changing alongside a dynamic critical landscape. Consequently, I deem it useful to reassess works that have fallen under the radar over the years, especially when they’re as visually striking and thematically weighty as Kane & Lynch 2. Video games culture, particularly its mainstream critical coverage, suffers greatly from shortsightedness in writing that resists a broader artistic and political conversation in favor of soulless talk on systems over themes and meaning. The steady reconsideration of initially shafted or overlooked games like Binary Domain, Haze, or Alpha Protocol given our slightly better critical outlook in comparison to a half-decade ago lends these works a fairer and smarter appraisal. Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days holds up with multiple replays since its initial release in 2010, and to this writer’s eyes, gains substantially in depth too. I continue my survey on the game with a character study and a closer look at its themes In the first half of this essay I examined the aesthetic strategies of Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days as expressing a documentarian style and commenting on our relation to images. I also analyzed the Shanghai setting and linked it to an exteriorization of the characters’ troubled psyches.
A study of the characters and lyrical themes of Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days.
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