Finished Kane & Lynch 2. Took me about 3.5 hours, so an hour shorter than the first game.
I thought it was good and would have been great 2p if you aren't price/length conscious. For what it is, it's an exciting pure cover shooter with some great setpieces to fight through, an amazing visual style (easily some of the best visuals I've seen at times; looked so real and stylish), and the gunplay is actually kind of unique in that it's bad and inaccurate but then it feels realistic because of that and it makes it more intense when you're spooked and just spraying bullets everywhere. Story was ok, length was fine but plot was kind of typical. Because it stayed as a straight up "take cover, shoot guys, run forward" game from start to finish it never really fell apart like the first one. I thought it was fairly consistent and enjoyable from the first stage to the last one. Extra points for the insane nudity stage.
My only complaints are in 1p the AI doesn't do shit. They stay alive but that's about it. In split path flanking opportunities you need to let them be the decoy and go ahead and flank since they won't do anything useful on their own. And in the few time sensitive situations it's annoying not to have another real shooter helping you out. My other complaint is that the AI is too smart which makes it less fun to fight. They hide because EVERYTHING and only pop out when you're not aiming at them. Then you pop out to aim at them and they immediately retreat back behind cover before you can aim and shoot them. I did a lot of diversion fire where I'd run at the cover shooting so they wouldn't pop out and then just walk up to the guy and pop him. Much harder when a ton of guys though >_<
Still for $5 it was a nice ride. I think Kane & Lynch is a great franchise for SE as it's a solid pure gears cover shooter with an interesting real world spin on the setting/characters/story. The thing is, they need to figure out how to sell it because it just can't work at $40-60 entries. The games are short because they feel like you're playing a hollywood movie which is COOL and a good thing and I don't want them to be longer than 3-5 hour campaigns, but at the same time you can't sell a 3-5 campaign at full or even budget price. I think the smartest thing to do with the series would be to make the future entries XBLA/PSN games for $10-15. Shorten the campaigns further and do 2 hour "movies" with challenges and achievements and stuff for replayability like how Lara Croft handles it. That way if you can split the budget cost of a full K&L retail title into a 3 game trilogy and sell them at $15 each you're making $45 and you're probably going to sell a lot more copies of K&L at $15 than you will at $40/50/60 retail game, so it should come out financially beneficial. Everyone just waits until a K&L game is $5-10 bucks before buying, so why not sell them at those prices from the start.
Oh and best chopper section ever; at least visually. Really really cool sequence.
For me it was under 3 hours. I thought it was pretty bad compared to the first part of the first game.
Kane and Lynch 1 had a variety of cool areas you'd have shoot outs in, and they'd have you doing more than just bog standard cover shooting. It had light tactical elements and cool sequences where you'd repel down buildings and break into a vault. Kane and Lynch 2 is just 3 hours of non-stop shooting through mostly the same environments. It does look cool with the visual effects going on (though I had to turn on steady cam) it's just Hong Kong. There are some interesting sequences, like the naked part, but it's mostly the same thing.
The shooting is way too basic. I'm sure it will be better in co-op, but in single player it is not even as complex as time crisis. Since you don't have grenades, squad commands, get dropped in a second if you go out of cover, carry too little ammo for guns that aren't accurate, and are fighting against huge numbers of enemies behind strong cover, shoots outs end up being about timing. You time when you pop up to catch the other guy popping up, repeat for 2 hours, cool-ish rail shooting sequence, repeat for another 45 minutes. If you use your limited ammo to take out cover, the enemy doesn't even wait half a second before dashing to the next cover. This are problems without considering how clunky the cover system is. And ffs, you kill so many people in this game it's ridiculous. You enter a room and a dozen people run in, move five feet, and another two dozen people run in. It's you against numbers and it isn't fun.
The story and characters are so minimal that I lost track of why I was doing anything. I get what they were going for, they just didn't execute it well enough. Even for $5 I was pretty disappointed with it. Enjoyed the first game more, though, at least it was better than the final parts of that game. I wouldn't mind seeing more Kane and Lynch games but they need to work out what works in these games, which is the style, atmosphere, and things like that.
