Wayneguard said:
Was Kane n Lynch 2 really bad? As in not worth a heavily discounted bargain bin price bad? Does it even address the terrible cover system from the first game? I just watched From Dusk Till Dawn again and the two bank robbers totally remind me of kane & lynch for some reason so now i'm itching to go out and get it. Is that going to be a mistake? Thanks.
Not a huge shooter fan, but I have some familiarity with it.
It's pretty much a below average cover based shooter, "dressed up" or "dressed down" so to speak to look like some bystander is shooting the action through a handheld camcorder, so the screen is generally grainy and moves around on you while your playing. Unlike "From Dusk Till Dawn" the characters are both totally unlikable scumbags with no redeeming qualities at all. See, most crime games and stories at least have characters you can empathize with to some extent, these guys you really can't. "Dusk Till Dawn" had George Clooney's character who was basically okay, even if his brother was a piece of work. In "Saint's Row 2" your character might be a sociopath, but does have a certain degree of standards since honor, respect, and loyalty to one's friends are all serious themes during the game, and as bad as The Saints are, the guys they are fighting against are just as bad, and usually worse. In "Kane and Lynch 2" the entire set up is one where you can actually have more human empathy for the motivation of the guy trying to kill them than you can for the protaganists who are complete pieces of human excrement.
It's like this, I'm not a shooter fan, but after seeing games like "Dead Space" I've actually bought them when they have gone down in price. I've been playing "Dead Space 2" a bit recently since I got a decent deal on it. I'm also a big fan of "Saint's Row 2" and have been meaning to play more of "Mafia 2" but other games keep luring me away. In comparison, having watched "Kane and Lynch" I am hard pressed to find a single redeeming feature in it that makes me want to play it. It doesn't have a good story, it doesn't have good characters, the mechanics are a mess, and the graphics seem like they are designed to suck due to the presentation.
I understand the effect they are going for here, but truthfully I don't think they really pulled it off. I have long suspected (since the first one) that the design philsophy was one where in looking at various crime games, that the developers figured that in the end what gamers wanted was to be rampaging sociopaths and that little more mattered. Sort of them agreeing with a game critic's worst case scenario of what we're all like. Make the protaganists slimy enough and have enough violence, and we'll forgive anything. It however didn't work, as we saw with the first game, so they tried again with the same basic formula, and it was just as bad.
Really the only redeeming feature of the franchise is a decent idea for a multiplayer mode, a lot of people will talk about how their bank robbery "fragile alliance" game mode is a work of genius. However that same thing could be done in a lot of differant games if someone wanted to (and honestly I think more games should do a variation on it), and it would probably work better with other games simply due to them having better design and more refined mechanics.
Just my opinion.
At any rate, I think Steam had it for like $5 around Christmas time, which should say something about how well it was received. Steam's sales tend to come around again if your patient, so if you must try the game, I'd probably just wait for them to put it up again on the cheap. Their price isn't likely to be much more expensive than a rental, and you won't have to pay any XBL fees or whatever to do the multiplayer.
You might notice that even for a really cheap price I didn't buy it (and if you look at my Steam games list, I am a wasteful impulse buyer... sad but true, especially given my thoughts on digital downloads). I, the guy who buys way more games than he should, turned their nose up at what was a pretty new game being sold dirt cheap. That should say something.
