Before reaching this point in 2010’s journey, there was only one thing I knew about Kane & Lynch. It was that in 2007 the video game website Gamespot sacked Jeff Gerstmann as editorial director after he gave a negative review to Kane & Lynch while the site was carrying extensive advertising for the game. This event conspicuously failed to launch a popular movement centred on ethics in video games journalism. It did lead me to approach Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days with an underlying expectation of moral squalor, which turned out to be entirely appropriate.
Kane & Lynch 2 launched to plenty more negative reviews and lots of complaints about how short it is. It has since become notable, in a cult sort of way, for its ugliness. Ugliness is something which it announces its commitment to from the beginning. It’s another third person cover shooter and its story is about the two returning criminals of the title who are no good, in many senses. They aim to carry out an international arms deal in Shanghai, kill people, fuck up, and just try to survive. Generally by killing lots more people. Like some of the assassination targets in IO Interactive’s previous Hitman games, Kane & Lynch’s unattractiveness is presented as part of a package with their badness, even before the story gets them naked and bleeding. There seems little danger of them being taken as cool bad guys.
Other bestselling games I’ve played have revelled in ugly things happening on screen. I talked about [Prototype]’s tremendously ugly experience. Kane & Lynch 2 takes things to an extra level by applying a dense extra filter of aesthetic ugliness on top of every moment too. Its cutscenes come with a “buffering” message and progress wheel, and a disjointed, halting rhythm that serves to further obscure an already deliberately fuzzy narrative. Via some carefully implemented visual artefacts like pixelation on motion, the gameplay looks like video filmed on a low tech camera and streamed over a poor connection. Nudity is covered up by its own thick pixelation like a cruder version of The Sims. Even the sound gets in on the act, with frequent use of that irritating rattatat speaker noise that incoming texts and mobile phone calls used to prompt. When other cover shooters do sprinting with a following camera and a rush of visual blur, it conveys excitement. In Kane & Lynch 2 it just feels nauseous.
An uncharitable reading could be that this visual filter is to cover up underlying flaws. Textures of, say, lit up vending machines don’t need to be good or detailed if every light is reduced to a source of piercing glare anyway. This is an undoubted benefit, but hard to see as the main point when the gameplay is so aligned with the aesthetics. It is simple and brutal, and despite having two characters has nothing as complicated as Army of Two-style tactics.
Beyond the basicness of its approach, any of the game’s more powerful weapons have remarkably shitty aim, making every successful hit feel like a matter of luck more than skill. Improvising grenades from fire extinguishers is even less precise. When you get hit a few times you fall to the ground and can carry on shooting while the screen fills up with blood and glare; it feels desperate but barely less viable as an approach.
The result is a game which feels nothing like the other popular games of its genre, and stands out as unusual even better than the early Hitman games did. It doesn’t lend itself to sophisticated play or to gaining any great satisfaction from smooth moves, but instead to a moment-to-moment intensity as gruelling as it is unusual. The short length comes as a relief, but if violence is to be such a staple of games, it doesn’t seem a bad idea to sometimes make it this confronting.
The complication to that approach of confronting norms is the Shanghai setting. IO Interactive went there for research and paid a lot of attention to detail. I didn’t notice anything remotely as bad as Hitman: Contracts’s bungled Chinese script and use of antiquated racist stereotypes, and when Kane & Lynch’s white and British boss uses a racist slur it seems safe to say it’s meant to be part of establishing what a dick he is. In an interview with the Heterotopias zine, art director Rasmus Poulsen talked about the game as a “cyberpunk love letter to China”, of the care put into rows of abandoned shopping trolleys, and of how it uses deliberately clashing aesthetics based on the speed of development of the city. “[T]he backdrop was the highend neon future and the foreground was the derelict, old, abused, misrepresented areas”.
At the same time, he mentions the game “maintaining a feeling of being like a fish out of water, because its a game built for a Western market in that sense.” Even with the story making an effort to bring Lynch into place there as a local resident with a local romantic partner, the setting becomes one more part of the game’s abrasion, twinned inexorably with the relentless bleakness of every interaction. Enemies shout in Mandarin and it doesn’t appear on the subtitles in any language, treated as one more bit of harsh noise to produce alienating distance.
Poulsen tries to claim that “it could have been anywhere” but China is an easy shorthand for the ugliness and corruption because it can line up with the negative stereotypes held by much of that Western audience. As you shoot gangster after gangster and policeman after policeman, the combination of the relentless urban decay porn with the cultural distancing is the one part of Kane & Lynch 2’s ugliness which doesn’t feel new or confronting at all.
Top of the charts for week ending 21 August 2010:
