A mess of ideas struggling to hold themselves together. While the concept is cool (dating sim and dungeon crawling), none of the ideas are executed in a satisfying way. The tacked on dungeon crawling and both the scenarios and enemies feel uninspired, with the former being just "shopping mall but fucked up 😈" and the latter "what if phones were fucked up 😈", which feels like a punch in the gut considering they try going a Persona "this dungeon is created by your mind" route but then you enter the dungeon and the first thing you see is a phone with teeth.
The gameplay in the dungeons itself is... serviceable but the skills you gain throughout the game feel wasted considering every enemy dies in like 2-3 hits, making stuff like immobilizing or bleeding them useless.

The dating is also... very rough. Characters throw themselves onto you and every one of them just feels underwritten. I tried very hard to be captivated by them but the focus is all over the place to the point that one of the reveals in a route feels self-parodying. The forced framing of every character encounter being a "date" feels weird and uncomfy personally. Wish the game had scrapped the boring cat route to develop the characters more 'cus it definitely feels rushed, and the games' dates being so lacking makes this game have no legs to stand on.

Speaking of rushed, as many others have pointed out, it definitely feels like the game has cut content. With tons of recipes to be found and only 2 dungeons to get materials in, equipment having repetitious buffs, areas that you never go into, this theme of "facing your fears" being underutilized, and a weak climax, there's a clear indication of this being taken out of the oven too quickly.

Overall, there's just kind of... not much to talk about. The game just falls flat everytime it tries something.

I came in expecting Dream Daddy 2, but considering I left with dissapointment, I wish it was that instead

Kane & Lynch 2 is a game about violence. Well, maybe.

Violence has been portrayed in many different ways in videogames. There's been over-the-top violence, mild violence, cartoonish violence, gorey violence, and even missing it entirely as a form of protest.
But this game portrays is it a very unique and, I find, realistic way: it's dry. It's very, very dry.
With gunfights happening in the middle of urban china, killing civilians is hard to avoid. When the stakes start getting higher, dogs become an obstacle that you must kill to prevent a game over. Hell, the events of the game are kickstarted by the violent death of an innocent.
All of these are met with silence. There is no mulling over death, no celebrating victories, nothing.

I find this reaction to violence the most interesting part of the game. I found it very raw and realistic. I remembered Hotline Miami, a game that also deals with the theme of violence, but a stark difference is that in that game the protagonist vomits after the first level. In K&L2, there's never something like that. Violence is not met with indifference but a feeling of emptiness (or at least that's my take-away), maybe even conformity?

But something about this game irks me. Despite my previous "praise", I still find myself a little in the middle of the road with it.
Most of this portrayal of violence isn't really explored by the game itself, which makes me feel that I'm just being pretentious writing this. It also stops doing much interesting stuff after a character dies, and from that point on is very "eh" and then it quite literally just ends. Also this might be consequence of not playing the first game but Kane is kind of a dumbass? He does nothing but follow Lynch along without much conflict aside from saying "this sucks!", which annoyed me because he was really just there for the ride. Lynch was much more interesting, but I was hoping for their dynamic to have more meat to it other than indifference.

So that leaves me a little confused. Is the game really about violence? Is it just a violent game? Was it going for something more than that? I don't know! And frankly, I think the game is a little confused too considering the last stretch of the game.
And for that reason, I feel a little lost. I'm honestly not quite sure what to make of it as a whole package. And honestly? That's fine! It did enough by presenting a different approach to violence, and that is enough to earn praise.
If Kane & Lynch 3: Escape from Brazil ever comes out (which it won't because the devs lost the rights to it when separating from SE), I'll be keeping an eye out for it. But for now, the only thing I'm sure of about this game is that it made me go 🤔

i think theres something to be said about """"review culture"""" (lets call it that for now) when a 3-min long game that reads like vent art seems to garner attention for some reason

Why do we seek to quantify something clearly very personal based on how much it resonates with us?

I think my problem is that I think people are looking at this game as they would a product. Like it needs to have some value to me, otherwise it's not "worth playing".
But I don't think "cave story sex rpg 2007" (lol) ever tried to be relatable. Its, as others have noted, similar to a page from a personal diary. So why rate it based on how much we cared about it? Do we need to care? It feels to me like that was never the point, or the intention.

Talking about this game feels like seeing a sad, personal comic online and saying that you don't relate. Or looking at a random poem on the bathroom wall and trying to critique it.

If I made such a personal game and then saw people were saying how "it didn't resonate" with them, I'd feel pretty awkward, y'know? Why would it ever?