The £0.79 I paid feels like the right price for this. Not in the cost = value sense - I have paid far more for games I've appreciated far less - but as a symbolic act that forms part of the Dog Days experience's larger whole. From the moment I clicked on the Steam launcher, the game started its audio-visual assault - taking over both my monitors, refusing to run in borderless or windowed mode, crashing to desktop when I tinkered with the AA settings, running my modern raytracer rig hot before I'd even seen the main menu. It was every Fuck You that Backloggd had promised me it would be, and I hadn't even clicked on "Start campaign" yet! Wow!

This may all sound like facile shithousery, but there is something kinda special about a game with Square Enix and IO Interactive title cards trying its absolute hardest to assault you through the screen. Title screens are an important part of the Gaming Experience, and the Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days title screen is no exception - hitting you with a barrage of low-kbps door-knocking sound effects, poorly-mixed raindrops and presumable Chinese swearing. Two paragraphs in and I haven't even pressed the Any key yet - that's how you know this is a game worth talking about! Yowza!

At the time this game was released, I was all over the cover-shooting scene - Gears, Ghost Recon, Uncharted, Vanquish - the whole hole-hiding lot. Gears of War 2, was, and still is, a 5/5+10/10 Certified: Awesome banger in my eyes. Landing an active reload and separating a locust's chest from its dick and balls will always feel (Marcus Fenix voice) Nice! to me, But could I have handled this game back in 2010? You've all heard of the Cool Ranch Dorito Effect, but this game is the Moldly Stale Nacho Cheese Dorito Effect - an alluring flavour so overpoweringly awful that you can barely handle the taste. But something about it just keeps bringing you back... This is Woke Up This Morning (Nightcore Remix) in video game form. Awesome!

It blows my mind that this game has splitscreen co-op. It does not blow my mind to learn that the splitscreen co-op is apparently broken in all sorts of offensive and ridiculous ways - it's so perfectly fitting in so many many ways that elude elucidation. It's now a Life Goal for me to play through this thing in splitscreen with a buddy while we're both spun out of our minds on something or other. It would whip so much fucking sack. I feel like splitscreen Dog Days would function as a drug in and of itself. Even if I wasn't blitzed, I feel like it would still give me a hangover the next day. Can you imagine two guys doing that sprinting animation at the same time while overlapping "SHT YOU CNT!!" "FCK PSS!!" audio files play at different levels over the top of each other and six other stock uzi sound effects of variable volume? It would be sick! Fuck yeah!

It always kinda bothered me when people told me No More Heroes was "belligerent by design" as part of some larger Art Game whole - it was just boring as hell! (Travis Touchdown voice) Fck off! Even if it was intentional, No More Heroes always had its sneakers halfway into its player-hostile concept. Kane & Lynch 2, by contrast, is completely unafraid of confrontation with the player on the other side of the keyboard/gamepad. Like killing people, do you, nerd? No More Heroes 2 (released the same year as Kane & Lynch 2) tried to take the antagonistic nature of the series further towards real meaningful stuff, but it looks like Little Baby Shit in comparison to Dog Days. Suda51 apologises for wounding you. IO Interactive interactively pisses in your wound - and maybe fucks it too, before crashing to desktop! This* is how you challenge your player about all their endless killing and collecting. God damn! Are you enjoying yourself?

I was gonna do a paragraph where I lamented the fact that the game lacks that final furlough of audio/visual/gameplay polish to complement the art vibe that almost takes this to 5 Star Status, but in the process of writing this I realised that the game just wouldn't land the same if you could actually hear the music or think clearly over the sound of a shotgun getting stuck in an audio loop. If I'd been able to clear the rooftop chase the first time without being wiped out by a fucked up ragdoll distracting me and causing me to run into a glitched-out cop who couldn't find cover, I wouldn't have been half as aware of the artifice of video game running-and-gunning-and-murdering. Holy shit! Am I enjoying myself? No! Five stars!!!!

Reviewed on May 26, 2021


1 Comment


2 years ago

haven't played this yet but i 100% agree about nmh