For as much as I love this game, I can't help but wish they had gone even harder on making a game that completely throws action-packed missions to the wayside in favor of making a cowboy slice-of-life. If I had spent 33% less time mowing down dudes and 33% more time with Mary Linton, 33% more time breaking into a slave catcher's foreclosed house, 33% more time learning about the cholera outbreak affecting one of the game's towns, I'd be even more in love with it. The guns are fun, I like them, but I think their presence could be significantly reduced without feeling like the violence has lost its thematic weight.

Not every game should be like this, of course, but Rockstar proved that they can make something interesting with all the money they pumped into this product, so I can only wonder what would've happened if they tried a little harder to break with convention.

the more i peel back of GTA V, the less i like it. i suspect this rule will be consistent and exponential with successive time invested but i dislike a lot of its tone and narrative direction, pastiche you've seen everywhere else stitched together with rockstars trademark cynicism and satire, like a napalm strike that misses every target it should hit. really something that this game might age harder than GTA IV, a game i at least have some interest in returning to. in general red dead remains a better fit for these writing chops, if only for imbuing the world with a touch of humanity despite still being populated by the usual gallery of assholes (the houser brothers seem to have built their fortunes on getting good performers to wring out any kind of charisma from their flaccid scripts)

that said...the 'generous' score here is because im playing this with my gf, whose suggestions are pure id, and therefore im playing exactly the way rockstar intends for me to play. spending a day from dawn til dusk with this itinerary:
- strip club in the morning
- high speed police chase throughout town after some sidewalk shenanigans
- absolutely demolish my dodge challenger in the process
- wind up next to the games mountain trail, punch a dude off a bmx and steal it
- gf suggests making our way to the spire to take the cable car, i fend off several mountain lions in the process
- read emails before taking the cable car from franklins ex-girlfriend insisting their relationship is over
- took a cable car down to earth from my picturesque vantage point, basking in the night sky while the piercing sounds of sirens welcomed my return to the hustle and bustle of the daily grind
...inadvertently told a more quaint story than a short hike

In the back room of an apartment, I am cut loose from the city. It watches me pass with sharp neon eyes. The sun has gone down with practiced bravado, twilight crawled across the sky and laden with foreboding. The night has gilded the monitor in silver. Every pixel is covered with light. The image of one mean sonnuvabitch called “Max “Payne”, is repeated over and over. The Drug. The red and yellow of a beretta’s muzzle flashes fiercely on the white screen’s snow.

Something goes clank in the night, and the sound is close enough to remind me I’m playing Max Payne on a PlayStation 2 with a broken controller. Wanted to give the boys at Backloggd something to joke about.

Except no one’s laughing now.

The poindexters at IGN explained it to me:

“Remedy ported this PC code to the PS2 pretty quickly, and simply chopped up the levels into smaller bits in order to work around the 32 MBs of PS2 RAM.”

“The result is smaller levels, with more loading, slightly rearranged AI placement, but even worse is the heavy disruption to the flow and tension of the story, which tries desperately to feel like a movie, but instead feels like a TV show with hundreds of commercials shunt into it. It nearly ruins the experience.”

Thirty-two megabytes of RAM.

Poor kid never stood a chance.

Neither did I.

A couple of days ago it had all come crashing down. The bad PS2 games arrived like a winter storm: Monster Hunter 2. Devil May Cry 2. Sonic Heroes. The Bouncer. I’d been pushed over the edge by a cabal of games junkies who were ready to explode in random acts of senseless posting at any minute.

I found myself in the cold no-man's land between kamige and kusoge, no road signs on a crash course to a 3D Realms rush job with nothing to lose. I’d died to jank before. I could die to jank again.

A gunshot. My last meeting with Alex before Max found out what his old friend’s brains looked like splattered across a wall. I’d been writing a review in the style Max Payne’s dialogue while the loading bar crawled across the screen for mercy. Now I was awake, brought to my senses by the rapid fire of an AK alarm clock.

Buckshot pierces through me like a wind of rusted razor blades. I’m dead. Again. Two more minutes of dead-eyed disc-reading before I see Alex’s brains. Again. A console port purgatory I wouldn’t wish on my own worst enemy.

Drawing from my vape pen like Bogart, I enter the big house once more with the odds stacked against me. Third-person aiming in an early PlayStation 2 game was nigh-on impossible, and the gamepad’s joystick had been busted for a decade or more.

I could relate.

Game like this would’ve been a pixellated piece of cake in my younger years, a fresh-faced gamer on the sixteen-bit beat. But the strain of sleepless night after sleepless night spent on the graveyard shift with a chain gang of falling tetrominoes had shot my dexterity all the way to Hell. I was no pro gamer now.

My thirteenth gunfight of the night. Unlucky for some, and the way this one started didn't promise anything better than the last dozen. Bullets and bastards coming at my face, an army of dead men with only a few brain cells of artificial intelligence between them holding one-way tickets to the river Styx. I was trying to look for the answers, but every gunshot created a hole with more technical issues leaking out. A spreading labyrinth of questions and QA tickets spreading like a pool of blood on the snow at six frames a second.

Somewhere in the background of the game-goon banter and stock explosion sound effects, I heard the end howling after me. Polygonal hatchet men sped by on fast forward, rooftop water towers disappearing in 240p darkness, a dead forest of antennas and chimneys, all a blur beyond the draw distance. Another level come to a merciful end.

They were all dead. The final gunshot was an exclamation mark to everything that had led to this point. I released my finger from the plastic trigger, and then it was over.

Digital photography capturing the heavy caliber plowing through the neon-infested air of Shanghai; fuck your eardrums and motion sickness.

Dead Men was clearly inspired by Mann's Heat in some set pieces: the bank heist, the nightclub - which was my favorite part of that game by far - and the shooting in the streets of Tokyo. It had some redeeming qualities but other than feeling like a homage to Mann it didn't get many things right - the dialogue comes to mind.

Dog Days while still being heavily inspired by Mann's cinematography - the use of digital photography in films such as Collateral or Miami Vice - feels like its own thing where everything fell right into place.

The emulation of digital photography is very beautiful and creative - the depth of field, the bokeh, grain (actually noise!), the use of overexposure and a really smart choice of color grading are implented masterfully but Kane and Lynch 2 goes beyond this to present us with very distinct visuals and a nauseating mood: the invisible cameraman struggling to document all of this. To add to this, the camera glitching when you get shot, the hitmarkers getting displayed on the bodies you shoot instead of on your invisible crosshair, the display of water droplets and blood splattered to the lenses were a nice artistic choice as well.

Ironically, this beautifully-crafted digital camera presents us with very ugly things - two psychopaths, sweat shops, corruption, poverty, mutilated persons, innocent people dying and dead naked women in the middle of busy streets. In all of this uglyness, there is some regard for human decency and some elements are masked by pixel censoring: namely these naked women and when you deface the face (sorry) of someone with a shotgun.

It all feels like a long hallway through the deepest place of hell - the nauseauting feeling of a camera struggling to capture this, the worst of human uglyness, the linearity of the levels and the thunderous sound of bullets coming from everywhere - it almost makes you want to vomit.

There's no pretensions about morality in Dog Days as opposed to some dialogues from the first entry - both protagonists just accept what is happening and just push-on as they follow the "the end justifies the means" ethos but for purely selfish gains. There are many moments where this can be seen but one of the best is when they find some hostages in the back of a shop, one of them acknowledges their existence but the other screams something along the lines of "it's not my problem!" which perfectly fits their characters.

Another thing I thought was cool was the fact that most "cinematic moments" happen through gameplay mechanics and with what you are presented from the beginning rather than a cutscene which feels very honest.

It all feels like a collage of violence since you usually don't see what happens behind Kane and Lynch going from one place to the next, you are just placed there to shoot people and get to the end of this nightmare.

On the sound design, it follows the sound signature of Mann's deafening bullets but at the same time it does its own thing by allowing the environments to play the rest of the soundtrack - I simply love it. All of the vocal tracks being in Chinese only enhance the soundtrack if anything.

As for the gameplay, it refined the movement and shooting of its predecessor - a pretty standard third person shooter but I enjoy those so nothing to complain about.

There is nothing else like this in existence and it's still surprising that Square Enix gave all this creative freedom to IO Interactive.