My fucking god, this game is so cool. It really draws you in, giving you an unforgettable experience. I can’t think of any other game that can evoke so many emotions in such a little timespan. Just three unforgettable hours of brutality, misery, loss, and a feeling of loneliness. I haven’t played the first instalment, Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, but I don’t think that has had much of an impact on my experience with the second one.

The unforgettable atmosphere of this game complements its found-footage visual style. All the action unfolds as if from the perspective of an unnamed cameraman - or, in a sense, the player - observing events from a third-person viewpoint. Or even a second-person, since you control Kane or Lynch, but through the cameraman’s eyes.

The visual style is enhanced by camera visual and audio artifacts. The camera responds to actions, the lens becomes dirty when you take damage, the light sources are distorted, and the loud explosions and gunshots are compressed into an audio mishmash, adding to the hyper-realistic aesthetic. Thanks to this style, the game has stood the test of time remarkably well and feels more realistic than most games of that era, and even many current ones. And the voice acting is so good!

The soundtrack is on another level. You can hear a little bit of Chinese pop music on the menu screen and some cutscenes, but the rest, for the most part, is a dark ambient that just melts into the game. You wouldn’t want to hear it separately from the game; it’s eerie, grungy, psychedelic, and has a lot of personality that can only be experienced to the maximum in the game.

The game itself seems to be pitted against the player, displaying extreme brutality, whilst only censoring with pixelation the exposed mutilated genitals and the faces of enemies hit point-blank with the shotgun - merely complementing the LiveLeak aesthetic and allowing the imagination to run wild.

There is no good ending in this game, it’s very abrupt. The characters themselves are maniacs who can do nothing but kill and fuck things up. Everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong, and you are just here, with them, navigating through the mess they have created. The only thing Kane and Lynch have left is each other.

I can only criticise is the combat in this game. It’s a rail shooter with cover mechanics that everyone was already fed up with by the time the game came out. It’s clunky and gets tedious by the end of the game. It’s a good thing the game is not too long.

When the game first released, it was written off. Remember Angry Joe’s infamous 4 HOURS? I can understand that not everyone wanted to pay full price for a product specifically designed to make a player feel uncomfortable. But with the passage of time, it has become the most unique game of the 2010s in my opinion.

You can now buy it for spare change, and YOU SHOULD!

My disappointment of the year. This game was praised from every corner of the WWW, but after only 2 years, it appears that everyone has forgotten about it.

I want to start with the good, and the reason why I bought this game. Visuals. Finally, someone stopped jerking off to PlayStation 1 polygons and took the inspiration from N64. The visuals are very cute!

Unfortunately, the developers decided to fuck this up by making them low resolution. The beautiful models are smeared with a pixelation, the result of which is that you stop paying attention to the surroundings and everything turns into a pixelated mess if you play long enough.

Otherwise, the game falls short in every aspect. I don’t know what it’s trying to be. The developers just crammed a bunch of mechanics from different classic horror games, but didn’t figure out why they worked in the first place and did nothing unique.

The enemies are damage-absorbing sponges, with no variety in dealing with them. Just shoot until they die. There are traps, like exploding barrels, but good luck leading enemies to them. They sit in their zone and don’t stray too far from it. It is also impossible to run past enemies, as not only do they respawn on top of each other, but most locations are narrow corridors with no room to maneuver. The enemies also love to make 180-degree turns and stick to you if you try to run past them.

The tremendous amount of backtracking, I honestly don’t know of a game in which I would feel so tired of it. The reason for backtracking is puzzles, but most of them are braindead simple or explained in notes with literal instructions on what to do.

I don’t want to talk about the plot, as it might as well not exist. Nothing interesting comes out because the game doesn’t expand on the characters, but simply throws in a backstory. There are no interesting interactions with them. They just exist.

I would like to draw attention to the criticism on Steam. The controls in the game are not tank controls, so it is not a problem, despite many people in Steam reviews mistaking them for. Maybe that’s due to reviewers not having experience in controlling a tank.

It’s a classic stealth action adventure that was ported to Steam in MGS Vol. 1 Collection in 2023. Despite that, this game was ported to nearly every console, except maybe PS2, LOL.

This time, Konami decided to get more money from gaijins by publishing it under the price tag on Steam. Perhaps gambling doesn’t give them enough money, and they decided to milk all of their franchises with re-releases and remasters. The same way they are raping the corpse of Silent Hill.

Regarding the game itself, there is not much to say. The whole story can be described in 13 pages in Metal Gear Solid 1 on PlayStation, which is something like half of an A4 page.

The game has a nice soundtrack, and it transitions between regular and combat states, which is neat. The stealth is very barebones and determines only if you get in the eyesight of an enemy. Most interactions with enemies are based around this mechanic.

There are many different boss enemies. For every one of them you have to adapt an individual playing style, which the series retained for every boss fight. However, for most of them you just find a corner and the corresponding weapon to spam them. Still, they should have started from somewhere. It would be rude to compare it to Metal Gear Solid 2.

There are also a lot of downsides. The amount of backtracking, present in every series entry, from which they only stepped back in Metal Gear Solid 3, is insane. Especially in the later locations, which are extremely maze-like and confusing. Each door has a corresponding card, but they look the same. So if you have a level 8 card, you can only open level 8 doors. Which door is level 8? Figure it out, retard.

A special note about the traps: they are fucked up. The pits are a whole other level of fuckness. They’re scattered in places where you literally have to memorize their locations. Combine that with backtracking, and you end up with the same experience as CBT.

In the end, I ultimately enjoyed this entry. It’s okay. It’s also very short and can be completed in 3 to 4 hours.