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!