YMMV / Kane & Lynch

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Depending on the player, both Kane and Lynch can be seen as sympathetic jerkasses, villain protagonists, tragic villains, all of the above or anything in between.
  • In Dog Days the entire plot is initiated by the two of them attempting to broker a large arms deal with an undisclosed African client. They could be assisting either dictators, insurgents or freedom fighters, and that much interpretation is left up to the players. Of course they both make it clear that it's just business, but the moral repercussions are left open.
  • Is the massive manhunt against the titular duo solely because of Shangsi's desire for revenge? Or is it also because the police want to stop the two murderous thugs who have murdered hundreds of people around Shanghai (many of whom were innocent bystanders)?
  • Yahtzee believes that in the second game, the camera is held by an unseen third character and aspiring documentary filmmaker whom nobody in the game seems to acknowledge.
  • Given her past with Kane, would Yoko have provided them some help if they'd just asked rather than kidnapping her?
• Anti-Climax Boss: Shangsi in Dog Days. He is seen as the Big Bad of the entire game and is so powerful a single act against his name is enough to get people to change sides and attack his enemies as Kane and Lynch find out when its revealed they unknowingly shot his daughter and has not just the various gangs and police in his pocket, but the military as well. When you finally meet him in the penultimate mission, he gets 30 seconds of screentime before Lynch shoots him. In a cutscene.
• Awesome Music: The entire soundtrack to Dead Men, which was composed by Jesper Kyd. An intense and foreboding mixture of electronic beats, melodic atmospherics, synth ambience, haunting vocals, ethnic instrumentation, musical distortion and industrial guitar that matches the pain and anger of the dysfunctional duo.
  • One of the aspects of Dog Days that many critics and gamers alike agreed was it's music. Composed by Mona Mur, the soundtrack is made up experimental, industrial dark ambience that reflects the increasingly disturbing situations that Kane and Lynch find themselves in as well as their frayed mental states. Mur created the ambience using real city noises, vintage synthesizers, guitar amplifiers, and unusual software. The soundtrack also features some catchy originally-made C-Pop music to create a discordance between upbeat love ballad lyrics and the game's dark tone.
• Broken Base: Dog Days did this to fans of Dead Men, splitting up the fans evenly among those who thought that the improved game mechanics didn't make up for a flimsy story and an incredibly short length, and those who thought that the improved game mechanics made up for all of Dog Days' flaws campaign-wise. Pretty amazing, considering that the fans of Dead Men didn't need all that much to be happy.
• Critical Backlash: While nobody is calling the game good by any stretch of imagination, Dog Days has earned some admiration for how uncompromisingly hideous the game is as an intentional stylistic choice. The gameplay is mediocre even for its era, the visuals are described in the trope above, the story is bleak, and none of it gets any better despite the game constantly showing beauty just out of reach even as you arrive at the places you saw it in ten minutes ago. The end result is something that, while unpleasant to actually play, has earned respect as a piece of art. The fact that it often tends to be around 10-15 dollars through second hand copies and Steam might've helped its reputation.
• Cult Classic: Despite its lukewarm commercial and critical reception, Dog Days has found a small cult following on behalf of its stylish presentation, unique art direction, realistic gunplay, uncompromising grittiness and an unconventional and surprisingly creepy soundtrack.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Thapa is rather popular with the fans for some inexplicable reason, since he doesn't have many lines and leaves the team early.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: The gameplay is the most frequently criticized aspect of either title. While Dog Days saw a number of improvements to the gunplay and level design, it's still considered by most to be only passable at best. The real draw of the series (especially Dog Days) is in the gritty and uncompromising story and atmosphere.
• Epileptic Trees: There have been a number of insane fan theories, ranging from somewhat plausible to ridiculous- The 7 murdered Lynch's wife, the second game is mostly happening in Lynch's head, Kane and Lynch knew each other before the first game but Lynch forgot, and so on.
• Funny Moments: In one of the promotional videos for Dog Days, Lynch angrily flips off an attacking helicopter while inside a ruined office building.
  • Depending on who you are, one could find it darkly humorous in the sixth chapter of Dog Days where the men are running around the streets of Shanghai fighting off angry cops while completely naked - though everything else about this chapter definitely isn't funny.
    • This quote from Lynch adds some much needed levity.
  Lynch: "I don't fuckin' care! I'm fucking naked! People screaming, shooting, staring!"
  • The comics have some amusing exchanges between the two.
    • When Lynch tries to point out to Kane how much Jenny hates him:
  Lynch: "C'mon, cut her loose. She doesn't want to be around you. Get used to it."
  Kane: "Suddenly, you're Dr. Phil?! I didn't ask your fuckin' opinion!"
  • When Kane notices they have more thugs coming after them:
  Lynch: "It's the global recession. People are just doing what they gotta do to get by."
  Kane: "Christ, how many pills you pop today?"
  Lynch: "Enough... to smooth things out. It's been a weird day."
  Kane: "Terrific. Hold on."
• Heartwarming Moments: Near the end of Dog Days, when Kane leaves a message on Jenny's answering machine, telling her he's done with his awful career, and he'll be coming to see her soon. Crosses into Bittersweet Ending territory at the end of the message, since Kane's time is rather short. ("But sweetheart? If... if you ''don't'' see me, I want you to know... I love you.")
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: The other major complaint against Dog Days. Most gamers can finish the single-player mode in a single four-hour sitting.
• It Was His Sled: The torture and subsequent nudity sequence in Dog Days is fast becoming this. Reviewers will happily exposit about it without care for spoilers at least.
• Jerkass Woobie: Both Lynch and Kane, to some extent. They might be murderous jerks, but damn if they don't go through hell and back multiple times across the two games.
• Memetic Mutation: FOUR HOURS!!!
• Moment of Awesome: The entire E3 trailer for Kane and Lynch 2.
  • Dead Men had an insanely awesome trailer too. It was the best part of the game.
• Moral Event Horizon: Mostly depends largely on your view of the characters. Best example so far would be at the end of Dog Days the boys resort to hijacking a commercial airliner full of innocent people in a desperate bid to escape Shanghai, after murdering well over a hundred police officers, shooting down several helicopters, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in property damage, being indirectly (or directly) responsible for the deaths of countless innocent civilians and having made most of the city descend into chaos. It was a busy weekend.
• Narm: Sometimes, The overuse of the F-Word makes the game unintentionally funny.
• Nightmare Fuel: You play as two murderous fugitives, one of them being an unstable madman, and you face armies of criminals, policemen and other armed enemies that can easily kill you in multiple ways. Combined with the overall bleak and brutal tone of the series, the torture scenes and all the deaths of criminals and civilians alike, this game can be quite shocking.
  • Dog Days is considered to be the more bleak and disturbing of the two games. The story sees Kane and Lynch desperately fighting to survive after accidently killing the daughter of a corrupt, powerful government official. Over the course of 48 hours, the two fend off what seems to be the entire city of Shanghai and its vicious criminal underworld; from homicidal gangsters and dirty cops, to ruthless SWAT teams and Chinese Army soldiers.
  • The sixth chapter "A Thousand Cuts" stands out; it sees Kane and Lynch escaping onto the streets of Shanghai after being tortured by a sociopathic crime boss named Hsing. Both men are completely naked and badly lacerated (I.e. cut up and bleeding like crazy) as they rush through the crowded streets of Shanghai while fending off more corrupt cops and SWAT teams.
    • Xiu's fate. She's tortured to death and skinned alive. The audio during the loading screen also made it clear that Hsing had raped her as well - and made Lynch watch.
    • The injuries Kane and Lynch sustain as a result of the torture. Good lord. This is not for the faint of heart (Or stomach)◊
  • Dog Days' soundtrack also stands out from your usual shooting videogame soundtrack. Instead of being the standard action themes for gunfights or even the usual bombastic hip hop tracks of some crime games, they're made of a experimental-industrial dark ambience, some of which sounds like distorted, psychedelic sounding noises that make it seem like Merzbow had a hand in making them.
    • This track from the eighth chapter "Out of Shanghai" is a good example; it's frenzied, panic-inducing and sounds more suited to a horror game where you're running from the monster.
    • One YouTube comment sums up the game's soundtrack:
  "This music was so unnerving in the game. It reminded me of Eraserhead, like some sort of descent into existential horror. It's like you're standing in a parking garage and the cavernous architecture captures the ambient city noise and voices on the street like a radio tuned to receive the sounds of hell."
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Nowadays the series is generally only remembered for the furore around Jeff Gerstmann's review and his subsequent firing from GameSpot, and to a lesser extent for its indirect role in putting the Hitman series on ice for the better part of a decade, as neither of the games sold or was well-reviewed enough to leave much of an impact on gaming culture.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Taking hostages/human shields. Doing this is mostly a death sentence in Dog Days as enemies are more than capable of shooting you through your human shield and the player is only able to use their pistol, a gun with pretty atrocious accuracy, while taking someone hostage.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Dog Days is much more unforgiving compared to Dead Men. The guns aren't accurate, you can't carry as much ammo, the enemies are more numerous and aggressive. About the only thing that's easier here is that you don't need a buddy to revive you.
• So Okay, It's Average: This seems to be the critical consensus on the series.
• Special Effects Failure: In both games, the way the characters lips move when they speak in-game (not during cutscenes) is just pitiful (think Quake II-engine era). Even if you don't count Half-Life 2, most modern games have at least competent in-game character lip syncing animation, at least for major characters. These games just go with having their mouths open and close like fish. It's even more bizarre considering that the game which IO worked on immediately beforehand, Hitman: Blood Money, had generally quite competent lip animations.
• Spiritual Licensee: Several critics (and players, as noted in the Shout-Out section above) have noted the first game's similarity to the films of Michael Mann, specifically Heat and Collateral.
  • The second game is a close to a Cloverfield video game as you can get without having a giant monster.
• Spiritual Successor: To IO Interactive's own Freedom Fighters (2003): it uses a very similar interface, and both scores were composed by Jesper Kyd.
• Tear Jerker: Too many to count- Kane and Lynch both have some of the most tragic, depressing lives ever. Notable mentions include Kane's wife being shot and him beating the shooter to death in rage (''YOU SHOULD! HAVE LET! ME TALK TO THEM!''), Lynch's breakdown (in an audio-only flashback) as he finds the body of his dead wife, Jenny's death in the Damned If You Do ending, and Jenny telling Kane that she hates him in the Damned If You Don't ending. What a depressing game.
  • Dog Days isn't much better. "Highlights" include Lynch killing a girl and driving her boyfriend to kill himself and Kane's possibly final message to his daughter; but the worst of it all has to be the torture of Kane and Lynch and the rape and death of Xiu. It was so bad that even Lynch broke down in tears after all that happened. In short, if you're dealing with depression or don't like to feel blue, don't play these games.
  • Regardless of how one may feel about them, there's something deeply tragic about Kane and Lynch. Both were, at one point, normal men with families who ended up losing everything - Kane's two year old killing himself by accident, with his wife dying and his daughter turning away from him later on, and Lynch unwittingly murdering his wife in a fit of psychosis. Both became violent criminals, and yet, over the course of two games, one can tell neither of them enjoy their criminal lifestyles. Come Dog Days, it becomes clear that the two are sick and tired of it and want to live normal lives, but are unable to due to their destructive tendencies. At their core, they are both desperate, broken men trapped in a cycle of crime and violence, likely for the rest of their lives.
• That One Boss: A lot of people were so frustrated with the Behemoth in the Reunion level that they stopped playing altogether. Not without reason, given it's a tiny target in a moving object with only a few seconds to spare.
• That One Level: The Havana levels (Freedom Fighters, El Capitol) were a huge spike in difficulty from the previous levels. Justified in that you are now fighting a trained military compared to the cop/warden/security/criminal mooks of the previous levels.
  • Even the other Dead Men start complaining about how dangerous it's gotten all of a sudden. Thapa even calls it quits afterwards.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Kane and Lynch are brutal criminals, with their enemies being not that much better. This can make it rather difficult to care about what happens to them.
  Yahtzee: Much as the visuals succeed too well at being deliberately hideous, the characters succeed too well at being deliberately wankers. There's nothing fun about the game. No light relief, just one nauseating heap on unpleasentness after another, like a roadside café breakfast special by Jeffrey Dahmer.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Possibly The 7. Sure, they're horrible people who have captured Kane's daughter and wife and plan to kill them, but the only reason they did this is because Kane betrayed them and caused the death of quite a few of their members.
  • Subverted, as the group's "loyalty" quickly breaks down when the duo go after them, revealing themselves to be no better than Kane.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Kane and Lynch 2 ups the already dour atmosphere of the first game to the point where it feels like a never-ending nihilistic journey that puts The Last of Us Part II to shame. Despite the short length of the campaign, many people believe that it was able to make up for it with a camera effect for the Third Person view that truly elevated this game into misery porn. The light that is obtrusive, the pixelated mutilation of bodies, a bloodied screen if Lynch/Kane takes too much damage, shaky cams as if there is a third person trying to follow them, the devs truly tried to depict the ugliness of violence and how it ruins people to a truly magnificent degree.
• The Woobie: Unbelievably, Dog Days sees Lynch become this to a degree. In the wake of Xiu's murder and his own vicious torture, he is suddenly overwhelmed with despair and sits, naked and bleeding, and starts weeping. Occasionally during the rest of the game he can be heard whimpering in firefights, and even wails in despair when the odds turn against them. Which is often.

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