Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days Preview

Run into danger and you'll be pumped full of holes, but it often isn't the end straight away. You can often be knocked down, from which position you can fire off a few shots at goons or stumble to your feet to find cover. With co-op play not present in the preview build I can't say if there are any clever two-player mechanics, but from what I've seen it might just be limited to helping your partner climb over a fence.

Dog Days' real identity comes from its visuals, with the game using an incredibly cool and stylish shaky cam. Throughout development YouTube has been cited as inspiration, but to me this has always jarred as it doesn't really work when you're talking about an event that's taking place before your eyes. It's more along the lines of the effect seen in the alien-invasion movie Cloverfield, in which all the action was seen from the point of view of a handheld camera. It certainly gives Dog Days a unique graphical look.

Small touches such as the pixelated heads of dead bodies and a buffering message when the next level loads add a lot to the overall visual package, while the voice work so far is uniformly excellent. The two leading men sound utterly convincing and suitably on edge, and the rest of the cast is spot on. Some odd looking lip-synching during in-game story sequences jars slightly, falling some way short of what we've seen in GTA4 and more recently Red Dead Redemption. A question must also be asked about why the lead character had to have a long balding mullet if the game engine wasn't capable of rendering it as anything other than a hardened, tangled mop.

Without being able to test out co-op it's hard to say if Dog Days will benefit from a friend coming along for the ride, but from what I've see the game as a whole relies heavily on the player's interest in the main characters and an appearance that is very different to the norm. Will this be enough to make Kane & Lynch 2 one of the must-own games of the summer? We'll find out soon enough.

Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days is due for release on August 20 on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.