what a rancid festering sore on the face of the planet this game is. its been a long time since i was pissed off at a game enough to go write a blog post about it on the internet and chances are if youre reading this youre probably pissed off too because i dont know how else youd find this thing without googling some game name while drunk and messing up the spelling
in order to break from the usual routine i will begin by listing, in bullet form, everything this game does right.
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now on to the negatives. kaen 2 lnych is a cover shooter stripped down to its barest essentials. there arent any driving or turret sequences, thank god, nor are there ridiculous construction machine boss battles like in the first one. too bad the absence of negatives isnt a positive cause this game sure has me down! lmao.
the Big Prob with making a cover shooter stripped down to its barest essentials is that cover shooters are inherently ungood. by cover shooters i dont mean shit like choas thoery or MSG1/2/3 or dsue xe 3: hmunar rvolutino, where there’s a cover mechanic in place to let you see around walls easier than a games perspective might otherwise allow. in fact thats a great feature. but by cover shooter i mean gaers-of-wor-likes, games where every room has meticulously placed waist-high concrete car barriers to hide behind while playing whack-a-mole with enemies as they, for some reason, continuously and rhythmically peek out of cover. i know calling kanye and lunch 2 the videogame equivalent of whack-a-mole seems like exaggeration but it isnt. its yet another in the interminable 2000s run of shooters where you go into a room, take cover, pop out to shoot an enemy, get hit, and duck back into cover for 5 seconds while your health regenerates
there arent any tactics. there arent multiple approaches. the game could probably play itself. you dont really have to make any choices ever. your only ‘choice’ is whether or not to pick up some gun, all of which are basically interchangeable except for the three assault rifles or whatever that kill guys in a blessedly small amount of time
but then i suppose it says a lot about this game, and other brainless shooters, that i tend to play them entirely through in one sitting as efficiently as possible. because why not. doing so is more engaging than watching paint dry but doesnt require any more skill, and this, seemingly, is by design; why else have we seen an increasing tendency to shovel out these shitpiles every year except that slobbering nerd meatsacks will appreciate anything with gunfights and melodrama.
this game is actually a closet favorite of a few people whose game opinions i respect. they like how its story doesnt follow game or genre conventions. i agree, that is a pretty cool thing for a story to do, not that this story does it. the game is shit though, and the only crossover between the story and mechanics is that the game wont stop you for shooting civilians, and thats not enough to excuse the 5 or whatever hours spent trudging through this clunker, fighting through increasingly improbable scenarios. actually fuck im going to break one of my rules and talk about the story for like a paragraph, you should probably skip the next paragraph.
the story is boner stupid. people will say like, “its cool that cain and lance aren’t niko bellics and theyre exactly as bad in cutscenes as they are in gameplay.” so fucking what. its pretty clear the writing staff at IO is about as well-versed in their trade as the main characters are in theirs because they dont know what the fuck theyre doing. not one fucking thing in this game makes any fucking sense at all. let me try to make sense of this. so lnych is living in hong kong for no reason and has a girlfriend, ok, thats cool. also hes not insane anymore, most of the time, although sometimes in the game you hear voices or something, i guess its supposed to be that youre crazy. it must be frustrating for irl crazy people to have voice actors chime in at dramatically appropriate points in their life with relevant suggestions or whatever; truly this explains the character’s unhinged murder sprees from the first game. anyway then knae shows up for One Last Mission in order to help his daughter or something from the first game. ok, thats sorta weird that hed be hooking up with his ¿psychotic? ex-partner-of-necessity who is intricately linked with violent trauma in his life, but whatever, fine, we need to have a game here and thats an ok explanation. then ¿somebody? kills some girl and it turns out her father is a mob boss, and also owns the police, and also owns the military, and also is president of literally all of asia for i know because about two hours in, the game stops caring about why it’s dumping crap on these characters and just starts dumping it for no reason. the previously mentioned girlfriend doesnt have any scenes or lines i am aware of besides when she is running from soldiers, captured by them, raped, killed, and thrown in a dingy shower stall to give your character some extra angst for about 10 minutes before literally EVERYRONE in the UNIVERSE forgets she existed at all
its this kind of vapid crap that really pisses me off in games that get praised for their story; when nothing makes sense except to further the action, every female character somehow has to involve sexuality, and just enough tropes are avoided that it gets lavished with praise for its uniqueness. fuck. stories arent enough to redeem awful games in the firs tplace so i dont know why otherwise intelligent people seem to think that a story with a hazy, indistinct embryo of a theme (“what if bad guys… are BAD”) is One Of The Best Stories In Games. sorry idiots.
i feel like i spent more time here talking about plot than anything else, which is weird, but i reiterate that this is a game with no mechanics beyond moving, taking cover, shooting, and switching guns. thats it! thats all.
if roger ebert ever felt like returning to his argument that games are not art, this game could be the cornerstone of his thesis. its pretty, but its shitty.
