Cost of a Coffee - Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days

This week’s Cost of a Coffee game is Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, which was universally panned upon release.  However seeing it for £2.99 at our local GAME store, we purchased it in lieu of our usual caffeinated pick-me-up.  It’s the game that everyone thought IO Interactive shouldn’t have wasted their time developing.  When I heard this was getting development time rather than a new Hitman game, I was more disappointed than the time that six tonnes of leaking liquid helium damaged some 50 superconducting magnets and contaminated the proton tube with soot at the Large Hadron Collider.  Things didn’t start well when the install corrupted before the menu had even loaded.  Not good.  Deleting and restarting fixed the problem and we were treated to possibly one of the prettiest menu screens I’ve ever seen, which consist of handycam images of scenes from Shanghai.  They are very nicely detailed and some of them are difficult to differentiate from real footage.  This aesthetic flows through to the game itself with all the areas you visit having a nice level of detail to the environments, which we’d expect from the pedigree of the developer.  Unfortunately that’s about the best of it.