ZEALOT #14: Kane, Lynch, and The Aesthetic Shooter
Content Warning: This game features scenes of graphic violence, torture, and an implied rape (which we edited out).
This month’s ZEAL is one of our rare explorations into more ‘traditional’ shooter games, mostly because it is a particularly unusual case: a sophomore release in a franchise dogged by controversy from day one that ended up poisoning any hopes for a third sequel with ambitious aesthetics, weird game design choices, and extremely bad press. It’s the “found footage” shooter game, Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days!
I asked local gamer Regg (@Sheebposting), who first drunkenly told me about the game’s glitchy, camcorder-based visual design at a party, to help take me through the game, initially giving a single-player highlights reel of specific levels, scenes, and gameplay choices.
In part two, we explore the game’s implementation of co-op gameplay, the narrative implementation of grim, sleaze, and slog, and talk about how this all connects to a larger attempt at capturing an experience at the expense of a more traditionally viable title.
And that does it for this month’s ZEALOT! We appreciate, as always, your support, and tune in next month for our planned post-mortem on failed Grand Theft Auto series competitor, True Crime: Streets of LA.
