Culture

Kane and Lynch are two bickering hit men who can’t seem to get along without one another. Dog Days, their second videogame shooter together, finds them squabbling their way through the byways of Shanghai, with the camera tagging along behind Lynch with the handheld shakiness beloved by cinema verité and episodes of C.O.P.S.. The image, which is continually grainy and spotted with light reflections, often pixelates and glitches like a cheap digital camera undergoing gunfire, which is presumably the effect that the game’s designers were going for.

The same thing happens every day. The sun, rising unseen, illuminates Pacific City with a vague, generic glow. In this unwashed daylight, Pacific City’s buildings, which glower with foreboding imperialism in the darkness, are revealed to be charmless monoliths – a warren of cardboard box offices and oatmeal can towers. An occasional flock of paper scraps churn through the air in the otherwise featureless corners and alleyways. As the light emerges, so do the city’s sanest residents. I say “sanest,” though I would be hard-pressed to defend the mental health of citizens who insist on loitering in the streets like herd animals – a meandering obstacle course that the game admonishes me for mowing down.
Then the same thing happens every night. The streams of citizens evaporate as darkness oozes into the streets along with a dense backwash of mutants: pale, bulbous men studded with bony spikes, and wiry screaming women with frazzled hair. Outnumbering the healthy citizens, the freaks clog every corner of nocturnal Pacific City. Throwing punches at them results in a dense flurry of motion as I flit from one to the next, and it’s a simple matter to leap to the roof of a nearby building and target them with firearms. But that maneuver is likely to summon a carload or two of the game’s gang of human rebels, with their automatic rifles, endless ammunition and ability to track me across rooftops.The same thing happens every year. I find myself leaping from rooftop to rooftop, from skyscraper to street and back up again, as I bounce and climb around crime-infested cities. But unlike the truly epic scale of last summer’s inFamous and Prototype, the feeble heights and featureless skyline of Crackdown 2 present me with limited opportunities for super-powered heroics. I’m no longer impressed that I’m able to leap to the top of tall buildings in a single bound. In Crackdown 2 I’m merely a bundle of offensive maneuvers ricocheting around a mockup metropolis, pretending to save the day and night when all I’m really doing is going through the motions.