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Helicopter Ride – Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

As annoying as the credits for each mission can be after a while, the long helicopter rides in Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain can be excruciating. It’s pretty cool that you don’t have to suffer any loading times when in the open world but holy hell, does every helicopter ride, regardless of distance, have to be unskippable?

As most of you may know of the ON Live service that lets you play game on your computer even if it is a piece of crap and still looks great with essentially no lag is having a Special Sale this weekend only!  How does $5.00 sound for Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days for the PC this Friday?  Additionally Just Cause 2 will be 50% off this Saturday April 30th making it $14.99 along with 75% off Batman Arkham Asylum this Sunday only running you only $7.50 which are all a steal in my book.  You can try all the demo for free as well.

Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days – Demo
Just Cause 2 – Demo
Batman Arkham Asylum – Demo

Today Io Interactive is launching Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days Weekend Challenges. The multiplayer Weekend Challenges will be broadcast via in the in-game infocast and invite players to compete in a heist test to be the best. Dedicated leaderboards will be generated for each challenge, allowing gamers to track their proficiency against others. In this weekend’s challenge you compete to get the biggest stash of cash across all 3 of the multiplayer modes.  Future challenges will be communicated via the in-game infocast.

In Kane & Lynch 2’s multiplayer modes, Fragile Alliance, Undercover Cop and Cops & Robbers, you’ll need eyes in the back of your head.  Over $1 trillion has already been stolen.  But greed to win can only lead to betrayal and revenge.

Stay tuned with GB for the complete review of the game in the coming weeks.

We got a chance to play through the first four levels of Dog Days. As many of you will have gathered from trailers and teasers, the game takes place in Shanghai, China. The levels are suitably filled with seedy looking bars, dodgy apartments and grim looking fishmongers, the citizens eyeing you at every step.

The preview placed us in Lynch’s shoes as he attempts to give a low-life a shakedown, which quickly escalates into all-out warfare on the streets. The mechanics have changed little since the previous game- you’ll still be hiding behind cover, popping out for a few shots then moving up. However the entire cover system has been reworked- for the better. Whereas Dead Men had you shifting your body around until you made your character parallel with the wall at which point he would magically stick to it, Dog Days now uses a simple one-button approach. Hit one button and your character will automatically snap onto any nearby cover, whether it be a wall, a car, a table, whatever.

The two protagonists are a couple of gangsters with a complicated relationship.

The shooting however, is not so satisfying. It seems that every gun in the game has pretty shocking accuracy, as the crosshairs remain fairly spaced throughout, and there are no iron sights. The guns generally have pretty pathetic kick, with only one or two weapons truly satisfying our inner psychopath.

Fortunately, the game has again far surpassed the original with its AI. It’s still not the smartest you might encounter, and it doesn’t hold a candle to the kind of AI found in Crysis, but it’s light years ahead of Dead Men. While your allies and enemies alike had a habit of standing in the open and taking shots full to the face, they now stick to cover, and they are pretty reluctant to stick more than a hand out of cover if you’re popping shots over their heads.

The various squalid locales make up the backdrpo for many of the shootouts.

Cover is now temporary in many cases. One scene has you battling police SWAT teams in a restaurant while partitions explode all around you and your cover disintegrates. Some levels allow you to throw cans of fuel around, which are good for knocking out any particularly stubborn bits of cover. The preview didn’t give us access to any other indirect fire weapons such as grenades though, so flushing enemies out of cover could be rather tricky. We expect this is a feature we will see in the full game though.

Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days has one major problem however- it looks downright fugly. Not content with just a few jaggies, the games explosions look like something out of Wolfenstein 3D and the characters in cutscenes lack perspective and detail. The entire game also plays out with some sort of a permanent grain filter which makes it look like you’re playing the game on your dad’s old TV that still uses a clothes hanger for an aerial. When we saw the initial screenshots from the game we thought that they were just badly developed- but I’m afraid to say, the game does in fact look just like this.

After all that’s said and done though, Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days is still a vast improvement on the lacklustre original, and holds together all the basic third person shooter mechanics fairly well. But when it releases next month, it’s going to be up against strong competition, particularly from Mafia 2, releasing just over one week later on August 24.

Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days releases on August 17 for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC.

Currently the demo for Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days is now running, but you have to you must have been able to get into the preview which had limited space.  Next week the demo will be available for everyone to download and let me just say the demo so far has been pretty awesome.  It has a different and unique style than the first game which I wasn’t too crazy about.  The demo will be available for the Playstation 3 on July 27th while the Xbox 360 and PC just have a “Next Week” date set for them.

The demo lets you play 3 ranked multiplayer playlist modes online, as well as a campaign level (solo) and an Arcade Mode which requires you to grab all the loot you can grab and then escape with a team as you are swarmed with enemies.  You can also go renegade in this mode and try and take your teams loot by killing them and then escaping… I could not get away alive after going renegade.  Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days comes out for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC on August 17th.

Gamestop Pre-Order Bonus:
Greed, Betrayal, and Revenge Multi-player Pack! Betrayal, greed, and dirty money feature prominently as you play the Radio Tower Map across all 4 multi-player modes. As an added bonus you’ll receive three exclusive multi-player weapons: the Doretta handgun with silencer, the US-standard Steel 780 shotgun, and the TOQ SBR submachine gun.

Amazon.com Pre-Order Bonus:
get $10 off a future video game purchase. The promotional code will be placed directly into your Amazon.com account within 2 business days after the product ships. Additionally, receive an exclusive graphic novel and a code to unlock the exclusive Goodbye Katty Gun. Both the code for the gun and the graphic novel will be included in pack when the game ships.