Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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Pure adrenaline of non-stop action in Single Player, Online Co-op and Multiplayer. Double the pleasure and mayhem with new multiplayer DLCs! (click for details)
Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days is a action, co-op and third-person shooter game
developed by IO Interactive
and published by Square Enix.
Released on August 17th 2010 is available only on Windows
in 5 languages: English, French, German, Italian and Spanish - Spain.
It has received 8,877 reviews of which 5,816 were positive and 3,061 were negative resulting in a rating of 6.5 out of 10. 😐
The game is currently priced at 9.99€ on Steam.
The Steam community has classified Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
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System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- OS *: Windows XP/Vista/7
- Processor: Intel 3.0 GHz or AMD 2.5 GHz or higher
- Memory: 1 GB (XP), 2 GB (Vista)
- Graphics: Nvidia 7800 / ATI X1800 or better (Shader Model 3.0, 512 MB Video Memory)
- DirectX®: 9.0c
- Sound: DirectX 9.0c Compatible Sound Card
- Controller Support: Xbox 360 Controller
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
This is a game about voyeuristic ultraviolence, hypnotic ugliness, mindless and nauseating murder. This is raw, unfiltered, real. The display of violence in Kane & Lynch 2 is so gratuitous it almost resembles a parody. It’s the worst of the worst, like a dead body on the road, you cannot not look at it. The art direction here is probably one of my favorites in gaming. Everything is shown through the lens of a handheld camera, snuff film–esque, early-2010s YouTube digital grime, like the entire game is some footage found in a trash bin and then uploaded to LiveLeak or something. It’s unapologetically ugly. Grainy filters with shaky handheld framing, and yet there’s a strange beauty in that ugliness. It has style. Games with this kind of bold creative direction are almost nonexistent nowadays, at least in the mainstream industry, and that’s a shame. Even the trailer and all the promotional material are noteworthy. It’s actually unbelievable how much style they have. Please watch the trailer and teasers, they’re probably some of the coolest and boldest promotional materials ever made for a game, especially for a 2010s third-person shooter. The game’s aesthetic actually reminds me a lot of the Dogme95 film movement. That same obsession with rawness, handheld cameras, no polish, everything shaky and imperfect. Kane & Lynch 2 doesn’t look like a normal video game at all, it feels more like some underground Dogme95 film shot in the back alleys of Shanghai. The digital grime, the clipped audio, the way the camera never sits still, it all feels dirty and real. And that’s the point. The game doesn’t want to make violence look cool or cinematic, it wants it to feel exhausting, ugly, and joyless. Just like Dogme95 tried to strip movies of all the artificial beauty in cinema, Kane & Lynch 2 strips games of polish and style until what’s left is something raw and uncomfortable. All you do in this game is murder people, get shot, get tortured, murder some more people, and then it ends. There is no overarching, mind-bending plot, it’s just violence. Even the characters seem to notice this as well. Halfway through the game they can’t even take it anymore, shouting “when is this going to end?!?!” while shooting through endless corridors with endless people to shoot. Everything goes to ♥♥♥♥. Everyone dies. You just kill and kill and kill and then it’s over. The game ends. You don’t get to know what happens to the characters. You don’t get to see the consequences of your actions. It doesn’t matter. This is an early-2010s third-person cover shooter, you don’t care. You can’t even process that you just killed half the population of Shanghai. Violence in media is just so much fun, right? You’re sent back to the main menu of the game. Everything is “well.” You’re listening to the radio while a soft Chinese pop song plays, looking through the window of your apartment as a neon sign lights your room. The tonal whiplash is evident, intentional. Look, I enjoy violent games, movies, whatever, there’s fun to be had in them. I’m not saying it’s always morally wrong, I like it too. But it makes me think about why violence is so common in the media we consume. Why is it everywhere? This game forces you to notice that. It’s not entertaining in the usual sense, but it makes you confront what you’re actually doing while playing. The sound design deserves special mention. Most of the game is drenched in heavy, industrial ambient tracks, metallic, oppressive, almost suffocating in their weight. It feels less like a soundtrack and more like the sound of the world itself grinding against your mind. Then comes the explicit contrast, the Chinese pop songs on the radio, cheerful and cozy, as if beamed in from another reality. That tonal dissonance is intentional. It’s mocking, disarming, and deeply unsettling. The violence you just endured is suddenly framed by something warm and human, and the clash only makes the experience more disturbing. Honestly, it’s one of my favorite soundtracks in gaming. The gun sound design is also very interesting. Every shot feels violently loud, distorted, and overwhelming, as if the digital camera capturing the footage can’t even handle it. Bullets don’t just sound like gunfire, they crackle and burst through the audio, clipping and breaking the mix. It’s messy. The voice acting is also worth mentioning, it’s fantastic. The performances feel raw and unpolished, like real people caught in the middle of chaos rather than actors reading lines. Lynch’s frantic outbursts and Kane’s beaten-down exhaustion add so much weight to the experience. I kind of feel some empathy for Lynch especially, he’s such a different kind of protagonist, a broken man who’s barely holding it together. Not really an easily marketable personality. Kane & Lynch 2 almost feels like an anti-game. It’s not polished or designed to be widely appealing. It’s unapologetically focused on atmosphere, style, and artistic expression. In many ways, it’s kind of punk. This game reminds me a lot of Hotline Miami and its infamous question, “Do you like hurting other people?” While Hotline Miami wraps its violence in neon, electronic music and hypnotic speed, Kane & Lynch 2 strips it bare, grainy digital noise, shaky cam, and the suffocating filth of Shanghai back-alleys. Both games refuse to let you consume violence as simple entertainment. One overwhelms you with excess until it feels surreal, the other forces you into ugliness so raw it becomes unbearable. They’re mirror images of the same critique. Games that confront the player with their own appetite for violence. Hotline Miami makes you complicit by seducing you with its rhythm, then asks why you enjoyed it. Kane & Lynch 2 does the opposite, it makes every kill feel nauseating and joyless, like trudging through rot, and then asks why you kept going anyway. Kane & Lynch 2 was released in a time when ultraviolent games were not only the norm, but expected. It’s practically a parody of itself, mind-numbing violence, real, raw violence. It’s a sharp critique of its era while also being a product of it. This game is genius. I don’t care what anyone has to say about it. The gameplay might be rough, the story might be messy at times, but I don’t care. I love this game. I even have it on disc, Xbox 360. It’s one of my favorite games ever made, ♥♥♥♥ it. Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days is a godawful ugly game. It’s filthy. It’s genius. It is art.
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this game means something its a shame square enix forgot about this series because its really great the whole game is seen as a snuff film and I think it's the best critique of the cover shooter era of 360 and ps3 era games too postmodern for some people but i fw the vision
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Best game ever made. There are no issues or bugs, only intentional features. Perfection. Buy it NOW
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those who pitched it to Square Enix had ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ big balls. insane vision, always one step from a heart attack, so much tension, and I wish it was longer. IO Interactive was almost shut down because of it. real piece of art. a monument to artistic courage. never forget.
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Shanghai, the product of empires and treaties, now a fully integrated city of Mainland China. It is a lovely place, bootleg game consoles, fake jewelry and outdated phones greet you from every shelf in saran wrap. The shoddiest apartments have the most beautiful ambient lighting from the adjacent neon lighting and every table has a used ashtray, some left over take out in a carton and a few empty bottles of Tsingtao. The only people who speak English are characters straight out of Guy Ritchie's SNATCH and they all dress like British sex tourists. The cops are corrupt, in the pocket of a bent government official known ominiously as Shangsi, ("Big Boss") and he also has a sizable force of paramilitary counter-terror units and the military on his side. Of course, he also has deep connections to go with his deep pockets, into the far from shallow, ever widening black abyss that is the Shanghai underground and its wretched killers, traffickers and murderous gangsters like Hsing. Oh! And to make matters worse, Kane and Lynch just killed his daughter. This is another one of those games that, in the public conscious, is often thought of as being terrible and surprisingly, it has even divided some fans of the old game. It just so happens that I love this game and have many core memories with it with friends and family, specifically my cousins. It is remarkably similar to Max Payne 3, as it is a subversive, anti-hero game and many would be surprised to know that Kane and Lynch 2 came out first. Max Payne 3 was praised for its shooting mechanics and style, whereas Dog Days was crucified for it. Kane and Lynch 2 was the first game I ever played that had visible alteration of fabric meshes and textures on the character's clothes, to simulate realistic movement, as well as dynamic body damage and permanent corpses and blood decals, all things that once again, Max Payne 3 is adored for. But I have to admit, as someone who also loved Max Payne 3, Kane and Lynch 2 simply does not have the gameplay to compare, but it commits far more further to the concept and presentation gimmick at great sacrifice (or simple inability to achieve) of other aspects. Not only that, but unlike the first game, Dog Days is far less derivative of its inspirations as and has a truly unique, unsettling and utterly fantastic little story that is blessed in its simplicity but ability to keep momentum despite all of its grotesque ugliness. Honestly, these same visual effects were strongly present in Battlefield 3 and to great effect. Dark shadows, lightbars to simulate compressed videos, specs and stains on the camera-lens filters and compressed, crunchy sound. I totally understand why people get nauseated from the shakycam. Thankfully, the cheekily named steady-cam option removes the vomit inducing, albeit immersive hand held presentation of the in game camera. It still works insanely effective in the cutscenes. Kane and Lynch 2 feels like a true third person game, as we witness events from a fourth wall breaking, unseen and unquestioned perspective of some camcorder recording of the events at play. I can see why this game truly failed financially and critically, it is, at its core, about two overweight, retirement-aged psychopaths with varying degrees of competency who are not nearly as redeemable or cool as Max Payne. But I think for a select few type of gamers, this is exactly the game we always wanted. A truly grounded game with only occasional breaks in realism for the sake of entertainment (one of these incidents being a helicopter section that is very similar to a few in the COD series, but primarily, feels like a bit of an homage to the first Matrix movie but also a near verbatim treading of a scene from Spec Ops the Line, another miraculous work of art restrained by merely competent third person shooter mechanics). But Dog Days is something else, it is one of the most remarkable recreations of a country I've ever seen in a game by people who do not natively inhibit it. The poverty stricken parts of Shanghai, to its industrially robust heart and eventually, luxury skyscrapers, is captured so realistically that the environments itself are a true testament to the art of immersive video games. Few games can ever convince you so full-heartedly of you being in this setting alongside the characters as well as Dog Days does. And all the sins of these sort of portrayals are surprisingly overcome by pure competence in how they were constructed. Every level and every bit of in-game cover feels real. None of these environments feel like they wouldn't exist in reality before us. This sometimes is a detriment to the gameplay, but the architecture of the game itself makes for a deep, immersive flow. Even the absolutely shoddy and inaccurate shooting mechanics (still wildly better than the first game's) elongates gunfights into a sparing realism and gravity. Sure, the LiveLeak Chinese-factory-explosion aesthetic is certainly used to hide the fact this game does not look as good as you may think without these filters and effects, but the game's commitment to this look makes it almost ageless to me. There is still some jank to the animations and especially the lipsyncing, but small details like Kane and Lynch physically pulling the triggers and occasionally flincing with their weapons or the the archaic way the simulate micro-manuever warfare in strictly real urban environments is to be applauded. Kane had the highlight last game, but Lynch is arguably the most realistically written, mentally ill, socially and occupationally impaired nutcase in interactive media. Gone are the first game's somewhat cartoony hallucinations and instead, Lynch's episodes are more true to actual bipolar type 2 than anything, mixed with borderline personality issues, unspecified anxious distress and possibly PTSD. He flows realistically between forced and fake empathy, to bouts of intense apathy, to manic rage and later in the game, mid-fire fight, you can audibly hear Lynch swing through several conjunctions of conflicting emotional states. In an instant, he could be grossly co-dependent on Kane's help or the emotional reassurance of his girlfriend's wellbeing, only to be spontaneously cursing and sociopathically taunting dead cops over how capable and deadly he truly is. I am still so surprised to see what this primarily Northern European team could do with just some help from Edios' Shanghai department. Even some of the in-game pop songs, which I swear were simply sampled and licensed from actual music from China, were actually commissioned for the game specifically. Thus, its on-point and genuine sound is entirely intentional and engineered. Honestly, the artistic integrity of this game's ugly vision of Shanghai is impressive. The game is just as insanely critical of the "le white man in le foreign country" genre as it is of the Chinese government, its autocratic and criminal elements that border on modern oligarchy, the implied corruption of all of its sectors and sections, all while being able to make a bunch of anglo-expats the occasional antagonist that show the heinous inhumanity that man shows to man is not exclusive to any race or national origin. In this setting, much like real life, there are few if any good guys, but plenty of bad guys and guys even worse than them. And it says all of this through the player's ability to simply digest and experience the game through the apathetic and unapologetic, bitter perspectives of the protagonists, never having to preach any of its criticisms nor explain its thesis. One of my all time favourite games and I will never pretend this was not peak. It simply is underappreciated and overhated, I hope some of its DNA finds its way to the hands of an ambitious developer once again some day.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days is currently priced at 9.99€ on Steam.
Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days is currently not on sale. You can purchase it for 9.99€ on Steam.
Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days received 5,816 positive votes out of a total of 8,877 achieving a rating of 6.45.
😐
Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days was developed by IO Interactive and published by Square Enix.
Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days is playable and fully supported on Windows.
Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days is not playable on MacOS.
Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days is not playable on Linux.
Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days offers both single-player and multi-player modes.
Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days includes Co-op mode where you can team up with friends.
There are 3 DLCs available for Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days. Explore additional content available for Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days on Steam.
Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days does not support mods via Steam Workshop.
Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days does not support Steam Remote Play.
Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days is enabled for Steam Family Sharing. This means you can share the game with authorized users from your Steam Library, allowing them to play it on their own accounts. For more details on how the feature works, you can read the original Steam Family Sharing announcement or visit the Steam Family Sharing user guide and FAQ page.
You can find solutions or submit a support ticket by visiting the Steam Support page for Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days.
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Last Updates| Steam data | 19 April 2026 03:08 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 22 April 2026 20:34 |
| Steam price | 29 April 2026 20:46 |
| Steam reviews | 29 April 2026 01:56 |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days
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- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days compatibility
Game modes
Multiplayer
Features
Online players
12
Developer
IO Interactive
Publisher
Square Enix
Release
17 Aug 2010
Platforms
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