Today I shall do a review of a Playstation 3 title called Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days – I bought this for a very cheap price of £9 at Game and this was the Limited Edition title which includes extra on-line maps and items. By Sheer chance I saw the PC version also on sale for £5 but I left this as I really only need it on one format. It is billed as a Shooter but it steers away from the normal FPS type games in that going in all guns blazing will not get you very far. I would like to describe this as a “Hide and shoot” type game as you fight from cover to cover to complete each part of the game.

Plot

The game begins with the originals criminal anti-hero, Kane, arriving in Shanghai to do one last job with his psychotic ex-colleague, Lynch. Both men are deeply dislikeable in their own way, but each has some shred of humanity to keep your interest. Strangely, the game makes the curious choice of having you play as the crazy Lynch instead of the more sympathetic Kane, though our protagonist has calmed down considerably for the sequel). The tale that follows isn’t a whole lot more than an excuse for a long series of shoot-outs, but it’s a reasonably well-written excuse with a couple of genuinely shocking moments.

Game-play

At no pont in the game did I feel i was really part of a story, it consisted of getting to an area and then shooting out various gangs be in the police or the other gangsters. I tried standing up and running forward but soon got gunned down. To aim you have to press the left shoulder button and the right shoulder button shoots. Due to the fact you are using a Game controller, this is not as fast and accurate as say using a Keyboard and mouse.

Multi-player

I tired this for a while and my apparent lack of controlling a FPS using the PS3 game-pad become apparent very fast indeed and I never last very long at all. Maybe if I played long enough, it would become easier but for now, I have not loaded up the multi-player part very often.

Conclusion

If you are looking for the normal type of first person type shooter, then this game is not the one for you, at times you will get frustrated at the puzzles parts were shoot one bullet too many at the wrong time can lead to running out of rounds before the mission ends and thus failing. You are going to be looking for new weapons all the time as the number of rounds is not a lot but there is enough about if you look. Other times in the game you will not be 100% sure were to go and there is the option to pick up gas bottles, throw them and blow them up. My Suggestion is to try the demo if you can or buy it only if the game is very cheap (as I did).

I recall way playing the first Medal of Honor game on the pc way back in 2002 and the on-line experience back then was brilliant, even to the point of me creating a clan and joining a league. Recently they have remade the game across all platforms including PC and I even played the on-line beta via Steam to test it out. I was interested in the Single player version for now, so installed and played – here are my thoughts..

Gameplay

There was a lot of movie sequences at the start and I am not a great fan of watching some long sequence, shoot a few people and then back to watching some more of the plot unfold. The people seems to take a lot of shots before they died and I could even see most of the parts were the people ran from the same place every time (Scripted). This reminds me of one of the Call of Duty games were you can shoot the other truck as much as you want, unless you shoot the correct person at the correct time, nothing happens.

Bugs started to appear

I got to one part in the single player where I had to shoot snipers (after the hanger) and once I had cleared all of the people from the rooftops – nothing happened. One of the men kept shouting “grenade” which would have took some arm muscles on the bad guy part to throw it that far in the first place but there was no way to go forward. I ran out, restarted the mission and the same thing. I checked for an update, only a multi-player patch was out. I think they should test these games better, was it rushed out to beat Call of Duty: Black Ops? Probably.

Pariah

Pariah is a first-person shooter computer game developed by Digital Extremes, co-developers of the Unreal franchise. It was released on May 3, 2005 for Windows and Xbox. It uses a modified version of the Unreal engine and the Havok physics engine

About the Game

Due to it been released in 2005, most computers these days can run this game with ease, you can probably find the game very cheap indeed if still around for a very low cost. Running on the Unreal engine and adding in the Havok Engine which allows parts of the game to be destroyed (such as walls and such) – it is not a bad game.

Gameplay

Pariah features standard first-person shooter gameplay, largely influenced by the Unreal franchise, particularly Unreal 2 (whose game engine Pariah is based on). The single-player and multi-player game feature drivable vehicles that may be used in combat.

The game’s most remarkable feature is the use of collectible Weapon Energy Cores with which to upgrade the player’s weapons, giving them additional features and greater power. Each weapon in the game can be upgraded a total of 3 times.

Main Story

Jack Mason is a medic for the Alliance, tasked with transporting a cryogenically frozen woman named Karina from the maximum security prison “the Anvil” to Alliance headquarters. However, while flying over “the Zone”, Mason’s ship is shot down by a surface-to-air missile, crash-landing down to Earth. Karina escapes in the ensuing chaos, and Mason ends up accidentally becoming infected with the mysterious transgenic virus Karina is carrying. Scavengers soon arrive and attempt to capture Karina and kill Mason. The Scavengers succeed in killing Stubbs, the pilot of the ship, but Mason manages to outfight them. Mason is suspicious that the incident is more than a mere Scavenger attack, as it seems unusual for them to possess a surface-to-air missile.

Although Karina is highly distrustful of Mason, her former captor, the two of them team up to evade the Scavengers. In the process, Mason learns that Karina possesses bizarre powers granted to her by the virus; when experiencing strong emotions, she involuntarily produces an explosive effect that creates mass destruction around her, but leaves herself unharmed.

Mason and Karina eventually succeed in radioing the Alliance for help, only to learn that Colonel Stockton, the Warden of “the Anvil”, has ordered the Alliance to nuke the area and kill everything that moves, supposedly to contain the infection and prevent the spread of the virus. Karina is soon captured by Alliance Security, and Mason finds himself fighting against the very organization he works for.

Mason infiltrates “the Anvil” to retake Karina from Stockton, and finds that the Scavengers have also launched a massive assault against the Anvil for the same purpose.

It is eventually revealed that Colonel Stockton masterminded the attack on Mason’s transport, and that he has paid off the Scavengers to capture Karina for him. However, he double-crossed the Scavengers, captured Karina himself, and now refuses to pay them.

Stockton is obsessed with battling the Shroud, and wants to use the virus Karina carries as a weapon against them. It was necessary for Stockton to kidnap Karina, because his superiors in the Alliance disagreed with his research and wanted to cancel the program and take Karina away from him.