Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days on PlayStation 3 Demo Impressions.

Kane & Lynch is a franchise that will long be marred by the controversy that took place outside of the product.

The original game was a bit of a mess, with poor shooting mechanics taking centre stage in an interesting, but under-developed piece of fiction. Despite that, you'd be forgiven for thinking a sequel wasn't necessary — but developers IO Interactive have other ideas about their gritty duo, and at least with Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days they're doing something interesting.

With a pile of cover-based third-person shooters already on the shelves, the last thing the world needs is another one. Both the PlayStation 3 and XBOX 360 have exclusive, genre-leading third-person shooters with the Uncharted and Gears Of War franchises — so the multiplatform Kane & Lynch 2 needs a hook.

And with respect to IO Interactive, they've found that emphatically. The game's visual style is breath-taking in action. Opting for a dirty, "home-video" look, Kane & Lynch 2 is artifacted to pieces — with glitches, colour bleeding and buffering making up a huge portion of the game's visual style. While the afore-mentioned big exclusive franchises go out of their way to out-pretty each other — Kane & Lynch 2 takes a different direction. It makes everything look rubbish. But it does it in an extremely pretty way. There were moments checking out Kane & Lynch 2 that we felt like we were watching a low-res YouTube video. They've nailed the effect perfectly — it just remains to be seen how it will hold over the course of an eight-hour campaign.

Gameplay-wise, this is a third-person shooter. The game's playable in online co-op so you'll always have a buddy at your side, but the mechanics are largely familiar. You'll run through narrow corridor environments, taking cover and picking off cops. The shooting feels tight, but it doesn't yet feel weighty. Cops fall to the ground in a jarring, janky manner, and that takes away from the satisfaction of picking them off. It remains to be seen as to whether IO have the time to solve this problem before the game's launch next month.

While the single-player appears to be standard-fare with some neat visual tricks, it's the multiplayer that actually has us most excited. The mode we played, Fragile Alliance, has you playing as a series of robbers out on the thieve. Playing in co-op, we were tasked with picking off a CPU gang who'd just hoisted a bank. Upon taking the men down, and stealing their money, we had to work together to reach a get-away car. While you'll need to co-operate to escape the cops, there's always the possibility that one of your "allies" could betray you, lessening the need to share the cash. Thus, you'll need to keep your wits about you and trust no-one. Brilliantly, if you do happen to die, you'll respawn as a cop, meaning you'll be able to seek out the person who betrayed you, or simply work to hold off the robbers.

It remains to be seen how fun it'll be after a few attempts, but we certainly enjoyed our time with the mode (though the time constraints were a little too sharp).

Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days is a bit of a mixed bag. It's combining the unique with the familiar, but our attention's certainly been piqued by what we've played. Naughty Dog probably have nothing to worry about from a campaign perspective, but if the mulitplayer works out, we could imagine it sapping a good few hours from our life.