Kane & Lynch 2, IO Interactive’s latest exploration of the murky side of the human condition, is a genuinely exciting game. This fact, of course, in and of itself, isn’t one that is unique to just this title: there are plenty of games on the horizon that we’re very much looking forward to. However, our excitement regarding Kane & Lynch 2 stems not just from the usual avenues of gameplay or other, superficially mechanical features. It, in fact, comes from aesthetic design that challenges perceived notions, attempting to buck the notion that ‘beautiful’ graphics and aesthetic perfection are one and the same.

The game is deliberately, staunchly different, and one that we’d love to see more of, because it’s exciting to see a mainstream, big budget title play with conventions in a medium that is in danger of tipping itself into the uncanny valley, and remind game creators that the human mind creates an affinity based on suggestion, not just straight-up fidelity, and that the darkest of thoughts and feelings is always the one that grows like a parasite in the mind of players who can’t quite see the whole picture.

IO is shooting for an aesthetic that recalls the gut-reaction footage shot in the heat of the moment that adorns YouTube or its many imitators. That the game is meant to look like it was shot by someone wielding a Handycam rather than a Steadicam isn’t the point. Kane and Lynch 2 is not so trite as to be just do lazy faux-vérité, to just throw a grain filter over the top and call it a day. The aesthetics don’t just complement the mechanics; they inform the entire experience.

Headshots are pixellated, as are scenes of nudity, lending the whole experience a dirty, almost self-loathing sense of disdain for your actions: the headshot, so often the celebrated coup de grace of all shooting games, here is reduced to a dirty secret, one in which the inherently traumatic nature is given weight and credence by virtue of it being hidden from even its perpetrator.

Light sources bleed breathtakingly, stretching and warping and are dramatically thrown, not merely cast, by everything from streetlights to gaudy, trashy, knock-off neon that adorns the multitude of Shanghai’s tourist traps. The lighting is just one part of the whole: against a low-resolution filter, as the camera swings manically in a manner akin to the heart-thumping footage captured by camera crews in shows like Cops, Kane & Lynch’s look is executed with so much bravado, a true commitment to an ideal, that it makes Shanghai look almost spookily realistic and admirably alive. By smashing deliberately rough-hewn graphics into the mix, IO has made the player’s mind fill in the gaps, peering through the distortion to find a clear picture that will never come but, ironically and brilliantly, creating an uncompromising vision in the player’s mind of a day in the life of two of the most despicable characters in videogames.

Still, as important as the look of the title is, the basics have to be done right, and it looks at this stage as if IO has a solid, if not spectacular, grasp on proceedings. The farcical, woolly shooting of the original is long gone, and, as our two reprobates lurch from one abhorrent situation to another, conducting business with a hollow-point handshake as Shanghai closes around them, the tight and responsive shooting set against a backdrop of tight and claustrophobic shootouts augments the sheer ghastly truth of our character’s horribly self-serving plights.

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