We don’t have a water cooler at Gameplanet and until now that hasn’t been a problem. Whether “Dan from Editorial” and “Simon from Management” are finally going to “hook up at this weekend’s team-building retreat” is a question that, frankly, we have little interest in exploring.
That all changed this week with the arrival of a courier envelope concealing preview code for Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days. Since it turned up, there has been an overwhelming sense of bewilderment and dejection that we have no time-honoured place to congregate and gossip. Instead, we’re forced to speculate on the scene at videogame site Giant Bomb from the comfort of our sofa, parked in front of a plasma TV. It’s unnatural.
The original Kane & Lynch was an unremarkable game, chiefly remembered now for the scandal that followed Jeff Gerstmann’s review of the title on GameSpot. At that time publisher Eidos had made a significant advertising investment on GameSpot to promote Kane & Lynch. Gerstmann, then the site’s editorial director, scored the game 6/10 in his review, writing, “When you consider the nearly ridiculous number of extremely high-quality shooters available recently, there's not much room for something like Kane & Lynch.”