All the result of Lynch and Kane's incompetence, more pathetic than sympathetic. After spending the first half of the game in a panicked flail to keep these three sides from finding out what the others know, the game devolves into a shambolic run from everyone they once considered allies. A few minutes after their reunion, Lynch will have inadvertently killed the daughter of the most powerful gangster in Shanghai, putting the two at odds with the British mobster they're supposed to be helping, the Shanghai underground, and the cops on the mob payroll. Kane, the concrete-brained fallguy from the original, comes to town to help Lynch with another heist hoping to win back his daughter's love with the payout. Players control Lynch, the bald and beer-bellied psychopath who, in all likelihood, killed his wife and is now tucked away in a cramped Shanghai neighborhood trying to settle down with a new girlfriend.
The first game was a traditional noir-a seemingly decent man hoping to absolve some family guilt with a stupidly miscalculated scheme. "But they're trying to do something good." It's that schism between intention and action that captures the power of Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, a gorging on thrill violence that is darker and sharper than the original. "These guys are-let's face it, they're idiots," Karsten Lund, Creative Director at IO Interactive told me over lunch in the company cantina.
Yet, it's hard to find a more literal example of antihero-someone either fighting against true heroes or subverting the very idea of the hero fantasy-than Kane & Lynch. You'll have seen this description applied to Han Solo, Henry IV, Holden Caulfield and Niko Bellic. The idea of the antihero is a portentous label that can be made to accommodate so many different kinds of characters it's become a near meaningless contradiction.