Broken cover mechanics, a lack of online co-op, and a minor PR fiasco marred IO Interactive’s first Kane & Lynch title back in 2007, but that hasn’t slowed the brand down one bit. There’s a Wildstorm comic adaptation, a movie in the works, and now Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days is here to justify the tie-ins with a much-ballyhooed aesthetic that looks like the Bourne franchise, as shot with a cell-phone camera. The detritus-strewn corridors of Shanghai are the setting for a deal gone sour that quickly sees the gun-toting titular odd couple kicking down doors and delivering streams of invective at Chinese mobsters, crooked police forces, and former comrades-in-arms. In Dog Days, players control Lynch instead of Kane, but the pill-popping psychopath’s hallucinatory tendencies have been curbed this go-round—as have many of the previous installment’s features, like light squad and inventory management, or the occasional split-up. Instead, Days practically runs on rails, and at times takes on the rhythms of an old-school duck-and-cover coin-op like Time Crisis. This wouldn’t be a problem if the much-maligned mechanics had been given the same overhaul as the game’s aggressively punchy visuals, but the destructible cover is uncooperative, and bullets have too easy a time finding Lynch even before enemies get wise and start engaging in flanking maneuvers.