IO: K&L2 is a "love or hate" game
Not bothered some didn't get it.
You "either love or hate" Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, creator IO Interactive has admitted.
The sweary shooter divided critics upon its August launch. Eurogamer gave it 4/10 and it's currently sitting on a 63 out of 100 Metacritic review score average.
"I can't talk too much about the commercial reception to the game at this stage but I was interested in how it was received by the critics and journalists," general manager Niels Jørgensen told gamesindustry.biz in a new interview.
"I think it's a game that you either love or hate. It's interesting that we have scores ranging from 1/10 to 9/10, so we have critics that really loved it and those that didn't really get it."
You'd think low review scores would have depressed IO – but Jørgensen wasn't bovvered.
"Actually, I think that's fine," he said. "I actually like the approach that you take some chances to reach out to an audience. People have different tastes in all kinds of media and we see that with music, films, books and also with videogames.
"It's about choosing an approach to give people entertainment and variety and I think we've been able to produce something that's a bit different, if not to everyone's taste."
He added: "It's difficult to get everything that you need to know from a review or article as it's difficult for words to convey how you might experience a game and so I think people should try it for themselves and decide based on their own tastes.
"Marketing is very important. The reviews are important for some people but others will just browse through the games available in a store or online and pick up whatever they think is exciting. If you look at some of the charts you'll find plenty of games in there that don't score so well on Metacritic so arguably that's a mixed thing.
"Obviously you try to incentivise consumers to buy your product and advertising can help with that, especially when a purchase can be very much an impulse thing. Reviews and advertising can often reach very different people."
Despite mixed reviews, Kane & Lynch 2 did the business for publisher Square Enix. It went straight in at number one in the all-formats UK chart.