Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days

Those are the details, perhaps, but the real impact is saved for the game itself. Dropped in around the fourth-chapter mark, the developer runs me through a shootout sequence in a dingy restaurant. It's a standard cover-based set-up, but the effect is genuinely electrifying: the camera wobbles and bobs, the screen fragments into digital noise when things get too violent, and everything is sketched in the washed-out light and smeary colours of a handycam.

Underneath this brilliantly squalid coating, you might be able to spot a few actual gameplay elements - weapons seem jarring and weighty, and cover splinters very pleasantly under enemy fire - but Kane & Lynch 2 is primarily packing a visual punch at this point.

And aural, actually. The sound is perhaps the most effective aspect of the whole design approach. Gone is canned action-movie music and carefully-balanced audio tracks. Instead the whole thing has been just as carefully unbalanced: voices echo and distort, rooms do wonderfully horrible things to the acoustics of gunfire, and there are daringly long moments of silence, broken only by heavy breathing and hollow footfalls.

With the restaurant in tatters, outside on the streets things are even better. IO is capturing Shanghai in the seedy urban details rather than the towering temples, and there's a real sense of authenticity to be found, whether it's the old guy wearily lowering the shutter on his knock-off DVD concession, the once-cheery trees dying within a toxic fug of car fumes, or the garish music dribbling from at least three different transistor radios. Sirens sound in the distance, and the video-camera visuals perfectly capture the slight bleed of passing tail-lights and the way cheap lenses turn neon overheads turn into an angry sodium-orange blur.

Guns and cover aside, it's hard to tell too much else about the game underneath the stylings in what been shown so far. From five minutes of a developer demo, it looks like a corridor shooter with a nice mix of wider arenas and set-pieces (the presentation ends with a ragged-breathed pursuit through an almost entirely dark stretch of wasteland as an unseen chopper nosily moves in for the kill).

The brashness of the delivery may actually work against the game in some cases, however - inane co-op moments such as Kane helping Lynch over a wall stick out even more when handled in natty jump cuts, and IO can't be happy with the imposition of the current on-screen button prompts, which wouldn't rate a second glance in less stylish games. Even if it's early days and all this stuff is placeholder, it's difficult to see what the team's going to be able to do about that.

And, ultimately, five minutes of game doesn't reveal whether the developer's commitment to capturing reality goes deeper than visual gloss - or even if that would be a good or workable idea in the first place. The important thing, however, is that Kane & Lynch 2 actually makes you sit up and pay attention. It looks a million times more vivid than what's come before, and a million times more enticing because of it. Real? Who knows. Distinct? Definitely. And in these dog days, that's no small feat in itself.