Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days

Any gang members killed along the way respawn as cops, and you can also turn traitor on your criminal cohorts, gunning them down and taking their cash, at the risk of turning everyone else against you. If you wound someone by accident, you get a yellow card, giving the injured party the right to execute or forgive you. Reach the van first and you can also opt to split your personal haul with the getaway driver, leaving the others stranded, rather than sharing it equally between everyone. Solo players get to enjoy this scenario as well in the offline Arcade Mode.

Undercover Cop is much the same, except one member of the team is randomly selected to be an infiltrator. It's up to them to sabotage the heist and kill the other players without everyone turning on them. It's another clever wrinkle, but one that lives or dies by the effectiveness of the players. It's very easy for the game to devolve into mayhem, which might be a realistic depiction of honour among thieves, but isn't the most consistently entertaining way to spend your time. Cops and Robbers, meanwhile, follows the same heist template but offers a more recognisable team-based framework with AI removed from the equation, pitting human thieves against human cops.

All the modes are certainly preferable to yet another half-baked deathmatch variant, but the construction of the thing still holds it back from greatness.

There's no real motivation to turn traitor, for example, since the cash you swipe is only good for buying new weapons between rounds. Nothing is carried over from one game to the next, and since the default weapons work just fine and you can walk away with at least a million dollars by playing fair, the whole mechanism goes limp. Betraying the squad means a lot of risk for no lasting reward so, unless you're an unrepentant griefer, why would you bother?

Also holding things back are the incredibly strict time limits - five minutes is the longest available - which leave little room for any serious strategic play beyond "I'm going this way, you go that way". It also means that the game becomes pretty much impossible with low numbers. With its woolly targeting, the odds of one or two survivors battling through a gauntlet of whack-a-mole cops in the time it takes to boil an egg are minimal, so expect to see lots of dropouts when things go pear-shaped. Adding insult to injury, you earn absolutely no XP for a failed mission, regardless of how many lawmen you killed or dollars you snatched before death.

And, finally, the maps are scripted to a fault. The same cops spawn in the same places, running in the same direction, every single time. It's easy to imagine that players who put in the hours will be able to breeze through them blindfolded within a few weeks.

All the ideas behind the multiplayer remain sound, and are certainly good for a few rounds, but the co-op heist concept simply needs more variation, more room to improvise, to keep you coming back. It could have been a giddy Tarantino-esque spin on Left 4 Dead's beautifully pitched panic, but instead it's a curious distraction that runs out of steam far too quickly.

The kindest thing you can say about Dog Days is that it exists. It's a shooter, and there's a lot of shooting. In that respect it meets the genre basics, without ever being successful in any single area. The single-player mode is short and hollow, its wanton excess weighed down by twitchy targeting and distracting video effects. The multiplayer is fun, and improved from the previous game, but still fails to offer any compelling reason to commit for the long term.

Taken as a whole, Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days will probably amuse unfussy fans of nihilistic violence for a few evenings. But in a genre stuffed with far more interesting efforts, that still leaves it woefully below average.