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It’s a shame K&L 2 quickly feel into obscurity because even though as a game it’s only ever about shooting people in the face, it does try to do it differently – at least aesthetically. The gameplay itself is a hyper-violent, ugly roller-coaster through the worst streets of Shanghai. It’s quick and brutal, start to finish is barely five hours and much like with Call of Duty games, the intensity of the gameplay is such that you tire of it before the end.
The game follows two main characters throughout the game, at its core it’s about two rotten Americans getting mixed up with equally rotten Chinese and British gangs. There’s hardly a ‘just cause’ in the game, at one point a main character says something to the effect of, ‘Fuck, we have to get out of here!’ Which then dictates the progression for the rest of the game. What follows is a series of very pretty corridors leading the protagonists eventually to their goal of escaping the city. The games ending is beautifully abrupt, leaving Kane and Lynch at the height of their frantic fight for survival.
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I’m not going to critique the moment to moment gunplay, this is just about audio, at every step of the way the audio is consistently interesting and quite unlike any other game I’ve played. I don’t think I’ve played a game before where the music and sound merge together so seamlessly to create such a strong sense of environment. There are multiple layers of sound and music, carefully placed within and on top of the world which pull the player from the reality a moment to the surreality of Lynchs’ dark and fragile mind.
I believe this is one of the first IO games to not use Jesper Kyd as composer, instead they got in German vocalist / ambient music specialist Mona Mur. The soundtrack is a weird blend of effected diegetic pop music blasting out of shop radios, TV sets and hi-fi’s sitting atop an ambient soundscape which mixes in elements of generic city murmer, twisted birdcalls, alarms and other ‘found sound’ elements. In places it boarders on musique concrète.
Below is a short video I made, an excerpt from the first moments of the game, pay attention to the music and ambience - listen to how they blend into each other to form this dreamy state of hyper-reality. I think it’s very much a case of the real world as interpreted by Lynch.
Pay attention to the music at the end, is completely diegetic but mirrors the emotion of the scene perfectly. The crunchy effect they put on that music further emphasises the reality of it when in fact it’s a highly unrealistic effect. In an interview Mona Mur said how she was told that, “The gamer should receive the whole thing as a ‘game without music’ but with a very strong sense of environment.” She then goes on to cite Eraserhead and Blade Runner as major influences – I can see this, the musicality of the environmental sounds in both of those films is heavy.
Something else you may have noticed in that video is the VO, it’s recorded meticulously dirty. The whole game has this aesthetic of being a poorly compressed YouTube video. There’s visual artifacting, overly saturated colours and an uncontrollable auto adjustment of brightness and contrast. It’s a striking look and it’s an aesthetic philosophy that extends to the sound design too. All of the dialogue is loud and when characters shout it distorts and cracks, as if the cameras microphone can’t handle shouting on top of the other madness feeding into it, I love it – it really adds weight to the voice work and it makes sense in context of the overal style of the game.
This translates also to other loud noises such as explosions and large collisions, there is one area of the sound design I’m not too hot on however and that’s the guns. I don’t really know what to make of them but they sound weaker than they ‘should’. It’s a stylistic choice by the designers for sure, but in a game like this and in keeping with the rest of the audio of the game I would have expected some seriously loud gunfire, Michael Mann style gunfire with massive reverb tails echoing off the dense urban walls of Shanghais streets. Also note a complete lack of foley, I found this to be quite awkward too, it made my character feel quite light as I had no feedback to the weight and momentum of my characters movements.
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There’s some other glitches in the games audio too which I can’t work out if are intentional or not. Back to the video I made, in the beginning as Lynch kicks down the door, listen to how on impact they add a huge distant reverb to the door sound and then instantly kill it as soon as Lynch walks into the room. It sounds odd – if they were going for a dramatic contrast between outside and in I don’t think they went for it enough. To me that particular quirk sounds like the game not blending well between two different reverb zones.
Quirks aside this is a bold game from an audio perspective. It actively goes against convention when it comes to sound design, it takes a brave team to do things dirty in a skill that often so heavily relies on precision and cleanliness. The two highlights for me in K&L 2 are the soundscapes and the voice recording, they’re both executed with skill and confidence and really set a unique tone for the game. In a wonderful way it’s ugly, it’s an ugly game with ugly audio and it’s great because of it.