(Note: Edited from my Amazon.com review of this game from 2011) First things first. When people fantasize about a game that plays the way the movie "Heat" looks, I'm sure there's only one thing that comes to mind: epic street-level shootouts involving scads of ammo, automatic weapons, cops, shattering glass, screaming pedestrians and duffel bags slung over the shoulder. I'm pretty confident no one wants to play a "Heat" game that revolves around your ruined relationship with your wife and stepdaughter, or meetings in diners with arch-rivals. If we can agree on that, then I'm here to tell you that, prior to Payday and its sequels, Kane & Lynch 2 was as close as consoles got to a Heat-esque experience. The entire single player story was one brutally violent street-level shootout after another, while the multiplayer modes masterfully evoked the tense feeling of being in a gang of like-minded criminals who will do anything to go home with a bigger cut - including killing their teammates in cold blood. Kane & Lynch 2 also inhabited its own game space with the kind of confidence few games can manage. That is to say, everything is of a piece and seems the result of a singularity of vision so rare in these times when games seem content to come to you, when it should be the other way around. So few games challenge players to really accept things on the game's level - also see Dead Rising and the initial games that would eventually birth the Soulsborne genre. Because of this, many people have criticized elements of the game as flaws that are actually deliberate design decisions - including the woefully inaccurate weapons you start the game with, the briefness of the story mode, and the nausea-inducing camera. That's not to say the game isn't without its flaws. It's loaded with them. But if you can get past them, you'll enjoy it for what it is, not what you want it to be.