Kane & Lynch: Dead Men

IO Interactive and Eidos Inc. have provided a variety of extremely good titles for the gaming community. Kane & Lynch was hyped up to be an intense shooter game with a very good storyline and in a sense, it delivers on that promise. But I can’t help but feel slightly cheated by the lack of length to this title. I mean - it’s sensible to assume that a good shooter is going to take a bit of time to get through, but this game took me a whole like…5-6 hours…5-6 hours?! I mean, I know that it’s difficult to put in intense shooter action and not feel like its really dragging on, but there are times where I just have to wonder why it is we cannot seem to get a good 8 hours of gameplay out of these titles that are coming out these days.

Don’t get me wrong, Kane & Lynch gave me a sense of glee while I mindlessly shot authority figures in the face (yes, those anti video-game activists will probably have a field day if they get their hands on this title) but I couldn’t help but feel robbed of quite a bit of enjoyment when the game ended so soon. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the game contained several bugs and flaws that made me feel a bit…violated. Explanations are again broken down into their individual sections for your enjoyment.

Gameplay: (5/10)

You know, Kane & Lynch had one serious thing going for it - Third Person P.O.V. - I know some people don’t really appreciate the value of the Third Person View, but I feel it adds a certain tone to the game that really makes it stand out against other titles. What’s more, is that with a third person view, you can get a better idea of whats going on around you, which without that in this game, you would be in for a serious challenge at parts. That said, the controls handled alright, though Im not terribly appreciative of the fire button being placed on the R2 trigger while the R1 trigger was used for grenade tossing (habits from other shooters say R1 fire button is the way to go!) but I got over that quickly (mostly because the only time I tossed grenades was when I accidentally hit the R1 button trying to fire my gun…more on that to come).

One of perhaps the greatest downfalls in this game was the rather jittery AI. Your allies have a tendency (like in so many other shooters) to jump in front of you and let you unload into their backs, while your enemies have a tendency to run out in the open at a low crouch right as you decide to lay surpression fire on them at that exact spot: the consequence? Lots of bullet holes in the backs of your allies, lots of dead enemies. But this unfortunately means that the game is a little lacking in the challenge area at times, because well - your enemies are very smart and your allies aren’t much better. Consequently, I found myself at several points in the game simply telling my squad to stay put while I took on 12+ enemies with my pistol using a series of headshots and having almost no difficulty at all.

Further disappointment with your allies came in the fact that they would often find cover from only one set of enemies, while leaving themselves exposed on their flanks to other sets of enemies. While normally, I would assume this was just so they could take down the enemies that were not being covered against, this was not the case for my “gang”. More often than not, they would end up firing at the opponents that were ahead of them while getting brutally shot up from the opponents on their flanks - this initiated the “save me” situations where you are now timed to get to your friend before they bleed out, and unfortunately that means running into the line of fire on two sides yourself.

Fortunately, as the game is fair in AI Balance, this meant that your enemies often times had the exact same method of dealing with you and your gang. Because of this, you could set yourself in a particular position, send your allies around the sides to attack the enemies, let them get shot up, and attack from the flanks of your foes without opposition.

However, there were several instances in the game where I found myself suddenly challenged by an almost rediculously intelligent opposing force. It’s not that I went into a room and was now fighting elite soldiers, it was just that the game seemed to suddenly kick up a notch and the opposing force became incredibly accurate and long-lived. It would suddenly take twice as many rounds to kill the enemies and putting your head out for a moment meant that the entire enemy force was attacking you. Whats worse, is that this often became the situation of the game opposition seeming to “know” that if they killed you (rather than your four buddies who are kicking the crap out of them) they would “win” the game. So every single bullet seemed suddenly to be flying in your direction and it made for some very frustrating scene-repeats.

The command system that was built into the game was poorly designed as well, it seemed. You had three basic commands - Attack, move-to/defend, and return to me. The Return to me button was pressed almost every time you needed to move to another area because often your men would not follow you, the attack button was rarely used unless you wanted your men to specifically target someone that they werent targetting (rare, but on occasion, it was useful) and the defend command was useful just to get your men to stay back so you could handle a situation on your own. But generally, you really never find a reason to use the commands - your troops scatter to cover on their own and often when you tell them to defend an area, they will do nothing different then if you just tell them to fall in on you and help you out - so I saw almost no purpose in it besides getting your men to stay put.

Oh - and that reminds me.  Game Designers/Developers…I know there is a dread fascination with stealth sequences in otherwise intense action shooters, but don’t…just - don’t. It doesnt work to try and sneak up on a group of enemy soldiers and prevent them from popping a flare when you have only one route to them and one route away from them - yes, on occasion you can come up behind them, stab them in the back of the neck, and yes - the melee sequences with Kane were pretty cool…but I really didn’t feel like I was getting much out of the stealth scene in this game other than a tedious annoyance. Your main weapon remains unsilenced, your pistol gets a silencer, but I ended up trading out my main weapon for one of my buddies (A silenced sniper rifle) and trying to proceed with that. It didn’t work terribly well, but it got the job done in most the scenes.

Another thing about this game that was rather disappointing was the way in which guns and ammo worked. All weapons had a set limit to ammo and (apparently) a clip size. For the sake of the suspension of disbelief, I appreciated when I first stalled in a firefight to reload a clip, but unfortunately there was -no- direction given on how many rounds were in a clip, or how to reload one clip for another. No Graphic indicator, no flashing lights, no clicking noise as your gun neared empty…nothing - just suddenly you would stop firing, pop the clip, load a fresh one in, and resume firing. When you ran completely out of ammo, you had to choose between taking a small lot of ammo off one of your comrades, or switching out for a different gun. As for the games arsenal selection? Well, it was a bit dissatisfying as well. You had shotguns, automatics, and pistols. Pistols were all the same, shotguns were all the same (pump action) and automatics carried the crowd with minor differences (AK’s are more accurate than M16’s, SAW’s are heavily inaccurate, Submachine guns are highly accurate but low damaging…personally, I think I really preffered my pistol throughout the game), with RPG’s and Grenade launchers to top it all off (Only when you face vehicles of course).

And then there were the random bug/glitches. At times, the enemies would get stuck rapidly firing at absolutely nothing - they would get so stuck, in fact, that the game would not require them to change clips or reload in any fashion. So there would be a random soldier unloading round after round of their machine gun into…the wall…or something similar, until you shot them in the head and made them stop. Grenades were equally painful in the game. It seemed like the enemy only had them at one point in time - one grenade thrown by the enemies in the entire game was a little sad, but the accuracy at which it was thrown made me cringe and thank the designers for not increasing that rate at all. I, unfortunately, spent 8 grenades from about 10′ from my target trying to just get them through a particular window. And please, for future reference, add in a cook-off function for us gamers that would use it?  I know I could toss the grenade on the floor and then pick it up and throw it to cook it off, but I’d rather not risk losing it, cursing as I find it in my back pocket on the last second, and suffering the consequences.

Graphics: (8/10)

As you would expect from a next gen title like Kane & Lynch, the graphics were astounding. Each bullet carried a tracer, each hit left a blood splatter, and each blood splatter trickled down the wall a little behind my enemies heads. Explosions in the game were a bit lacking though, often times lacking the firey hollywood-esque action and containing more of the gray debris matter flying about, but they werent all that bad. Nothing much else to say on this, really. The lighting was good, the transition and glare effect was good, but water effects lacked any form of note. On the rare occasion you would enter a pool or stream in the game, you had no sign that you were in such other than that you assumed you were walking in water based on the reflection of the surface that your feet appeared to be a couple inches under…no wake, no foot-splash….nothing at all. Brings it down a notch that they didnt pay that much attention to detail here.

Audio: (7/10)

The audio in Kane & Lynch was pretty darn repetitious. Music was generally some low tone drama which I cant really recall making me excited or anticipatory at any points, while the sound effects were pretty much the same lines over and over, along with the shooting and the violence. Almost all of the explosions took off the same sound effect, be it your grenade going off, or a mortar going off, and so once again I found myself feeling…cheated, in this area.

Replay Value: (5/10)

Not much here, unfortunately. The only reason I would go back through the campaign of this game is for the co-op mode, and even that is pushing the level of “interesting”. I mostly just want to see what it’s like to play as Lynch.

Story: (8/10)

I give the game credit where it’s due - the story of this title did occasionally have me egging for more. But - I still feel like Im waiting to find out more on the story arc, because almost nothing is revealed about Lynch’s past - the whole game is based on Kane’s past and occasionally, Lynch comes along to screw things up. This game would have been a 10/10 story if they had taken the time to write in more on Lynch’s past, but I suppose thats for the sequel, Lynch & Kane…or something.

 Conclusion:

Clearly, this game left me wanting more. The only potentially redeeming factor for this title is the Multiplayer (which I haven’t taken the time to try out yet) but I seriously doubt it could recoup much of what has been lost in this title. If you want to try the multiplayer out and give it a whirl, I’d highly reccomend you rent before you buy.

Overall Score: 6/10

“Kane & Lynch: Dead Men” is copyright 2007 by Eidos Inc.

Tags: Kane, Lynch, Playstation 3