Kane and Lynch Dead Men Review

Gritty, cold, harsh, bad, hard men doing bad things to each other and anyone unfortunate enough to get in their way! What a load of overblown nonsense! This game was portrayed before release as a game with a wonderful deep story line, something that would inject progress into a tired genre.


Who cares if you are doing the same old shooter if the story line is involving. Movies have been doing it since the dawn of time haven't they, same old genres played out with only the novelty of the plot to distinguish one thriller from the sea of other thrillers out there.


Well does Kane and Lynch have a better story than say gears of war, a game it shares most of its game mechanics with? Oh, darn, that was that point squashed, yes it does have a much better story than gears of war. What it doesn't have is a better premise!


Gears of war had a neat setting. creatures from under the ground that have lived for years underneath the humans on the planet suddenly decide they want the surface as well. War is unleashed and all hell breaks loose, the problem with gears was that the motivation for each level was never very clear. You were sent to recover the tunnel mapping thing, you get it and it doesn't do as intended, then inexplicably you go to your old house and find the data there all ready for you. You then go and trigger off the big bomb and what? Is the war over I don't know but the game is. See what i am getting at neat premise poorly scripted flow of the story.


So what is the setting for Kane and Lynch? It's the world of career criminals, dodgy deals and double crossing. Kane has worked with a group called the seven in the past and things must have went wrong. Kane ends up in prison and as the game starts he is busted out with the aid of lynch another con and the sevens army of thugs. After the first level is over you meet the seven and are told that Kane stabbed them in the back and vanished with all the money for the job. They understandably are angry and want the money back and Kane dead.


They have his wife and Daughter and will kill her if they don't get what is theirs. Lynch is assigned to escort Kane to get the money and make sure he doesn't just do a runner. Without spoiling too much The duo rob banks, kidnap a yakuza bosses daughter and end up fighting in the middle of a government coup. All in the aid of getting Kane's daughter and wife to safety. Suffice to say everything that can go wrong does. There are two endings to the game, a downbeat downright depressing one and a slightly happier though still dark and depressing one.


One thing that i kept getting irked at with Kane and lynch, and much talked about in previews, was that Lynch is touted as a medicated psychopath, what does that mean really? Everyone in the game, apart from Jenny (The daughter) and Kane's wife are complete career criminal sociopaths. What is Lynch's difference other than really bad hair? No he is on "medication" and every so often he is meant to wig out and go nuts. The only evidence I saw of this is when robbing the bank he starts shooting up the hostages for no real reason other than he is tense. So there you go, to make the game sound edgy and appealing they saw fit to tout the "medicated psychopath" role. Didn't actually do much else with it though, I kept expecting Lynch to do some double crossing or really get you into trouble as a result of his "illness" he doesn't, he is just there to wisecrack, the comedy sidekick to Lynch's deadpan straight-man, who seems infinitely more chilling and psychopathic than Lynch.


So is the story a step forward for action games. No I don't think so, while it has slightly more holding the collection of levels together than say doom, it is still a pretty linear shooter. The story is good, if  a little overzealous in its eagerness to be edgy. There are no new game mechanics that are plot related here, other than the fact that you can end the game one mission earlier than it should after a moral choice. Therein lies the difficulty for developers when creating games that truly give you a choice.  If you create a game where you branch the story you risk players never seeing a percentage of the game. Say for example you create ten levels and depending on player choice you only play through five or six when playing through, can you guarantee that the player will return and choose the other choice and play the other levels. You run the risk of someone thinking well that was short and hating the game. Alternatively you can go the open world route and allow players to tackle missions as they choose. This however leads to the main plot still being a series of missions and a few side missions. More importantly however the levels all share the same world and the levels are reduced to a task within it. Which can be a problem as evidenced by Assassins Creed, and the repetitiveness of some side missions. My point, if there ever was one is that gamers complain about linear games, when actually non-linear games have their own problems, there is room for creativity here but I don't think Kane and Lynch shows it.


Enough about the story then, how does it play? Well yes thank you, once you get used to the controls and the aiming system it plays very well. I found it hard to hit anything at first, which, yes, could just be my general blindness, then i found out that crouching and standing still when shooting actually sends your bullets to the cross-hair, if you stand and run while shooting then it's hard to hit the side of a bus. This isn't the first game to use this mechanic, i remember Graw 2 using this idea, though I think it's a little more exaggerated here than that game. The game employs a Gears of War style third person view and utilises a similar cover system, which is mostly essential for progressing through the game, sure you can lurch around in the open firing while running if you are a game god and make progress, but for most mere mortals we will be content with taking cover behind the appropriately placed walls, cars etc. and taking pot shots at the enemies.


The enemy a.i. is pretty standard, it won't win any awards for it's creativity and style, but it is functional and doesn't provide much opportunity for us to point and laugh at it's stupidity. What does need addressing is the squad a.i. especially on hard, I have talked to other players and they never seemed to have this problem, on questioning further they played on easy or medium difficulty. On the hardest setting "edgily" named morphine, your squad's main function seems to be to run blindly at the enemy you point them to and get killed. Which means you have to save them, as its game over, and back to the last checkpoint if one of them dies. You spend a few minutes trying to save them and gettting killed yourself, before you realise that in harder open areas it's easier to just point them to stand at a nearby safe spot and make them wait then go shoot everything yourself and come back for them. I never played on easy or medium, so I don't know if they were more use on those difficulty levels. As for my experience with the game they were nothing but a nuisance I could have done without. Though to be fair, Dom in gears of war was guilty of the same thing, I don't remember him as being as much of a pest though.


The levels themselves are well designed, with plenty of environmental detail and for the most part reasonably real world design, the streets look like they are streets, the bank might be similar to a real bank somewhere in the world. There is variety with the well designed club level, also since crysis the obligatory jungle level. The revolution in Havana makes a change of pace with more military type hardware making it's presence felt.


The game uses a checkpoint system to save progress, and there is a good spacing of these that avoids the "big gap between hard areas" syndrome of some games, which can be a real game breaker when you have to repeat two or three huge skirmishes to get back to where you died just to die again. The game uses a system based on adrenaline injections to the heart when you are shot down, there is the now almost standard reddening of the screen until you die and then you fall and have about twenty seconds for someone to revive you. They do this by sticking a long needle through your body into your heart and giving you a shot of adrenaline. Again, "wow you're so edgy", is this actually an accepted medical practice, no i don't think so, but sticking on the pads of an automatic external defibrillator, doesn't have that same edgyness. It's time this particular urban myth got edited out of movies, injecting adrenaline into your heart isn't a good idea kids, it might work, but they don't do that in hospital. Once this is done you get back up and carry on, the problem is that you can only have it done once before you overdose and die. The only point where I found this system really annoying was in the last level where you have to fight alongside your daughter who doesn't respond to your squad orders and tends to run about in the open firing ineffectually and dying regularly, the problem is  you can only revive her once. With yourself and the other adults if enough time passes, say five minutes you can be revived again. She is too fragile, logic applied to an illogical process only draws attention to how illogical it actually is.


The graphics are serviceable the engine seems similar to the one used in the Hitman games, the havok physics engine is employed. Characters are detailed, environments and lighting adequate, though that is the word I would use for the whole game graphically, adequate. Don't take that as criticism, just know that while the game looks good it really didn't move me to express any love for it's visual look, again the "edgy" factor comes in again with everyone being scarred menacing types. They went for bleak and harsh and they got there. For me they succeeded too well.


Sound is serviceable with all the usual bangs and crashes, music, where it is employed is mostly mood setting and works well. There is a soundtrack CD included with the version I bought, though it has never been popped from the case and probably never will, but that is just me. You may like the music and this feature will have been a great addition, for me it wasn't a draw. 


I played the xbox 360 version, so there should be some mention of the achievements. I played through the single player game on hard. and finished it, also going back and doing the second last level again so I could choose for the alternative ending. I got 310 points. Now this isn't a criticism of Kane and Lynch, more of developers in general. I feel that a game should do a sixty forty split when it comes to achievements, give 600 points for the single player and 400 for the multiplayer. My gripe is that if you struggle through on the hardest difficulty setting you should be rewarded with more than half the achievement points available. I personally don't like it when you see a larger number of the points going to one million head-shots in death match type achievements. Some may like that idea, I don't.


Special mention must be made to the co-op game. This almost wasn't played for this review, as it isn't over xbox live and I don't like split screen gaming, however, a friend was over the other night and we fired it up. It made a big difference to the gameplay in that it was much easier and fun, something which most co-op modes add, what did change was that sometimes during the single player game Kane and Lynch split up, and in the co-op game you have different things to do, another example of someone potentially missing nice game features. When Kane goes down into the bank vault Lynch gets to go on  a rampage with the hostages and the cops, what impressed me the most at this point was that playing a Lynch exposed you to his psychotic episodes, which as aforementioned seemed to be attention grabbing rather and gameplay orientated. When lynch has an episode the view wobbles as if you are affected by tear gas and you start seeing things differently, i.e. everyone is a cop about to shoot at you, so you don't know who is an innocent hostage or armed policeman, which means that yes you do have to go nuts and kill all the hostages. Suddenly the forced and overblown story element made some sense to the gameplay. I may have to take back some of what I said earlier about the game. Pity they never found a way to integrate this into the normal single player story.


I haven't said anything about the multiplayer game here, simply because I haven't got around to playing it yet. Will do soon, and add on my thoughts to this review.


In summary a good game not a brilliant one, very playable, I am glad I bought it, and I can't say that for some of my other recent purchases.



Scoring


Graphics 6

Gameplay 8

Story 8

Level Design 8

A.i. 4

Total 34 out of 50


Score = 68%

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