I do not dislike this game. Dislike is a passive sentiment. I actively hate this game. This game drove me completely bonkers, entirely independent of any scandals or controversies floating around lately. Kane & Lynch: Dead Men is a very poorly designed product, with a story that tries way too hard to be gritty and comes off as adolescent; a completely useless aiming and control scheme; lazily designed levels, and a downright infuriating save and checkpoint system. When a game pisses me off, I stop playing it; but when I'm reviewing it, I have to soldier on and take the continual emotional beatings it provides. After playing Kane & Lynch, I hate my life, myself, and my Xbox 360.



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Kane & Lynch: Dead Men is a game that wants to be a lot of things and fails at them all. Surely foremost in their attempts is to be a "bad guy game." Either Eidos or IO Interactive probably took the popularity of their Hitman franchise as a sign that people like games where you play as a "bad guy" and decided to take that to an extreme. What they overlooked is that why we love Agent 47 so much isn't that he's technically bad, but that he's a sympathetic character and a master at what he does. He's cold and collected: all he knows is assassination and he does it better than anybody on the planet. He's not after money, glory, or fame. Usually, he's after the truth or vengeance. Kane & Lynch, on the other hand, contains two of the most contemptible characters of all time who do absolutely nothing to redeem themselves.

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As soon as the game begins, Kane (our "hero") and Lynch (our perpetual AI teammate) are busted from a prison transport on the day they're set to be executed (why the HELL would they be transporting prisoners in death row on the very day of their execution, or at all?) and within 60 seconds of control being handed over you're blasting cops. Dozens of cops, in fact. This game is a practical cop-killing extravaganza. That's not fun for me. Maybe a few 14-year-olds with social issues might enjoy the thought of killing hundreds of cops in a game, perhaps due to some resentment they hold because a cop took their weed once. The ridiculous amount of cop shooting might be understandable if we could grow to like our main characters and wish for their survival, but all we're ever told about these guys is that they're cold-blooded killers.

Whenever there is a chance for a character to be developed so as to be slightly likable, the game plows right over it. Lynch is apparently completely insane and has occasional bouts of extreme violence as we witness him killing all of the hostages in a pathetic bank robbery mission early in the game, and later we discover that he killed his own wife. There's some pills that are supposed to help but, well, they're running out. Kane attempts to find nobility in character by really wanting his daughter to like him, but those glimmers of humanity are wrought pointless a few seconds later when Kane comes up with another deftly moronic plan to solve the next problem. In an attempt to "gritty" up the experience, the writers decided to pepper nearly every line with obscenities. The script begins to sound like it was scribbled into the back of a Mead notebook during after-school detention. Lines like, "Shut the f___ up, what are you f___ing talking about?" occur on a minute-by-minute basis, and just come off as lazy or pathetic. As the game continues, instead of learning more about the characters and coming to like them, we come to despise them.

Michael Mann movies, which this game very desperately wants to be associated with, often feature nasty villains as main characters but always, always contrasted with a good main character. Heat has Robert DiNiro's character doing awful things, but Pacino is there to serve as a moral mirror. Same with Collateral's Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx characters. These movies aren't good because they're about bad guys killing innocents, they're good because they show the highs and lows of moral character. Kane & Lynch is all lows, and very low lows they are.

This game also wants to be a next-gen shooter, of course, but it surely doesn't try very hard. It has a similar control to Hitman games; games where the use of guns is practically discouraged except in rare cases, but in this game shooting is often your only option. Aiming in Kane & Lynch feels sluggish and sloppy, and accuracy is a complete joke. For what we eventually learn to be as a paid mercenary, Kane is absolutely worthless with guns. That would be fine and even interesting if it were supposed to be a plot point, but the game is almost entirely nothing but shooting. No problem-solving, no stealth, no outrunning, just shooting. Eventually the game slips into the war genre as you find yourself in the middle of a Cuban civil war for absolutely no reason.

There is a "cover system," a popular trend in next-gen games where you can stick yourself to corners and surfaces and shoot around them. Here it feels tired and slapped-on. You don't hit a button or anything to stick to cover, you just sort of have to wander up to a surface and push the analog stick in every direction until perhaps the Gods of Play Mechanics decide to get off their asses.

Anything that would make this game feel "next-gen" is alarmingly absent. The graphics are very bland and there is practically no dynamic lighting. Every surface seems to have this unnatural universal lighting with no account for light sources, making it feel like a cartoon.

Level design is quite poor. There's a level that takes place in a Tokyo nightclub where you're supposed to kidnap the owner from her office. So you get to her office and Lynch carries her while you shoot your way out. Who is shooting at you? Night club guards, all 5,000 of them, all with guns. Of course they shoot at Lynch too, who is carrying their boss, which is why they're attacking you in the first place. Anyway, while you're in her office a guard on the roof shoots at you through a skylight, and then you leave the office the way you came in, fighting off the dozens of guards with pistols who can all zero in on you in a pitch-black nightclub amid hundreds of stampeding clubgoers . Then you get to the roof, and the lady escapes and runs back to her office. Do you follow her? No, you cross the roof and then drop down through that very same skylight into her office and grab her again, then fight your way through the night club again, only this time all the guards have submachine guns. Lazy, lazy level design.

There is often little sense to what you're supposed to be doing or where you're supposed to go, and usually the only thing to do is go by the objective marker placed on your crappy radar/compass feature. Problem is, that radar thing disappears after about 10 seconds, and to make it come back you have to click the left analog stick (and it'll just disappear again). This becomes interesting when you're running to avoid getting shot and you can't click the stick while moving, so you have to stop dead in your tracks just to get the radar to come back so you can see where you're going, and by the time you've oriented yourself the thing has already vanished.

From a next-gen game I expect some kind of variation in gameplay. There are even a few times when the game pretends to be giving you some variation, but then forgets to carry it out.

Take the beginning of the second level, for instance. Kane needs to get something from his safe-deposit box from a bank, so obviously he decides to rob the place. Your first objective is to put some knockout gas in the air system, and Kane actually says he'll "bypass the guards," so I'm thinking that means elude them. So you walk into the rear parking lot and a guard will see you and approach you. Kane says he's just looking for his car, but the guard doesn't buy that, so he starts to shoot you, then another guard raises the alarm. Mission failed.

I restarted this level at least 10 times before I figured out that I'm supposed to kill the guard, then quickly kill the second guard before he can raise the alarm. Fine, but why did the game tell me I was doing something different? Then in a later level, which takes place in Tokyo (believe it or not, a completely separate trip to Tokyo from the nightclub level. Actually, this game transports you from LA, to Tokyo, back to LA, then to Tokyo again, then to Cuba, and so on without any sense, logic, or direction). You and a crew of four other guys have just had a big shootout on an upper level of an office building wearing window washer outfits (for no reason), then you take an elevator down to the lobby. While in the elevator, your crew changes into suits so as to elude the police or guards. Awesome, a sneaking mission! Wrong. You exit the elevator, and then for no reason the Tokyo police are shooting at you. There's no "whoop, our cover is blown" and there's nothing done to raise suspicion. The whole thing with changing outfits was completely pointless other than to segue into a Tokyo streets shootout, followed by a Tokyo bus station shootout, followed by a completely jarring transition to Havana.

And the biggest failure of next-gen technology: the save system. This game uses a checkpoint system, where each level has about six checkpoints and if you stop playing for any reason (such as when the game freezes your Xbox 360, which it did to mine twice) you have to restart the boring, poorly designed level all over from the beginning. This is an absolutely infuriating element, and would have been the reason I'd have stopped playing if I didn't have to review the damn thing.

Kane & Lynch also wants to be a squad commanding game. In early levels, you just have Lynch to boss round but eventually you add on a crew of four guys. They're all useless. If you tell them to follow you, they won't. If you tell them to go someplace and secure it, they'll go there and die. If you tell them to kill someone, they'll run right up to him and shoot him from two feet away instead of from cover.

In fact, the game's only real unique feature is destroyed by the squad system. If you take too many hits, instead of just flat-out dying Kane will sort of keel over until either Lynch or another teammate comes over and hits you with a shot of adrenaline and brings you back or you eventually die if nobody can reach you. If you do this too often, however, you'll overdose on the adrenaline and die outright. When you go down, any one of your AI teammates can bring you back with the adrenaline, but if any of your AI teammates goes down, only you can hit him with adrenaline. If one of your teammates dies, mission failed. Even though there will be teammates closer to your fallen comrade, you have to stop what you're doing, cross an open battlefield, and dose him, keeping in mind that if he went down someplace it's because that's a very dangerous place to be, and you're kind of a sitting duck when you're reviving someone.

Kane & Lynch only has one online mode on the Xbox 360, a clever little thing called "Fragile Alliance" where everybody in the game starts out as allied crooks trying to rob a store or bank protected by AI guards or police. Whatever you steal gets split with everybody, so if you don't want to share you can grab the loot and then try to kill all your co-crooks and keep it all for yourself. When you get killed, you respawn as a guard or cop and your job is now to take down the remaining thieves. It's a good idea in theory, but is broken by the following elements: if you die and respawn as a cop and die again, you're done. No more repawns. Also, the game doesn't really let you know when someone has turned traitor, which is a major turning point in gameplay. You have to figure it out for yourself, which can get pretty confusing. Every time I played, some loser would start killing teammates from the very start of the level; nobody would get any cash, and the game would be over in two minutes. Also, about 60% of the times when I tried to play, I would get an error that would kick me to the very first game menu.

There is a co-op mode, where your split-screened buddy can play as Lynch, but there's no online co-op so the whole thing is rather worthless.

This is a bad game. It had promise, but it was clearly pushed out the door way too soon. It's no big surprise, really, this is Eidos's only holiday release for this year and they wanted it to be good so bad. Instead of giving IO Interactive the time and resources they needed, however, they spent all their money on advertising and hoped that would cover up for a poorly designed product. I really wish they would have just made another Hitman game instead, and considering there's a freaking Hitman movie in theaters, wouldn't this be the perfect time for a new Hitman game? I would have taken one or two levels of the quality of Hitman: Blood Money to this rushed, convoluted, lazily designed, buggy, aggravating, unpleasant disaster.

And if I must say any more: there is a boss battle against a tractor. Yes, a tractor.

Publisher: Eidos Interative
Developer: IO Interactive
Release: Nov 13, 2007 Interactive
MSRP: $59.99 Interactive
Also on: PC, PS3 Interactive

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