Kane & Lynch want you to hate them. There's just no two ways around it, the characters of Kane and Lynch do everything in their power to make you want them to fail. These men are absolutely unlikable, both men have spent the last few decades killing people, their language is coarse and the two of them have absolutely no respect for one another. Believe me when I tell you that the "heroes" of Kane & Lynch: Dead Men are the two most unlikable characters to ever been introduced in a video game.
But a little hatred can be a good thing when you're developing the next great crime drama. The crime genre is filled with unlikable characters being turned into heroes, look at the characters in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs or any Elmore Leonard book. There can be a lot of amazing tension when the main cast of characters hates each other, and you (the outside observer) can see everybody's point of view clearly. That's what Io Interactive (Freedom Fighters, Hitman) is going after in Kane & Lynch, the new action game for the Xbox 360.
Perhaps a brief introduction is in order. Kane is a family man who worked for a long time as a mercenary for a mysterious group known as The 7, only to be caught by the police and sentenced to the death penalty. Lynch, on the other hand, is a paranoid schizophrenic who is also on death row. Unlike Kane, Lynch is kind of a loose cannon, you never really know what's he's going to do ... or who he is going to accidentally kill. These two murderers are not friends, but in order to get what they both want the two of them are going to have to work together.
Not surprisingly, both Kane and Lynch are pushed together right from the get-go thanks to a somewhat successful prison break. Before long these two convicts are planning bank heists, running from the cops and trying to put their lives back to normal (not necessarily in that order). Early on this game feels like it has what it takes to be an amazing crime game, there is nothing but cop on criminal violence all around you, things are exploding, and everybody is reacting to the constant chaos.
Unfortunately Kane & Lynch: Dead Men can only sustain this level of excitement for so long. It won't take long before the non-stop bickering between these two characters starts to take its toll, couple that with the repetitive missions and you have a recipe for disaster. There were times when I felt like Kane & Lynch was the video game equivalent of having a kid in the backseat kicking your chair and asking "are we there what?" ... only there's no way of turning this car around, once you are introduced to these two characters you are committed until the end.
There are two major problems with Kane & Lynch's storytelling. The biggest problem I have with it is that it's just not very interesting. The game starts out acting like it's going to be the video game version of that 1995 movie, Heat. But it's not. In fact, the secret that nobody is telling you is that Kane & Lynch quickly turns into something of a military shooter. You don't enlist in the Army or anything like that, but before long you will be fighting guerillas in the middle of the jungle and waging war against what appears to be a terrorist militia. If you could chart my interest in the storyline, you would see that I became less entertained with each passing chapter. Had the whole game stuck with the banks heists and squabble between the convicts and the cops that would have been one thing, but I really started to lose interest once our two "heroes" left the country.
The other problem with the narrative is that it's kind of confusing. Instead of offering cinemas between levels that tell you where you're going next and what the mission is, Kane & Lynch: Dead Men just starts you off in a new location every level and expects you to know what's going on. It's actually kind of jarring, because you can go from breaking people out of jail in one scene to rushing a large Japanese skyscraper in the next. There were times when I felt like I missed an important cinema or something. But alas this is just the way it was made, the game doesn't seem to care that from level to level you seem to be going to almost random locations with no set-up what so ever.
But I can forgive a lame story and crummy transitions; what I can't forgive are the terrible controls. Kane & Lynch is controlled like a lot of other third-person action games; you control a small reticule and attempt to shoot down as many bad (good?) guys as possible. The problem is that the crosshair is sluggish and you never really feel like you're in control of your character. The good news is that you can tweak the controls a bit, but even after doing that I found that the game just didn't feel right. What's more, the game is clearly trying to get you to use cover to avoid being shot, but the cover system in Kane & Lynch is broken beyond all repair. Instead of giving you a button to press when closed to a barrier (ala Rainbow Six Vegas or Gears of War), the covering system in Kane & Lynch is automatic. That is, when you are close to something you can use for cover the game will automatically position your character next to it for safety. At least, this is what is supposed to happen. As I played through the game I tried my hardest to use the cover, but the computer just isn't very good at sensing when you should be flat up against a wall and when you shouldn't.
Unfortunately that's just the start of the control problems. You also get squad tactics about half way through the game. The problem is that your computer AI isn't very good at finding cover and shooting bad guys, so in most situations you will be the only person actually taking out the enemy and advancing the action. For what it's worth, if you are killed in the course of a level one of your squad members will come over and revive you using a shot of adrenaline. But don't get that shot too many times; it's just a little too easy to overdose in this game. Kane isn't the only person that can be revived; you will also need to keep your squad alive at all times. If any one of your squad dies during a mission your entire outfit will perish and you'll have to start all over again. Early on it's easy to revive people and stay out of trouble, but as the game progresses things become increasingly more chaotic and it will be extremely difficult to get to all of your downed men in time. To stay out of trouble you will probably want to keep your squad close together at all times, which effectively makes the squad controls useless.
As a single player you go through the game from the perspective of Kane, the less crazy one in this scenario. However, if you want to see the game from the other perspective you can always get a friend involved and play the game using both Kane and Lynch at the same time. This is definitely the most entertaining way of playing through the game, since the fun of playing multiplayer will take away some of the disappointment over the game's pacing and control issues. Unfortunately you can only play the two-player co-op locally; there is no way to take the story mode online. This is definitely unfortunate, sine you're somewhat limited with what you can do when playing locally.
On top of the two-player co-op mode, gamers will also be able to go online and play a multiplayer mode called Fragile Alliance. In this mode you are put together in a room of eight criminals who are set on stealing money, drugs and other valuable things. The way this works is all eight of the players will be on the same team, all working for the same goal. But an individual person can choose to defect at any time so that they can take all of the money/drugs/jewels for themselves.
The concept is definitely intriguing. At first the characters have to work together to pull off a successful heist, this means that you will actually have to play your part if you want to see any profit from this heist. The game gives you a lot of room to work, each of the levels offer you multiple entrances and plenty of places to hide. But at the same time you will also need to be thinking about when is the perfect time to break away from the crowd and take the loot for yourself. Do you do it with another person? Do you wait until nobody expects it? What if somebody else decides to do rebel before you do? These are the things that are running through your mind at all times during this innovative game mode.
At its best this mode allows you to play a game that is not only cops vs. robbers, but also robbers vs. traitors. There is a great dynamic here that is almost better than the overall single-player experience. I wouldn't mind seeing this concept fleshed out a bit more, even if that means I have to put up with these character's hateful comments in another nonsensical adventure. But there is one problem with this mode; there just isn't enough to do in this multiplayer experience to keep you coming back for weeks and months. Chances are you'll see what you need to see within a few hours and be done with it. What's more, since this is the only way to play the game online the Kane & Lynch multiplayer mode can be extremely short lived. Hopefully we can see this kind of thing in the future, perhaps as a component of a better game.
Like the storyline, Kane & Lynch's graphics are kind of bland. It's not that the game looks bad, it just looks dated when put up against the other titles being released this season. The backgrounds tend to look good and most of the character models are fine, but there are times when I thought I was playing a higher res PlayStation 2 game. The good news is that none of these problems bring the overall fun of the game down, but it's a bit jarring to go from something like Call of Duty 4 to Kane & Lynch.
While you can have a lot of fun playing through Kane & Lynch, part of me wishes that something could have been done about the poor play controls and the lame story. Despite being incredibly unlikable, I was really into the idea of these two convicts who hate each other working together. The problem is that this kind of story is better kept for the movies. I can definitely see myself enjoying a Kane & Lynch movie, but so far I haven't been too impressed with their video game adventures.
