Kane & Lynch: Dead Men (PS3) Review

Oh he’s not even going to go there is he? Holy crap he is indeed! I, like many of you I’m sure, eyed Kane & Lynch with cautious optimism during it’s development cycle. IO Interactive had a pristine history with their Hitman franchise and the well received Freedom Fighters all doing well. So it was more than a little disappointing when the first reviews started to roll in and they where less than favorable – even the “Official” print mags who normally fawn over titles that they get “exclusively” where not lapping it up.

Then of course came Gertsmann-Gate I’m not going to recap this tale as it is 50% conjecture and 50% internet hype, but, this caused a shit storm around the title that, to many, clouded the whole thing. Rightly or wrongly I know it did for me. So with that in mind I set about reviewing this once promising new franchise one year on from when it all kicked off.

Read on to find my full review of Kayne and Lynch: Dead Men

Ok, so we have dealt with the “hype” of the games pre-release and we have touched on the shit storm bought down by Gamespot care of Jeff Gertsmann so let’s leave all that behind for now, this is all about the game right now.

So, with this in mind let’s get to the guts of it. The game sucks – The End… Oh you want more? damn.Wouldn’t it be that easy if the game did? Oh yeah it would but the problem is, it just might not.

K & L is basically a re-hashed implementation of the Freedom Fighters game with a hard edged modern day gangster vibe. In the single player game you take the role of Adam ‘Kane’ Marcus (Kane) a mercenary thug who was jailed and was on his way to his final destination – death row – when a fellow prisoner traveling with him in the armored van suddenly tells him to get down before all hell breaks loose. The helpful traveler was in fact Lynch, a drugged up psychopathic schizophrenic and he’s there to break you out. After the escape from the police you meet up with a group of ex-colleagues known as The 7. You seem to have crossed them at some point during a job in Venezuela and they have broken you out so that you can return the merchandise you apparently stole from them. During this quest to recover the items your family is dragged in to the mix and your wife killed. Kane, with the help of Lynch and a range of other thugs, must now recover the merchandise, protect Kane’s daughter and take down the men that killed his wife.

So far, so good. Cheesey plot – Check.Excuse for boundless amounts of violence – Check. Opportunity for buddy movie style bonding and one-liners – Check! OK, now onto the the first problem.

Oh yeah we are here already J The graphics are not good, not even by last years standards; in fact not even by Wii standards! The game ranges in visuals from PS2, to top end Wii, to low end early Xbox 360. If I had to pick a average I would say it looks and animates like an Original Xbox title. In fact I would say the Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher’s Bay out paces it. That’s not a good place to be for a game that came out at the same time as COD4, Uncharted and Assassins Creed. It’s not just that the textures are Grey and bland, or that character models are low on polygons. No, it’s the animation that really gets you. They are stiff and about as fluid as concrete. I encountered multiple graphical glitches during this game (and it was patched as soon as I put the disc in so it was the latest build). One such glitch left me stuck “inside” an enemy who had walked into me when I was hiding in a corner. It took almost five minutes of jumping before I could hit the “Attack” command button and have Lynch shoot the damn thing. There are many more besides this, guns stuck in walls, characters lying dead half through walls and shadows for characters appearing under them when they are on a gangway – a solid gangway; how?! I even had the shadow of a thug going up the wall next to me whilst I was inside a building and he was outside walking up the fire escape. Messy, is the best way I can describe the graphics – outdated is the best way I can describe the engine being used. Did they just lift it from Freedom Fighters? Possibly.

Now on to the meat of it, the gameplay. Yes, it’s a cliché but a game can suck donkey balls in the graphics and sound dept yet still be great fun to play (Anyone ever play BIP on the Amiga – awesome!). So how does it play? Oh dear. Look, before we proceed I must confess, I am not a huge fan of squad based anything but I did buy and enjoy Freedom Fighters – in turn I did not care for Hitman but respected what it did and could see it’s quality. So I was confident that these guys could at least pull the gameplay side of things off. I wasn’t entirely wrong, but I was not entirely right either. Surprisingly the story is compelling enough. I can’t say you ever really care about the characters exactly but you want to see the result of the story. Kane and Lynch exchange abusive comments and some of it might bring a smile to the face but it lacks any real punch or weight which is a shame as the script could have been so much more. The game plays out as a 3^rd person, squad based, action shooter and it attempts to blend these, but fails to manage it wholesale. There are times when you feel your in charge of a squad and your fighting side by side for survival but other times you feel like your herding a bunch of drunk idiots. The shooting mechanic works well enough and there are a few weapons to choose from (Rocket Launchers, Machine Guns, Pistols and a shotgun) but nothing to write home about. The control of your squad will be familiar to anyone who has played Freedom Fighters. You simply issue 3 sets of command Attack, Defend, Come to me. That’s it, simple even for me a person who is no fan of these squad gameplay mechanics.

The trouble is the squad does not always do as it is told and can wander off or get stuck somewhere. They also have a habit of walking straight into fire and winding up dead. Not a huge issue as, and this is the “life” mechanic of the title, you can run to the body and if your in time slap in a shot of adrenaline to revive them. This is also the case for you and your team will, if near enough, do the same for you if you’re taken down. The kicker is that you can not do it too close together. And there in lies the problem with the mechanic. If you have waded in to resurrect a team mate (if you don’t they die and the game ends) and you revive them but get taken down yourself they will revive you no problem. Trouble is you are disorientated for about 3 or 4 seconds after coming around and this leads to them shooting you all over again – then your team mate injects you and you die from an overdose – Damn that was annoying as hell ! Oh and it sometimes accepts 30 seconds between hits and sometimes it takes minutes before it can be used again – there is no consistency leading to shouts of “WTF!” when you die from an overdose 3 minutes after having the last one when you survived before having it 60 seconds after the last one.

Another aspect of the title is a small amount of stealth. Now this is totally broken – probably the only thing in the game that is totally broken to be fair. You need to try and approach X or Y without guards spotting you. No problem you think I can crouch and cling to walls etc (something it does for you as you have no “hide” control) – wrong! You can hide behind a flower planter out of view of the guards and they can still see you. Add to that you normally have a team of guys with you and they won’t just stay put most of the time regardless of how many times you order them too. So you end up running for the guards and just hoping you get them down and onto the next one before they run through the “Alert” animation – not very stealthy! And from the guys that made Hitman it’s a huge cock-up.

So with a broken stealth mode and a piss poor cover mechanic you really end up playing this like a full out 3^rd person shooter and have to rely on weaving and dodging to survive long enough to put a few rounds in your attackers. Oh, and another thing, it takes a crap load of shots to take down an enemy regardless of hit zone. Now I might just be spoilt in recent times but I expect that if I shoot an attacker in the face, clean headshot, he should go down like a sack of potatoes right? Not in K & L! There are times where I fired maybe 4 or 5 shot with any weapon straight in to the face of an attacker to only finally take him down with a body shot – What the fuck! It took on average about 4 or 5 shots sometimes 6 to drop an attacker, now that’s a lot of bullets per guy!

There is a Co-Op mode where another player can jump in as Lynch but this is offline only and I did not explore this feature fully. It added a little to the play but nothing mind blowing – the online co-op was dropped last minute due to time and technical problems.

The sound design is such a mixed bag. The score is reasonable enough and the voice acting is exactly what you would want from these characters. Kane and is suitable gruff and Lynch sounds like a country psychopath. The score was handled by Jesper Kyd the composer responsible for the music in titles like Splinter Cell, UT3, GoW, Assassins Creed and the other IO games. The real issue with the sound lies in the spot effects. The guns just don’t sound right. The pistol sounds a little weak but doable. The shotgun again sounds weak but well enough. Unfortunately the machine guns sound like an elephant farting shingle on to a metal dustbin lid. Seriously this is not a good sound and detracts from the “immersion” level. The fixed guns are not much better but sound reasonable. A plus note is also the use of atmospheric sounds, frogs and running water in the park etc. Oh, and the club level is worth a mention as it uses the sound well to disorientate the player.

Ooooh longevity. Oh how I miss thee. Now this title has some seriously frustrating sections, sections that you will get stuck on for ages on and off. Like the stupid dump truck window you have to shoot out, grrr. This said I played from start to finish, without rushing and with doing the “extra” mission at the end (I won’t spoil it but you make a choice near the end to take flight or fight) and it took a grand total of around 5 hours. Yep that’s right 5! At a push 5, more like 4hrs 40 minutes, or if I had rushed and not done the extra mission I could of clocked it in under 4 hours for sure. Not good, not good at all. There is little point in replaying the title again as there are no other “bonus” items worth investigating, there are 3 difficulty levels to contend with but that’s it – I used the out of the box “normal” setting to play through so it might last a bit longer on hard. There is a multiplayer element to the game and it is a large saving grace. The title of the multi-player is Fragile Alliance and it does what it suggests. You undertake several scenarios as robbers/bad guys on a job. You and your crew need to collect cash or what ever from around the map whilst taking down the Triads or police force depending on which level you’re on. Everyone gets a share of the cash but if you so choose you can take down members of your own crew and reduce the share – or take it all. Anyone taken down by a player or a enemy then goes to join the opposing side and has to stop the heist/escape. This adds an interseting dynamic and lends its self to some good fun. There are still a few people playing this (there where 2 games running on the first time I tried it and 1 running the second time) but the appeal was limited. I think it will be a good thing to play with a group of mates because you have a certain dynamic before that you can explot with the game type. It certainly is a good feature but not worth buying the game alone.

So, to the conclusion. Man this is tough. No, seriously. Kane and Lynch is sick, not broken, not terminal, but sick. After reading the reviews, reading Jeff’s thoughts, playing the game etc I can see where all the bad love came from. I can see why Gertsmann sang out on the game and why his review had such a negative vibe to it. Because, to be honest, I feel so let down and frustrated by this title. Now I have, over the past day or so, received several messages of sympathy/confusion from gamers in the BrutalGamer and SarcasticGamer community, when they noticed my PSN name and the title of the game I was playing (Hey wanna spy on me and the others – then head to the forum to see our ID’s). And to be honest after about an hour or so o f play I wanted to give it all up, I just could not face continuing, not even for the feature. I did return though and discovered an overall vision of what the developers had in mind.

There is great potential in this game, there is great potential in the franchise, the characters, the multi-player. None of it was realised fully, none of it gelled and that’s such a shame it makes you angry and frustrated and gives such a negative vibe to your opinion of the game. The elements that work, work just well enough to get by and the areas that are dodgy are just plain broken. When you stick it all together you can just about out weight the bad with the good/mediocre but you really should not have too. I really can’t recommend you pick this game up, I rented it and I still wanted to stop playing and return it in the first hour god knows how much I would of cried if I had dropped £10 – £15 on the thing! I do recommend that you get to know the story, borrow it from a mate or if your really curious and it’s cheap rent it for a night (you should be able to beat it!). There is a point towards the back end of the 16 levels where you end up in Venezuela and it just screws things u p, it goes from gangster heist/revenge movie to weird ass war movie – a bit like when they went to Cube in Bad Boys II J – and I had to mark the story down because of it. And the Heat inspired shoot out down a city street is great too and represent one of the few point that the game nails it’s target..

IO and Eidos announced a sequel would be out “in time” and I hope it is, I hope they get the things right that went so wrong. You have to wonder how much pressure Eidos, a publisher with it’s back to the wall atm, put on IO Interactive to just ship the title and get the bucks rolling in. This could have been a good – not great – game at the time (the engine would have held it back no matter what) and I hope the next iteration will take the lessons learnt from this version and move on.

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