Kane and Lynch: Dead Men

With its deadly serious attitude and dialogue drenched with f-bombs, Kane & Lynch wants desperately to be a hard-boiled exploration of the criminal underworld. Unfortunately, it never achieves its intended goal, coming up short in all the pivotal areas.

A History of Violence

A game like Kane & Lynch almost demands a gritty, well told tale, but as much as it tries to emulate Michael Mann's contribution to action cinema, its narrative chops just aren't anywhere up to the task. This heavy-handed potboiler is just an excuse to get you into trouble with mobsters, cops, guards, and anyone else with a shotgun and a beef.

What Kane & Lynch lacks in storytelling acumen, it makes up for with interesting scenarios. However, while it might sound fun to perpetrate a daylight bank robbery, or break into a maximum security prison, these circumstances come off feeling limp despite all the loud gunfire and dead bodies. Each mission basically boils down to taking out witless automatons that come running when you cross invisible markers, and heading for the next disposable scripted cut-scene.

For every intense and strategically rich open environment there are two that feel like halls bound together with duct-tape, and though Kane & Lynch isn't exactly ugly, it doesn't come close to tapping the potential of the Xbox 360's hardware with its timid explosions and awkward enemy movements.

Losing Control

The Pros and Cons

PROS:
  • Engaging mission concepts.
  • Offline co-op.
  • Online multiplayer turns out to be pretty fun.
CONS:
  • Poor controls.
  • Mostly bland visuals.
  • Misbehaving allies.
  • Dumb enemies.
  • Inconsistent difficulty.
  • Questionable collision-detection.

Then there are the frustratingly inconsistent controls. It made me long for the intuitive control scheme found in Gears of War, which would have been practically perfect for this game. Why does holding down the left trigger to zoom in on your target, sometimes leave you pointing at the ground? Why is weapon reloading both manual and automatic, thus robbing you of golden opportunities to return fire because your character stubbornly insists on pausing to swap clips?

There are just too many problems with Kane & Lynch to cover here. The gritty atmosphere and balls-out gunplay offer some thrills, offline co-op demands a strong partnership, and the online cops-and-robbers mode holds some potential, but it takes a lot more than a hard-boiled noir tone and a mildly interesting amalgam of ideas to form the taut tour de force Kane & Lynch aspires to be.--Cameron Lewis

Now check out the second page to read our updated review of the online multiplayer!

Comments [0]

post a comment

Post a Comment