Kane and Lynch - It Got What it Deserved

Kane and Lynch was better than I expected, but my expectations were already quite low thanks to the whole Gerstmann conspiracy that followed the games release. For those unfamiliar, a Gamespot editor (Gerstmann), after giving the game a poor score, supposedly lost his job due to pressure from an angry Eidos company who pulled millions of dollars of advertising from the website. Now whether that remains fact or fiction is another issue entirely, but in the aftermath of the bad press, I avoided Kane and Lynch for quite a while (as did many other boycotting gamers), thinking the poor reviews that sprouted up in the aftermath not to mention the hatred toward Eidos made it a good idea to avoid the game.

Still, after the whole mess has now subsided I finally decided to indulge myself a bit, and picked up the bloody game to see if the 6 and 7 that it got from Gamespot and IGN were in fact warranted. I was surprised to see that it played better than I expected and combined interesting aspects of Hitman with Freedom Fighters even though in the end is still only an average shooter.

Graphically – Hitman-like and not much more

Kane and Lynch was never trying to be Crysis or anything, so the graphics are not killer and that’s expected. Typically games like Kane and Lynch, being team shooter games instead focus on getting lots of enemy/civilian spawns and environmental realism over detailed models and textures.

Kane and Lynch’s graphics are a weird combination of good and bad. Rain effects, reflections and all that other jazz come off rather well but the real kicker is the environments. There are a few levels in Japan where you start off from on a roof top, rappel down to a floor and blow the windows open, and then proceed to shoot through a company building and eventually make it out to the street level, where you’ll see civilians running for their lives, armies of police and a huge attention to mass detail. The feeling of seeing a lot of moving civilians and bad guys gives it a cool cinematic feel despite the use of low poly-count for the character models.

Story – Toppling an Underground Mafia, Saving your Daughter Jenny

The story focuses on Kane who apparently betrayed the mafia organization he worked for and stole their money. The mob chooses to retaliate by killing his wife and then kidnapping his daughter as ransom so that Kane can pay of his debts. Lynch, an uncontrollably violent and pill-popping thug, is sent to capture Kane and get him to pay up but ends up teaming up with Kane when the organization tries to double-cross them both.

The story, like most video games, primarily serves only one purpose, to connect the levels together with some kind of cheap tacky glue and give the characters some context for what they are doing. Eidos clearly had a movie-adaptation in mind with this, and there are semblances of a kind of B-action movie motif, which makes it a touch more entertaining than most video-game action plots, but the main problem is the lack of originality. The ending also is kind of frustratingly abrupt, with a dissatisfactory “there will be a sequel” finish that Eidos might not even end up pursuing given the harsh press the game has gotten.

Gameplay

Like Freedom Fighters you kind of get to move together with a group of convicts and tell them where to go and what enemies to attack in squad-like combat. If someone dies, you can resurrect them, and if they die they can resurrect you.

Weapons are nothing special, and basically the game plays like your standard Hitman game minus the cool weapons. It’s a simple 3rd person shooter, with loads of enemy spawns and a slow and repetitive cover and fire gameplay that does get old pretty quickly.

The real winner is the fact there is a co-op mode, but even then this was kind of disappointing given you can’t play it over Xbox Live and are forced to play it split-screen with two controllers. There is some multiplayer map feature but Halo 3 easily is a better option than something of this sort.

The game is kind of short too which goes against it quite a bit. Even though the levels are really diverse, ranging from a nightclub to the Tokyo streets, a prison break and a jungle setting, once you finish the game there isn’t any replay value so you’ll wish it was longer. The levels are all pretty linear and despite a few nice cinematic sequences, this is really not a game you’ll want to go back to.

Challenge is medium and reasonable though in these types of games dying isn’t so much a matter of avoiding bullets and killing enemies but really just knowing where the cover is. If you can find it before you get completely red and konk out, you’ll be safe, if you don’t then you die. This lack of skill gameplay can be occasionally frustrating.

Music / Sound

To be honest, I’d say it’s all your standard fare. The music never really stuck out to me at any point and isn’t memorable like any Metal Gear Solid, but it is fitting for an action-movie. The sound effects are typical, and the probably biggest highlight is the voice acting, again emphasizing the cinematic feel to the game.

Conclusion

Kane and Lynch doesn’t pull any new punches but it isn’t a total flop either. It plays a lot like a squad based Hitman game and looks the same way too. The only thing that it’s lacking really is boldness to try something more different, because it just rehashes old gameplay ideas and stories and kind of blends them together in a nice package. The game goes by pretty fast, taking me probably 12 hours to finish and once it’s over you probably won’t want to come back to it ever again. That said, if you are bored out of your mind and could use another shooter or you have a friend you want to play the game through with, then Kane and Lynch is kind of a cool experience, but if not, there are better games worth checking out first, like The Darkness, or Call of Duty 4.