Jon's Blog

If I was going to be critical of Kane and Lynch: Dead Men, I would lay out the following points:

• It is horribly broken.
• It is horribly unfinished.
• It is buggy.
• Did I mention it was unfinished?
• It has a disappointing ending.
• It’s not finished.

That would generally be my argument against Kane and Lynch: Dead Men in a few, distinct points. Most of the problems stem from the fact the game simply isn’t finished. It’s obvious from every mission, especially the last few rushed missions.

But I love it. There’s something about Kane and Lynch that draws me to it. Maybe it’s the characters (Kane in particular is a brilliant character), maybe it’s the storyline. Whatever it is, there’s something I like about it. Maybe it’s the thought of the game, as opposed to playing it. Maybe it’s because I know IO are Gods at making games. Maybe it’s because I love Freedom Fighters so much. Maybe it’s because I love Heat so much. Maybe it’s because it has a fantastic sense of art direction, something that games seem to be doing so well nowadays (Assassin’s Creed and Bioshock come to mind). Maybe it’s because it is a great-looking game.

Whatever reason, I love Kane and Lynch. It’s something a bit different, and if only Eidos had allowed IO some more time to actually finish the game then it may well have been one of the best games ever.

The plot is great. It’s something different from the usual save-the-world shit. This is very much closer to realism, albeit still unrealistic. You play Kane (and player 2 plays as Lynch if you play co-op), an ex-cop-turned-mercenary on Death Row. While on a transport to your execution, you get busted out. You happily fight alongside your buster-outers, until you learn the truth. You owe The7 something. And they’ve got your wife and Jennie, your daughter.

It’s something very different indeed. Kane has no hope of survival – even if he manages to get the briefcase in the two weeks alotted to him, he’ll save his wife and kid, but he’ll still die for betraying The7. But things don’t end up working like that, and luckily Kane manages to make it out of the game in time for sequel.

I like Kane. He’s got weaknesses, he’ll do anything for his daughter (a teenage girl who’s never met him), and he’s on a no-hope road. I can’t really share the same thing for Lynch. He’s supposed to be a “Medicated Psychopath” but only really goes mental at one point in the game (a real stand out moment if you’re on co-op). For the rest of the game, he’s just normal. A bit strange, really. Plus he’s not quite enough of a badass, although he does punch a woman in the face at least once. Maybe it’s deliberate: are we, as Kane, supposed to resent Lynch? He’s an ass, and annoying, to the point where I hate him as a character. I think it’s deliberate.

Stand-out missions include a Collateral-esque Nightclub mission, where you must first walk in through the crowds, kidnap a woman, and then fight out through the pouding music and the crowds of people. Whether you kill them or not depends on how trigger-happy you feel. Another great mission is the much-touted Heat-esque heist mission. You start on the roof of a building, rappel down, blow a hole in a window, steal the briefcase and then make your way out the front door and down the road. It’s really good. (It’s also the level shown in the Xbox 360 Demo, although the best bits of the level are after when the demo ends).

Now, onto the “unfinished game” business. About 3/4ths of the way through, suddenly everything goes wrong. Suddenly you’re in Havana, Cuba, and you’re in a war. Not only is this preposterous but this is also horrific for my framerate on my PC, and fighting through that level (surprisingly called Freedom Fighters) was an absolutely frustrating experience. It highlighted why the game was so, so bad. I died so much just trying to save my stupid idiotic team mates who wanted to hug the enemy, and then whenever they revived me I’d die again, but then they’d try and revive me again and i’d overdose on adrenaline and die. It’s horrific game design. From then on, it continues somehow into the jungles of Venezuala, (even more framerate killing) and the game just gets more and more preposterous.

Speaking of Venezuala, this game sure does like to jet around. Suddenly you’re in Los Angeles, and then Tokyo somehow, and then somewhere else, and then Tokyo again. And then Havana. There’s no way of knowing you’ve travelled, and when suddenly your two weeks are up, it feels like there’s no way that could have been two weeks in-game. It’s all a bit confusing. The only sense of time is the changes in Kane (which are very neat) – at the start of the game he has a broken nose, and when you get to Havana it’s healed and he has a full beard.

Now, onto the ending. The ending itself is quite good – it wraps things up nicely, albeit in a depressing and saddening fashion. It just feels like the last few levels are so rushed I simply couldn’t enjoy the ending much. I didn’t give much of a shit for what happened, even though I know I should. It just felt a bit “meh” after the last few terrible missions.

If you plan on getting Kane and Lynch, enjoy it. It’s a great game, but it has huge flaws. If you can, get it on PC and get it when it’s cheap. It isn’t worth £30 or anything. I got it for £15 on play.com, which I think is fair. The Xbox 360 version is horribly broken, mainly because the recoil and controlling is incredibly hard to do on the controller. It’s wierd, because even on the PC the keyboard controls are just a re-mapped controller yet controls so much better.

I’ve also heard a lot of complaints from reviewers that this game has too much swearing. It does, I’d say. It has an awful lot of f-bombs and it seems like they’ve just been added in to make the game more “edgy”. It does help contribute to the fact that this is a mature game. This isn’t a game for kids. The swearing and the violence, along with the subject matter itself, requires a mature, analytical mind to fully enjoy.

I hear there’s going to be a sequel, and I hope to God it lives up to everything this game should have been. I hear there’s also a film in the works, and although I think a film of this game would absolutely be perfect and it’d be my favourite movie ever, I hear that it’ll be by the same people who did the utterly despicable Hitman movie. It’s so saddening to see such a fantastic and brilliant new intellectual property such as this wasted with a terrible film.