What happens when you throw together a ruthless mercenary and one medicated psychopath who team up to cash in on a vendetta against a vile criminal organization?  No, it’s not a blockbuster starring Will Smith or Bruce Willis. Give up?  The Answer: Nothing.  At least nothing but a unique multiplayer mode trapped in a single-player shooter gimped by awkward controls.  This may sound harsh but that’s the impression I have after playing the shamefully half-baked Kane & Lynch: Dead Men from lO Interactive (from the makers of the rather saucy Hitman franchise!?!?). 

Two killers, one sub-par graphics engine, useless teammates and enemy A.I., and stop and pop gameplay so bland it would make a Locust retreat back into his emergence hole all combine to make Kane & Lynch: Dead Men a poor experience.  Whether this game was a rushed for the holidays, or a lackluster effort in general, we’ll never know, but one thing is certain: Kane & Lynch: Dead Men is not the experience it could have been.

You’ve Been Here Before

Kane & Lynch: Dead Men takes its inspiration from classic crime films like Ronin, Heat, and Reservoir Dogs only it’s nowhere near as groundbreaking as the aforementioned subject matter.  This is mainly due to a by the numbers narrative that pales in comparison to some of the game’s locales.

The game’s narrative unfolds in a rather sloppy manner and seems all too predictable.  Kane is the career criminal and killer who stole from the wrong people, or rather The7 - a dastardly underground criminal organization.  They want to kill Kane’s family if he doesn’t cough up the stolen goods (cause he apparently has a case of conscience and actually cares about them after a lifetime of killing and misery...hmmm).    Lynch plays his polar opposite (and babysitter), a guy who has no family or friends.  Instead he just kills a lot of people and takes a lot of pills.  Certainly, the idea of two fugitives thrown together for all the wrong reasons isn’t new, but it should have made for at least a semi-compelling game. 

Riding the Short Bus

Kane and Lynch: Dead Men is a mess of a game that squanders its potential slowly.  For each step forward it tries to take, the result is four or five steps back.  The gunplay is inaccurate and shoddy, only players utilizing the shortest of short bursts can hope to hit the broad side of a barn(to a point this is usually a strategic element in other shooters, but the guns here are way to jumpy in comparison).  Not that the A.I. can actually dodge bullets.  These brain dead bozos seem to be asking to get shot.

Besides the fact that most of the enemies behave as if they’d been subjects of a full frontal lobotomy, your A.I. teammates aren’t much better.  They’ll run right into enemy fire and get downed again and again.  If this was Gears of War that might be okay since it doesn’t affect the overall game (you’d just revive Dom and move on).  In Kane & Lynch that’s not the case.    If a downed comrade isn’t revived in a specific time span, it’s game over (a.k.a. restart mission).   Even an included offline coop mode doesn’t save the experience (especially since now two of you are trapped in a busted game), it does make the game slightly more enjoyable, but the gameplay is still ’out of order’ since the most important mechanic - the weapons firing – still cripples the experience.

Visions Of Grandeur

The edgy, Tarantinoesque color palette and contemporary atmosphere of some levels deliver a few eerie settings which stand in contrast to the majority of Kane & Lynch’s visuals. Levels like the opening jail break sequence in which the player, as Kane, experiences impaired vision due to a concussion creating an effect like a scene straight out of Apocalypse Now, serve up a rush with their washed out urban streets, and cops jumping out of every corner.

A later club scene set in a Tokyo nightclub offers similarly impressive eye candy as you move through a surging crowd with a gang of baddies in tow, flashlights bobbing in the air like agitated fireflies.  Kane & Lynch does have its moments – the problem is they are all too few.

Take the Money and Run

One of those few moments however resides in The Fragile Alliance multiplayer game which is the one thing that makes Kane & Lynch slightly compelling (and just barely so).  Eight players start by working together to pull off a heist and steal as much money as possible.  But who needs teamwork when you can turn traitor and make off with all the money?  Any team members waxed (by you or the rather incompetent A.I.) are instantly turned into cops or mercs tasked with stopping your team’s progress.

While it’s an admittedly unique concept which reinforces the criminal mantra, if I can’t have it – nobody can, it’s unfortunately saddled with the same mediocre visuals and gameplay carried over from the campaign mode.

If anything, Kane & Lynch: Dead Men represents a bunch of undeveloped and disjointed ideas.  It’s odd that the developers at IO Interactive basically sent this game to die.  Or to be fair to IO, perhaps Eidos was just too blinded by the need for an end of the year AAA title to see the writing on the wall?

Regardless of the business decisions behind the obviously rushed release of Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, you should be playing something else this winter.  In this life there are plenty of decisions to make, but playing a poorly designed game doesn’t have to be one of them.