Future generations of gamers will remember 2007 as the Year Of The Shooter. It might even be named that on the Chinese Calendar.
After all, this is a year that has brought us games like Halo 3, Call of Duty 4, Half-Life 2: Orange Box, Crysis, Bioshock, and to a lesser extent, Metroid Prime 3. When the annals of gaming history are written, it will remember 2007 as the year that the shooter genre was represented in full force, with big shining lights, with games that were polished experiences that pulled out all the stop.
And then there’s poor Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, a game that tries so valiantly to stand in the big leagues on its own merits, but doesn’t make it to the top. Kane & Lynch is a title that, in any other year, might have done better. In fact, if it had been released three months ago, or three months from now, it might have been much more noteworthy as a title. As it stands right now, Kane & Lynch is going to be dead and forgotten by the time December hits.
Kane & Lynch isn’t a bad game. It introduces some unique gameplay concepts. It has some solid ideas. It has, at its core, an absolutely wonderful narrative that makes you root for the bad guys. But when it’s all said and done, Kane & Lynch handles some of the basics in a very bad way. Things like gameplay, camera control, absent features, and puzzling design concepts will have you scratching your head. And in a year when shooters are all about bringing you the perfect experience, when publishers are bringing out polished shooters left and right, there just isn’t room for a game like Kane & Lynch.
Jump’s ahead. Make sure you’re packing, because this could get messy.
Kane & Lynch: Dead Men follows the story of two men, ostensibly named Kane and Lynch. They’re criminal mercenaries. Men without a conscience, willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done. They exhibit no remorse. They show no fear. They’re hired killers, and they’re good at what they do. Kane and Lynch are members of an organization called The 7, a cartel of the rich, the powerful, the corrupt, and the deadly. Once you’re in The 7, you’re in. There is no going back, and there is no room for treachery.
Except that Kane didn’t get that memo. After working for The 7 for years, Kane steals a few things which belong to the organization. On the wrong end of things, Kane finds his life ruined. Without the protection of The 7, he’s sent to jail. As the game starts, Kane finds himself in a prison transport vehicle with Lynch. The two have never met. Lynch is an unknown quantity to Kane. But little does Kane know, Lynch is about to set events into motion that will dramatically change his life, and possibly destroy him and his family in the process.
The two characters, though similar, are unique and separate. Kane is a man with a family, a family that’s being held hostage by The 7. He’s rational, calm, collected, methodical. Lynch, on the other hand, is psychotic, in the clinical definition. He’s a paranoid schizophrenic. After his wife died under some mysterious circumstances, Lynch goes crazy, and only a series of prescription pills keep him in relative check from the impending insanity that’s at the fringes of his mind.
In case you haven’t figured it out from the explanation, Kane & Lynch are some bad, bad men. They’re not heroes. They’re not even anti-heroes. These are cold men with dark hearts, willing to do anything if the price is right and it helps them. There is no honor amongst these thieves, no salvation for the wicked. As much as you might want it, there is no riding off into the sunset for these two. Sympathetic as their situations might be, these men are evil. The only fate that awaits them is a swift and unfortunate death by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Kane & Lynch: Dead Men focuses on the stories of the two title characters, and plays out almost like a movie. Where Call of Duty 4 was a shooter first that played out in a cinematic element, Kane & Lynch is almost the opposite. Dead Men has a story to tell, a story about two men that are forced to rely on one another not because they choose to, but because they are forced to. Kane must work with Lynch to keep his family from getting killed. Lynch must keep Kane alive long enough to retrieve the property he stole from The 7. But as the story begins, the two find out that there’s a much bigger picture that neither of them were aware of, and they soon find themselves over their heads.
Kane & Lynch is a third person shooter title. It starts you out with a bang, throwing you right into a mission and then explaining the story as time goes on. It wants you to get rolling immediately. No boring, lengthy cutscenes to distract you. It’s a game, it wants you to play it.
Then… you play it. And that’s where the problems start.
The first thing you’ll undoubtedly notice is the camera controls. They just don’t feel right. They’re stiff and sluggish, which is anathema in a first or third person shooter. Gamers will probably spend the first few minutes of the game trying to find just the right camera/turn sensitivity. Even by the time you finish tweaking a few minutes later, things probably still won’t feel right. And it sucks, too. The game does its best to try and get you running and gunning right away, and instead of being pepped about the action, you get bogged down by poor controls.
The A.I. is downright moronic at times, too. From the first mission, you’ll probably notice police officers running to designated spots on the map, and they will barely stop and look at you if you start shooting at them. The enemies feel almost like they’re brainless at times. In some levels, they actually perform as you’d expect; the nightclub in Tokyo, for instance, has some amazing battles with enemies. But when you deal with larger battles, enemies just seem to run like mindless drones.
This same A.I. seems to be used for the Friendlies that you control, as well. As you’re aiming down your sights and shooting at an enemy, one of your partners might just decide to run through your field of fire. As bad as that is, it’s made worse because you have to actually keep those people alive. So not only do you have to destroy the enemy, you’ll have to save the friendly NPC that’s on your side, simply because they were too stupid to keep from getting in your way.
Then there’s the actual shooting. It’s just not good. The aiming is uncomfortable, partly because of the aforementioned camera controls. And if the way the two characters fire weapons are any indication, you’d almost think they’d never handled a weapon before. Even when you use the Aim mode (via the L trigger, akin to aiming down the sights in CoD4 and Medal of Honor Airborne) bullets will start dancing around your intended target. It’s understandable that this might happen over large distances, but when an enemy is fifteen feet away and you can’t manage to hit them with 10 bullets from an MP5, something is wrong.
That’s the big rub here. In a game that focuses on action, when shooting enemies is going to occupy the majority of your time, there is simply no room for poor shooter mechanics.
The single player campaign contains fourteen overall missions, although a few of them are divided into A & B sections to help better spread out the checkpoints and make completing them a bit easier. The game takes you around the world, and gives you some very vivid representations of locales such as Tokyo and Central America. Most gamers will probably be able to finish Kane’s campaign in a single day.
Kane & Lynch: Dead Men introduces some new concepts to the multiplayer side of things as well. Titled “Fragile Alliance”, the online multiplayer pairs you up with seven other people. You’re a criminal, tasked with pulling off a successful bank heist or drug run. It’s a very simple objective game. Get in, grab the money or drugs, and get to the escape vehicle.
Except that a big pie gets very small when it’s divided amongst eight people, so it helps to thin out the herd. And wouldn’t it be a shame if one of your partners just accidentally walked in front of your line of fire…
Fragile Alliance is about pros and cons. Mostly the cons. On the one hand, if you work as a team together, it makes breaking in and getting out extremely easy. But splitting up the pot means less money per person overall. And since there is no honor among thieves, you can turn your guns at any time on one of your fellow players. Sure, it means you have less backup overall, but it’s also one less mouth to feed.
Of course, there are caveats to being the Benedict Arnold. For starters, you’re painted as a traitor (quite literally, with your overhead name turning orange to signal to other players that you’re a turncoat). And that guy you just killed? He respawns as one of the defending SWAT officers, ready to get their revenge on you.
It’s a unique and interesting gameplay mechanic. Eidos likes to bill this as a multiplayer mode where the person that thinks like a solider will fail, while the person who thinks like a criminal will thrive. And this is very true. If you think about it, almost all of the team modes you play in multiplayer are established to force you to rely on common trust, defending one another, and performing with just the right amount of teamwork to win. In Fragile Alliance, teamwork gets you so far, and then you’ll realize that becoming that traitor is so much more beneficial. It’s honor versus greed.
This works very well when you’re playing with a group of people you already know. But when you’re playing against random players on the internet, that’s when things fall apart. In an online environment where the majority of players are jerks, a system like this doesn’t just encourage them to be jerks, it rewards them. I’ve been in several matches where players make it a point of killing others early on, just to spoil the fun. And because this system rewards that kind of behavior, one bad incident turns into another, then another, then another… until finally, the entire game is chaotic.
Granted, the developers want you to watch your back. They want you to get paranoid and not trust anyone. But that mentality goes to an unfortunate extreme here, to a point where players just end up screwing each other over. Not for the sake of the game, but for the sake of screwing over another person. In so many games that I played, it was a matter of hanging in the back to make sure I didn’t get shot from behind.
And it’s an absolute shame that this happens. Fragile Alliance is a good idea… nay, a great idea. Finally, a developer that’s willing to do something different with their online multiplayer modes. But it gets ruined not because of bad design, but because of the players in the environment. I can only hope that future Kane & Lynch titles offer more robust multiplayer that rewards to ‘good’ players.
Kane & Lynch also includes a co-op mode. Given the two separate paths of the characters, as well as their separate storylines, co-op makes perfect sense. Except that the co-op is limited to split screen. This is pretty inexcusable in this day and age, and it’s hard to understand how a game can offer a co-op mode offline, but not perform the same function online. The developers explain this as being the result of limitations in the engine, but that may not fly with some people.
It also doesn’t help that, in a game that makes it a point of highlighting that Kane & Lynch have two separate stories, you can only play as Lynch in co-op. There is no single player option for Lynch’s story. And there are actually some pretty cool things you can see and experience with Lynch’s storyline, but the fact that you’ve got to have another friend sitting next to you, playing as Kane, in order to experience that…
Seriously, is this 2004 again?
The problem with Kane & Lynch isn’t that it’s a bad idea. There are so many good concepts in it. This could have been a contender. With another three or four months in development, so many of these problems probably could have been ironed out. The concept of a cinematic action/shooter title isn’t new, but Kane & Lynch: Dead Men is the first to really, truly feel like it’s telling a story before it’s a shooter. The problem is that action/shooter part, and that it doesn’t feel right. The storyline can only take you so far.
Kane & Lynch isn’t a bad game. It’s just not a great one. And the fact is, there is simply no room for a shooter game right now that doesn’t get things right. When games like Call of Duty 4, Crysis, Orange Box, and Halo 3 are on the shelves, alternative shooter titles can only be successful if the ‘alternative’ part works. And Kane & Lynch doesn’t.
But at the same time, as a gamer, I hope that Eidos can learn from their mistakes with K&L:DM and come out with a second Kane & Lynch title that hits on every front. Because Kane & Lynch has franchise potential written all over it, and if these bumps in the road ever get smoothed out, I want to be there. I want to play that game, the one that gets the shooter mechanics and an online co-op mode available while still telling an awesome story.
Kane & Lynch is worth trying. It’s worth playing for a little while, just to see what it does. The storyline and the music deserve high praise for the atmosphere and mood they set. But as to whether or not this is worth buying? That’s going to be the iffy part for a lot of people.
