Kane and Lynch has by now achieved the unenviable position of being more famous for the controversy it engendered on a certain game reviewing website than for its actual gameplay. I decided to give it a shot to see if it really deserved the bad press, or if it was just one of those rare games that for some reason just never got its fair shake. I mean, could the people who made Freedom Fighters, an excellent game with high plot aspirations, really have fallen so low in their efforts in just a few years?

Yes, they could.

Kane and Lynch: Dead Men is perhaps a noble failure, however, even given the controversy it has caused, because while it did fail in producing stimulating game play it at least TRIED to do things that many other failed games did not even attempt. But before I get too far into things, allow me to introduce the game properly.

Kane and Lynch is a third-person shooter along the same lines as the above-mentioned Freedom Fighters; it puts the player in control of the titular "Kane", a repentant mercenary/hitman figure, as he sets out on a mission of revenge against "The7", a group of apparently politically-influential gangsters. In his mission he is paired with another man, Lynch, who is initially hired by The7 to break Kane out of prison and play babysitter for the unwilling servant. Unfortunately, Lynch seems to have what can kindly be called "anger issues", which come into play several times during the game's plot.

The two leads are probably the biggest asset this game has going for it, and the one that had given me so much hope prior to actually playing the game. In a medium awash with action games centered on 'roided-out men with ridiculously gravelly voices and armor so ludicrously huge it looks like they just strapped a tank turret to their thighs, Kane and Lynch are actually rather unique figures. While Kane does have the requisite cliched antihero facial scarring, he's not the posturing man-ape that other action heroes tend to devolve into. However, it's Lynch who is actually the more intriguing of the two, as I would argue he represents a sort of parody of the more typical main game character. Both of these characters end up being, at the very least, more interesting than their cohorts in other games.

Unfortunately, the plot fall flat outside of this. While the beginning of the game shows some promise of story, this is quickly squandered by what I can only assume was a rushed production. For an example (spoilers), one mission involves you kidnapping a woman. During the mission she is revealed to be "Retomoto's daughter", which causes Lynch some obvious distress. Who is Retomoto? What does he (or the woman) have to do with Kane's mission? Who knows? I finally discovered some clue as to who this Retomoto was not in the game itself, but in the mission select screen. At one point the game makes a sudden shift from an office building to a warzone with all of one sentence of segway. The transition is so jarring that it renders the plot nigh incomprehensible; what may have been an attempt at the drama of incomplete knowledge on the player's part comes off as a plot so esoteric and cryptic that it is simply boring. To make matters worse, there's only about 6 hours of actual gameplay there, so not only is the story hard to follow, it ends before it started going anywhere.

This feeling of potential having been dashed by a lack of time for tweaking extends throughout the K&L experience. The general gameplay is basically identical to most other third-person shooters with a dash of squad command, but everything eventually comes off as at least a tad half-baked. The main controls feel sluggish, and the lack of difference in accuracy makes the entire ability to bring up ironsights pointless. Squad commands are also pretty useless, as the friendly AI (and enemy AI, for that matter) has about all the strategic ability of a squid in a bathtub full of jello. This is especially infuriating given that it is these same people who stand still when being shot at are also the ones who are supposed to keep you from dying through liberal applications of adrenaline. Several times throughout the campaign I faced enemies who would not shoot at me until I crossed an invisible barrier about 50 feet away from them, while snipers hundreds of yards away could get a bead on me with little problem. I will give some credit, however, to the inset screen used when snipers are aiming at you: this mechanic mirrors the shape of the rest of the HUD and gives a sort of 70's split-screen feel that mirrors the feel of the plot in general. Basically, the game simply suffers from a sense of me-too-ism in its gameplay, which is sad since the same team broke the mold somewhat with Freedom Fighters last gen. It is more a series of aggravatingly stupid design decisions than any sort of systemic failure in design that renders K&L's gameplay lackluster, which puts the game firmly in low-end-mediocre territory. Also, there's no reload button. What the hell.

Graphics are a party favor mix of decent and bad. I believe the game runs on basically an updated version of the Freedom Fighters/Hitman engine, but lacks a great deal of polish that either of those games exhibit. Levels give a somewhat convincing illusion of scale, but remain relatively small in terms of actual playable area. Textures appear to have a respectable resolution, but simply lack detail, as if the artists had left in temp textures. The one highlight of the game is environmental destructablility, which while completely irrelevant to gameplay (unlike, say Bad Company, where blowing holes in walls could actually be used to strategic effect) does make the enviroments seem less static. Unfortunately, this is only used occasionally and erratically, with some areas being torn to shreds and others remaining pristine after even the most extensive of firefights. Character models are relatively good looking, but animations are limited and nothing really stands out. Basically, this game looks like what it is: a last-gen engine shoehorned with higher texture resolutions and some per-pixel shaders and little else of use.

Unlike the graphics, which are so-so but serviceable, sound is a complete failure. Some sound effects simply seem to be missing, and those that do exist vary wildly and unpredictably in terms of quality, realism and especially volume. At one point a car crashed through a doorway not 10 feet in front of me, and failed to make ANY noise. Guns sound ludicrously muted, forcing you to turn up the volume to give them any dramatic effect, while the noise that marks your being close to death is so loud as to be deafening at this volume. Voice work is in general pretty good, but the script seems to subscribe to the idea that how "mature" a storyline is is directly correlated to how many times the characters drop the f-bomb. Eventually this goes from a realistic depiction of how less savory characters may act in reality to being laughable or just annoying. Mixing is also off here, with voices often being drowned out by other random sound effects.

Kane and Lynch is a perfect example of what happens when an otherwise talented studio falls into apathy. I know that IO interactive can do better than this. Hitman remains a viable, if less than perfect, property, and Freedom Fighters showed that the same team could do a pure action game without sacrificing plot or drama. Unfortunately, it looks like K&L was simply rushed to the point that the team lost interest. What is left is the shell of a game that could have been good, but lost its way about halfway through development and never picked itself up from there. For a game that could be beaten during a rental period (and whose multiplayer offerings are silly and tacked-on enough to be not worth mentioning), I cannot even bring myself to recommend this game as a rental. There's simply not enough to make it worthwhile.