Kane & Lynch: Dead Men

In another, you kidnap a woman from a nightclub, and Lynch carries her over his shoulder while you lead him through the dark, the terrified crowd, and the shoot-first-questions-later bouncers. And then there’s the full-scale prison riot and breakout you organize, along with a revolution in Cuba (seriously!) — both involve more people in combat than we’ve seen before.

Fantastic, mass-scale missions like these really give you a background sense of wonder while playing Kane & Lynch, and you’ll need all of that euphoric feeling to carry you through its less-impressive parts. At first, you’ll probably be testy about how clueless the enemy A.I. is…at least until you realize that developer Io Interactive went for quantity over quality. This is a twitchy action game about mowing down herds of people. You’ll take out what has to be the entire Los Angeles Police Department, and probably the rest of the cops in California and Japan. If they were smart enemies, you’d be dead 0.2 seconds into each level.

What will trouble most players, though, is how loose and erratic the aiming feels. If you’re a vet of the Hitman series, you actually might not even notice because aiming is similar in all of Io’s games. But in a game that’s all about spraying lead, you’d think that Io would’ve tightened things up so that when you’ve got someone’s head dead in your sights, they turn out dead. Instead, you have to learn to keep firing until they crumple, regardless of how perfect you think your shot was. That really makes this game feel pretty hard at times, and a lot of folks will probably enjoy it more if they drop the difficulty down to the easy setting.

Kane & Lynch isn’t brainless, though — not at all. Like most shooters these days, you have to keep your nose behind cover lest it get shot off, and on top of that, it’s often wise to hide somewhere and send your mates into the line of fire. Yup, Kane & Lynch uses simple but effective squad controls that fans of Io’s Freedom Fighters will recognize in a heartbeat.

With two main characters in starring roles, you’ve also gotta be wondering about co-op, and Kane & Lynch delivers it….on split screen only. There’s no excuse for not doing it over Xbox Live in this day and age, and we really think Io just shouldn’t have bothered to do the feature if they weren’t going to do it right. But if you’re game, give it a whirl. Once you settle into your cramped half of the screen, the missions are interesting as, for example, one of you provides sniper cover and the other carries that kidnap victim through the nightclub. With a little online support, a lot of people would’ve loved the co-op. Fortunately, the online multiplayer kicks some tail, and that does make up some lost ground.

All this leads us to wonder — why has it taken so long for a great heist game to be made? Somehow, it makes sense that the Hitman lads are the ones who came through and did it, and as with their popular assassin series, Kane & Lynch is not for the impatient, perfection-demanding gamer. But if you have some tolerance to spare, the eye-popping missions are really the big payoff here, and they make this crime easily worth the time.

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