When it comes to trigger-happy, explosive entertainment, what’s better than The Sopranos and Jason Bourne? The answer can only be both at once, which is why we love the heist-flick essence that Kane & Lynch: Dead Men channels into videogame form. Part thug brutality, part capers and hijinks, the latest wild ride from the developer of Hitman has its fair share of rough edges — maybe even more than its fair share — but its epic missions are so thrilling that they’ll sear away the nuggets of disappointment you’ll occasionally feel.

If you haven’t memorized all the pre-release trailers, you’ll agree it’s a shame that Kane & Lynch doesn’t do a better job of setting up its thoroughly excellent story. So here’s some background: Ex-mercenary Kane is on death row when his former employer, a mysterious cabal known as The7, hires Lynch to bust him out. Seems that Mr. Kane has buried a knife (or seven) in their backs and made off with a load of diamonds that was supposed to be divided among The7. They give him three weeks to return the goods, or they’ll kill his wife and daughter. Oh, and Lynch sticks around as his evil babysitter and partner in crime.

And yeesh, do they commit crimes. Kane & Lynch is gritty and raw — vicious might be the best word to describe it. Lynch is truly, badly insane in a give-you-the-creeps way, and between that, the sailors-would-blush dialogue, and the wholesale slaughter of hostages, this one is not for the kids or the gentle of heart.

If that didn’t send you scurrying off to play Beautiful Katamari, prepare for one of the best opening levels you’ve ever seen. Kane’s escape from an armored prison transport is a confused, frantic bloodbath as you half-stagger, half-are-dragged-off to a grim meeting with The7. The game’s fantastic set pieces draw heavily from Michael Mann flicks like Heat and Collateral to create large-scale action sequences with big crowds of innocents and even bigger crowds of enemies. In one, you’ll try to sneak discreetly out of a heist (complete with ginormous backpacks, just like in Heat’s bank scene) as hordes of panicked office workers flee the building…but naturally, the waiting SWAT team recognizes you just as you see daylight, and good lord is it on!

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.

On Xbox 360

+ Gripping, large-scale heists.

+ Genuinely absorbing story.

- Lotsa rough edges, especially the incomplete co-op and multiplayer.

? What kind of magic could Io make if it ditched its janky Glacier engine for Unreal 3?

8.0