Kane and Lynch: Why’s Everybody Always Pickin’ on Me?

July 5, 2008 4:49 pm Sir Haxington Games for Fun, Gaming

I was eating lunch with a group of producers one day about the time Kane & Lynch: Dead Men (K&L) was released. Unfortunately, K&L came out during a storm of other awesome games (it was a holiday 2007 game, going up against the likes of Halo 3, Call of Duty 4, Mass Effect, Bioshock and so on). We were discussing various games that we had been playing when one of the producers at the table asked me “Have you played Kane and Lynch? It’s really good.” He seemed fairly adamant that this game “had something to it” and his comments stuck with me to this day. I had been itching to play it, and finally decided to see what the fuss was about.

K&L starts out interestingly enough. You play as Kane (Lynch can be controlled only in co-op, more on that later) who is being broken out of a prison transport by Lynch. It soon becomes apparent that K&L tries to straddle the style of a comic book and something out of a Hollywood heist movie. As you stumble around the tutorial level, large groups of similarly dressed (and masked) goons help cover you as you make your escape. The game jumps off immediately with huge fire fights against swarms of police, SWAT and even some choppers.

The first thing that stood out to me from a gameplay / technical perspective, is that when you shoot enemies, they just sorta twitch. I can’t think of a better way to describe it. When other games’ AI have actual pain animations, it feels a little cheap to have the enemy just kinda procedurally twitch when getting shot while not stopping. Plus, enemies can take a hefty amount of damage. I’m sure it was purely for balance reasons, but tagging a human character three times with a gun in practically any game should drop him. That’s not the case in K&L, especially for leg shots, which can take 5-10 shots to drop a guy.

Since we’re talking about AI, the AI in K&L feels like your average third person game AI. They spawn in, for the most part ignore you until they reach a cover spot, stop, do a fast blend into the cover anim and finally go into a fire / cover loop. At least they aren’t ninja AI, but there’s so little variety in the AI animations that the combat feels fairly dry. In general, there aren’t a lot of different enemy types either, so it feels like you’re just fighting against different numbers of the same AI throughout most of the game. A Tokyo foot soldier behaves and animates like a police officer in the states.

K&L mixes things up a bit with the occasional sniper who is super deadly. A nice touch was adding a scope in the corner of the screen when a sniper is nearby, which shows you what the sniper is looking at. When you see yourself in a sniper scope, you get the hell behind some cover or else the hurt is about to happen. Seeing myself in the scope was one of the few times in the game where I felt actually scared. However, snipers are usually so far away and almost always out of range of your current weapon so fighting them becomes a hassle. To take down snipers, I ended up plinking away at a long distance with my automatic rifle for the most part. As far as other enemy types go, occasionally you’d have to go up against a machine gun turret, or SWAT with riot shields. It was fun to have to fight AI who use grenades and tear gas, which made the combat much more interesting and intense, but it didn’t happen frequently enough.

K&L contains some interesting level design, but it felt like for every decent level there would be something to offset it’s cool factor. For example, there’s a bank heist mission which has good pacing throughout. You start by meeting with your driver, taking out some guards discretely (melee), making your way into the bank, gassing the building, and cracking the safe. Pretty cool stuff, but that level is immediately followed by a pretty ridiculous rail level where you and lynch are just shooting out the back of a van and just blowing up tons cop cars throughout the city. It ends with the van going over an on-ramp and crashing. Then you have to follow the damaged van while defending it and cops just sorta spawn around you. The whole experience just felt really contrived and was a letdown after the cool bank heist mission.

Another example: Eventually you end up in Tokyo and have to fight through a crowded (looks like they used the tech from Hitman: Blood Money for the Mardi Gras street scene) nightclub, which takes some serious balls to design, I think. The mission itself isn’t bad, although you’re forced to go though the level twice- once with the crowd and once without. A later level features, I kid you not, a two-story earth mover (the huge trucks they use to move dirt around at quarries) that crashes into a tiny construction area and is a sort of “boss” battle. So, for me its like, okay we got this decent level, things are going down the right path with the Tokyo thing then BAM! Crazy comic-book dump truck level. To top it off, you end the level by driving down the highway (in a cut scene) to a prison and crashing the wall of the prison with this huge vehicle to gain entrance. The whole experience is just so crazily implausible. I would have loved it if the designers had stuck to a more grounded story and approach to the game in general, where players felt like part of something that could happen in this universe rather than alternate comic book reality.

The weapons didn’t feel meaty enough for me. The shotty just sorta goes “fwoosh” when you shoot it. Where’s the boom and the camera movement? Most of the weapons feel basically the same, even some of the heavier weapons. While some feel a little different, there’s just not enough differences in the weapons to make you really care to grab something else (other than ammo considerations). The heavy mg is a rare find, but is so inaccurate that you’re better off just using the rifle de jour.

To it’s credit, Io Interactive added co-op to K&L, but at the last minute cut online co-op. So, players are left with local split-screen only. I tried it out (by myself!) just to see what it was about, and it looked like a pretty fun implementation of co-op. However, I really only play co-op on live with friends. I always think of split-screen as something for kids living in the same house, friends who go over to other friends house when hanging out with each other, and so on. However, K&L is a M rated game (17+), and when you reach that age I think you’re more apt to play online co-op. I’m totally speculating here though, maybe lots of adults play split-screen co-op.

K&L is another game where the story didn’t seem totally fleshed out, or just feels all over the place. There’s this group called “The7” which is after Kane to get some briefcase full of stuff which is never fully explained. At one point you get the briefcase but the players are never told what is in it. If you’re going to basically copy a Pulp Fiction plot device, at least do it justice. Later, The7 kidnap Kane’s wife and daughter, whom you have to go save. The wife is killed in a cut scene, the daughter hates you because her mother dies, the daughter escapes, only to be captured again in a later level (when overthrowing the Cuban government or something, which is also confusing) and has to be saved yet again. Then you save her and she still hates you. If you escape with her she hates you still, if you choose another path she dies.

The whole story basically revolves around Kane constantly getting shit on, and never being liked (hence the nod to The Coasters song, “Charlie Brown” for this post title). I think we’re supposed to sympathize and feel sorry for Kane throughout the game. Kane is never offered a chance for true redemption (sure, try to save your crew, but Kane botches the whole thing, so it doesn’t count) either. I mean, in GTA IV, you get a similar moral choice ending to the game, but at least Nico gets to have revenge. In K&L, you’re either an ass or a bigger ass, and there’s no real precedent for it besides some comments from other characters telling you how much of an ass you used to be. However, Kane always appears to be a “good” guy throughout K&L. There should have been a flashback level where you get to play Kane as a the bad guy.

There are a few other issues I had with K&L, namely the objective indicator. In order to see the next objective, you have to click and hold the left stick, but it doesn’t always work. You’re forced to stop, click and wait, which can be annoying if you’re moving around and you want to see where to go next. Then also there’s a gun swapping mechanic which felt totally unnecessary. If you go up to Lynch you can swap weapons with him by pressing left stick then pressing the right stick up or down (or is it the other way around?). I never used it outside of the tutorial, but maybe it’s more useful in co-op. K&L also has third person cover which I barely used (I completed the game on the hardest setting) and blind fire which I never used outside of the tutorial either. Basically, if felt like K&L has a series of game mechanics that were unnecessary or hard to use.

The most fun I had in K&L was during the last level where you’re on a rail and have to shoot out the engines of a prop engine airplane before it take-off from a runway. Also, the bank heist mission and the prison break mission stood out above the other K&L missions, mainly because those situations are better than any other prison break or bank heist I’ve played yet. The chopper “boss” fight on Cuban roof-tops was pretty awesome as well. The chopper actually felt smart, as it hovered around the edge of the roof and seeks you out, flies off, comes back and does strafing runs, and so on.

The MP game types feel pretty unique. One game mode, Fragile Alliance seems pretty fun. Your entire team starts out fighting police AI to steal money from a bank. Once you start stealing money, you can choose to kill off teammates (so that you can get more money for yourself) at the risk of becoming a traitor. If you die, you becomes a police officer and have to stop the bank robbers. If you don’t die, you need to escape with the cash. It’s a very dynamic MP game type but it didn’t hold my attention for too long as it was hard to get into a match. I don’t think a lot of people are playing K&L online at this point, but I’ll try it out a few more times.

So after K&L, what did I learn? If a producer you’ve never met tells you a game is “really good,” get more information on why they think that.