The “Break it Down” Blog

Summary [6.5 out of 10]

Kane & Lynch is an idea for a good game, wrapped in 2 obnoxious technical mechanics (controls and cover), last-gen graphics and obnoxiously repetitive/punishing level design and gameplay elements.

Introduction

I’ll admit, I’ve been tempted by the marketing of Kane & Lynch and wanted to get it, even after all the bad reviews of it. There was something about the grittiness of it that looked badass to me.

Unfortunately, after getting it and playing through it, I have determined that the reviews were spot on… this game is definitely not a “Buy” and probably not even a “Rent” unless you loved the hitman series of games. The reason for the game being so poor isn’t it’s graphics or fundamental story, but instead very fixable technical design elements of the game that make it a goddamn chore to play and tolerate. The only impression I get from this game is that IO Interactive was told to ship the game regardless of if it was done or not, or they have completely lost the ability to determine what is “fun” and what is “fucking annoying”.

Story

The premise of Kane & Lynch is that you are Kane (the guy with the broken nose), you used to work for an outfit called The7, but apparently you thought they were dead and stole something valuable from them. They aren’t dead, and instead want to kill you. But first they are going to blackmail you (using your family as bate) into getting back the goods that you “stole” from them in the first place. They give you Lynch (the crazy bald guy with glasses) to watch your every move and report back to them.

It’s a pretty straight forward story that will feel cliched, and it is, but you figure the game will redeem itself in the execution of the story… either by making it super gory and brutal or giving you twists and turns… in this case you get neither. For a game that was touted as a violent/adult-crime-drama… it’s pretty lack-luster and not really gory at all.

Gameplay & Controls

This is where 4 of the most obnoxious parts of the game rear their head and honestly made me hate it within the first 30mins of playing it, they are:

• Bad Controls: Regardless of how you adjust the control screen, you can never get a natural feel to the aiming of these controls, they just swing all over the place, you are constantly over-swinging past your target and then swinging back to shoot them. I tried fucking with the acceleration and x/y-axis speed all over the place and couldn’t get the controls to feel any different… I think this screen is broken or something.
• Buggy “Auto” Cover System: Imagine Gears of War or Rainbow Six vegas, both with excellent cover systems (I prefer Rainbow Six with the lock-on button) and now imagine those same games but removing the ability to control the cover lock-on. Kane & Lynch tries to determine when you want to auto-stick to cover and does it for you, unfortunately there is about a 50% success rate making you feel like walking straight into cover isn’t sufficient because sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Also, when you are trying to run past a wall or pillar or something, it will sometimes stick you to the wall like velcro mid-step and then swing the camera around you, complete disorienting you all together. Half way through the game I learned it was easier to stop trying to use the cover system as it just ended up annoying me to all hell.
• Punishing/Fake-Challenge Game Design: What I mean by this one, is stupid or ridiculous scripted situations in the game that are only there to serve to be hard to pass… scenes that are obnoxiously hard just to cause the scene to be longer than necessary or harder than necessary. One scene that sticks out in my head is during a get away your van crashes… it’s not bad enough that it crashes, but instead you have to repel wave after wave of police officers from different directions while the guy in the van fixes it, because it’s stuck in gear… oh that doesn’t sound retarded enough? How about the fact that the van can’t take “much more damage” so you have to protect it… OH, yea and don’t forget, if you touch the fucking van it kills you. I’m not joking here. Scenes like these in games are a developers version of saying “Fuck you” to their customers… gamers don’t think this shit is fun, it’s not challenging, it’s just lazy and obnoxious. Want another example? How about another level where everything is quiet until you get to the center of the level then uh oh! it’s an ambush, and bad guys run out from behind every rock and come at you… don’t forget the snipers all over the place too. These scenes are just so damn lazy, all they do is serve to keep you inside an “arena” fighting until the next cut scene, but aren’t realistic, challenging or well designed.
• Unforgiving Checkpoint System: Checkpoint save systems usually bother me to no end, because more times than not developers will think it’s a good idea to make me die and replay an entire level over and over again. This is a mechanic used to make a game feel longer than it really is, while just serving to drive the player crazy. Kane & Lynch has a fairly unforgiving checkpoint system (not too surprising given all the other poor design elements in the game) that caused me to replay large portions of the game many times over. It wasn’t horrendous, but it was certainly obnoxious enough to make me scream “Fuck” a few times.

You’ll notice that most other reviews mentioned how the gun firing is ridiculously inaccurate but I didn’t mention that as a bad point because it was that way with every single Hitman game in history, and is probably more realistic than some games pin-point accuracy. It’s surely annoying, but it doesn’t ruin the game persay.

You’ll notice that every gripe here that ruined the game for me were all technical issues that could have been corrected or ironed out during play-testing. If the game had good controls and a great cover system this game would have been a 7/10, if it had a more forgiving checkpoint system and got rid of some of the more ridiculous scenes in the game that are there just to punish you, it would have been a 7.5/10 or higher.

One design decision I did like a lot was during loading scenes voice-overs that progress the story play for almost the exact same length of the load sequence, so you are never just sitting there staring at nothing. This really helped make the load scenes useful and unobnoxious.

I’ll also say that the hardest/most frustrating parts of the game are right at the beginning, around the middle of the game clear until the end it stopped being so difficult and retry-heavy (except for the last few scenes) and ended up being pretty fun. It is almost like IO Interactive spent so much time trying to make the big city scenes so “real” that they forgot what makes things fun… where as some of the later levels (that take place in Burma or something) feel a little more “gamey” and relaxed in their insane requirements.

Graphics

What’s to say, they are terrible. These graphics and assets are straight out of Hitman Bloodmoney or any other Hitman game. The character models, little “bullet” decals that get painted on bodies when you shoot them, gun models, bullet tracer styles, cars, etc. etc. are all the same from previous Hitman games. Also the bodies of the character models are terrible, they look last-last gen (not just last-gen) while the faces only look last-gen, and are the highest detailed part of the game.

The buildings are bland building blocks dropped into a level and used to direct the player from point A to point B, repeated textures and building elements over and over to draw you forward through the level. There is next to no level interaction besides some glass panels from time to time.

Towards the end of the game there are more portions of the environment that are destructible, like crumbling stone and so on… this is a nice touch for what little of it that I saw.

Sounds & Voices

The gun sounds, reloading sounds and pick-up-ammo sounds are actually great in the game. That is one thing I noticed and really liked, I felt the guns felt solid and strong.

The voices are decent, they sound over-acted at times and a couple of times it sounded to me very clearly like the voice was recorded in a booth instead of blending well with the scene… it’s hard to say why, it just seemed so. Kane is way to emotional for being a super-badass which broke my expectation when I first started playing. Lynch is pretty good and the rest of the characters are well acted as well.

The characters do swear, especially “Fuck”, a lot… not a normal amount either… like a ridiculously huge number of times… to the point that you sort of wince at how stupid it sounds. For example, a conversation might go like:

• Kane: Shelly, get over there and blow that safe.
• Shelly: Fucking hell I will… you just fucking keep them off me you fuck. Fuck this shit!

Umm ok tourettes-McGuillicutty…

Conclusion [6.5 out of 10]

Kane & Lynch is a decent game, almost ruined by a handful of technical decisions that make the game really obnoxious to play and too easy to hate. There are moments in the game where you say “Oh hey, that was good” or “I’m having fun”, but the moments where you are yelling “Oh for FUCK SAKE” or “FUCKING LOCK ON” far outweight those moments. These obnoxious elements aren’t helped along by poor last-gen graphics and sloppy controls.

I don’t know if IO Interactive never did play-tests with this game, were rushed, or just have inherently bad taste, but I hope they learned a lot from this title for their next game.

Areas of Improvement

As we have done in the past, we try not to criticize a game unless we can give suggestions of exactly how it could have been better, those items are as follows:

• Better/Tighter Controls. This one change would have made the game a 7 out of 10 or so.
• Manual Cover System (like Rainbow Six Vegas). This would have made the game a 7 or 7.5 because the really obnoxious bugs with the cover system wouldn’t have gotten you killed or driven you crazy during the game like it does.
• Non-Punishing Level Design. If the levels were designed to be more fun and less purposefully punishing just to keep you in an area until the next cut-scene to artificially drag on the game, this would have possibly made it an 8 out of 10 or so. And it’s not that I mind “arena” gameplay (that is all God of War is), it’s just how it’s done. To make it unnecessarily difficult with stupid requirements that aren’t fun just kills it.
• Generous Checkpoint System. This would have pushed the game to a 8.5 or so given the checkpoint system was more fine-grained and not so coarse, so I wouldn’t have had to play and replay large portions of levels over and over again.
• Better Graphics. This would have given the score a .5 boost as graphics aren’t everything, but having the graphics be so poor didn’t help either.

Also one *minor* issue that was bugging me but I wasn’t able to diagnose completely until about half way through the game is that each time you pop out from cover, the location your aiming reticule was in will change… you aren’t always aimed in the same spot. So if you centered your reticule on a bad guy, and drop behind cover to reload, then pop back out to shoot him in the face, you have to re-aim again… this becomes really goddamn obnoxious in later levels and the only reason I can even think of having this in the game is to make the game artificially harder for the player.

It’s these little design elements that made playing this game painful and obnoxious, not fun. I really don’t know how or why IO Interactive thought these were good things to have. It’s like Home Depot sawing the handles off of shovels just to make them harder to use… for no particular reason.

If all the elements listed above had been addressed, even if the better Graphics hadn’t been addressed, Kane & Lynch would have been a Good/Great game, maybe an 8 or 8.5 out of 10.