Two convicted criminals are broken out of police custody so that they can get the money they owe a powerful and deadly gang. Murder, kidnapping, assault on police officers, and other heinous crimes are all in a days work for Kane and Lynch.
1. Gameplay
The player takes the role of Kane, a convicted murderer who is being sent to prison. Somehow a gang of heavily-armed thugs manages to break him and Lynch out while the two are being transported. They go on the run together in an effort to clear Kane’s name and save his family. Make no mistake, however, Kane and Lynch are not “good” men. They’re two dangerous criminals who are willing to go any length to get what they want. It doesn’t matter who they have to mow down in the process. The player will be required to shoot dozens of police officers and will likely shoot a number of innocent civilians along the way. By the time the game is done, “resisting arrest” will be the lightest charge added to their extensive rap sheet. Unfortunately for gamers, Kane & Lynch: Dead Men offers very little in the way of true “entertainment”. The story was interesting to me because it was so different, but it was absurdly short (see the “Length” section below) and offered no real replay value. The two main characters are interesting enough on a very basic level, but the game spends far too little time developing them. Take away the few cutscenes that are sprinkled throughout the game and it’s essentially no different than stick figures shooting at other stick figures to escape being killed by a third group of stick figures. The absurdly short length of the campaign is one of the main hindrances to this game’s entertainment. This will be dicussed more in the “Length” section below. There is supposed to be a multiplayer mode but with no one bothering to play this game online, this mode is completely pointless and does not add to the length. The somewhat sad thing is that the multiplayer mode actually seemed somewhat interesting. A team of players has to cooperatively rob a bank and get money. The players leave the bank with a share of the cash and have to get to some sort of escape vehicle alive. This isn’t too abnormal, but there’s a twist. If one player kills one of his cooperative partners, the killer gets the victim’s share of the cash. The more cash you get, the more points you get. This makes it so that you have to trust your partners just enough to get the cash and survive, but not so much that you’d turn your back on them. Unfortunately, I never got to test out the dynamics of this game mode. Overall this is one game that I could definitely forget playing and would not be worse off as a result. The entire process just felt entirely unfinished.
As mentioned before, this game had a multiplayer mode that was somewhat unique and probably would have added a few more hours of gameplay onto the overall package, but there is no one playing this game anymore. Even so, I couldn’t see playing the multiplayer for more than a few hours.
What was frustrating was that I never figured out for sure if what I was doing made any difference. It was extremely difficult to hit any of the chasing officers and even when I did I wasn’t sure if that saved my life in some way. None of the police officers would shoot back, so the only reason I was shooting was to try and facilitate a getaway. Other than this, some simple aspects of the game seemed almost broken. The game is supposed to have a cover mechanic which allows the player to (figuratively) latch onto a wall or other object to hide against it. This is supposed to allow the player to quickly and easily pop out from cover to fire at enemies or, if necessary, Blindfire at approaching enemies. In reality, however, this mechanic hardly ever worked properly so I just ended up manually hiding behind cover. This allowed me to be even more precise about movements. The grenades hardly ever seemed useful either. Enemies would usually throw smoke or tear gas grenades, which I could easily pick back up and throw in their direction. However, I never used my own grenades because the throwing mechanic took too long and was far too imprecise to be useful. In real life, you can be a decent judge of your own skill and accuracy so you know how to throw an object to a desired distance. This is completely lost in games, so usually they compensate by telling you (relatively) how far you’ll be able to throw an object like a grenade and where it will generally land. This game did not include any of these helpful tips, so using grenades became a chore and far to ineffective to be worth any time. 2. Parental Notices
When an enemy dies and falls over, blood will pool underneath the body. Sometimes the gunshot wound can be seen on the body. If an enemy is shot with a shotgun, blood and other chunky “material” can sometimes show up on the wall behind the dead enemy. The body never seems any more damaged than any other, however. There is one section where the player will beat an enemy to death with a shovel. It’s not graphic but it is a demonstration of violence built entirely out of rage. In one section the player uses a bomb to enter a high-rise building through the window. The violence leaves one bank employee extremely bloody.
Lynch, the main character’s partner, has to take some sort of medication a few times during the game. The medication comes in the form of a pill, but the specific drug is never mentioned. However, the medication seems to be some sort of anti-psychotic or anti-hallucinogenic because when Lynch goes off his medication he gets extremely angry and sees things that aren’t there. If the player or another vital character gets enough damage, that character will go down and must be saved before moving on. In order to save the character, the healer must inject the character with adrenaline. This is a fairly simple process that is difficult to see because of lighting and color changes. If the player gets downed multiple times too quickly the player can overdose on adrenaline and instantly die. I found that if a minute elapses the player will live, but any time in between then will kill the player. Late in the game the player will have to fight in Cuba during a revolution. The player will stumble upon a heroin operation complete with tall poppy flowers and unmarked barrels (presumably filled with either poppy seeds or raw heroin). The player never sees anyone use heroin.
3. Other Factors
In the prison breakout chapter, a fresco of Jesus can be seen painted on one of the prison walls. How the prisoners got paint to paint the fresco is never made clear. In the final chapter, two of the players’ allies are trapped in a burning church. Kane and Lynch can choose to rescue their friends or leave them to die.
After escaping, the player will be taken to an unfinished mall construction site in order to go through a tutorial scenario. At the end of the tutorial, security guards or police members (I couldn’t tell which) enter the mall to investigate the gunfire. The player has to shoot and kill the cops to escape. In a separate mission, the player will have to participate in a bank robbery. The player will have to shoot and kill S.W.A.T. members and other police officers. Eventually, the player’s partner Kane will shoot and kill the hostages in the bank during a hallucination. The player will also have to go to a prison and break a few inmates out in a violent overthrow of the prison guards. It's not a pretty process and the automatic weapons the player uses don't make things any better. I have played a few games where shooting cops is not only allowed, it’s sometimes encouraged. But usually these games will try to justify it in some way (i.e. GTA: San Andreas and the corrupt cops). But this game does nothing to justify the player killing dozens of law enforcement agents.
There are also a few scenes where car chases are involved. The player will be in the back of a moving truck or van while police chase them. The player is supposed to shoot out of the back of the van at the pursuing officers.
Rather than get captured (and possibly tortured) by Kane and Lynch, one of the gang bosses, hiding out in Cuba, shoots and kills himself right in front of the player. The scene is fairly unexpected and does help the story a bit, but doesn’t make the story seem any darker than it already is. Execution In one section, Kane and Lynch are brought to a construction yard in the middle of the night by a group of very unhappy gang members. Kane’s wife and daughter are brought to the yard and the wife is executed in front of the group. Before the daughter can be executed, Kane and Lynch jump the gangsters and beat them up. Kidnapping Kidnapping is involved in at least one mission. In one mission, the player kidnaps a Japanese crime boss’ daughter and tries to ransom her to the crime boss. However, the ransom goes horribly wrong and the daughter ends up getting shot and killed. Language
On a scale from one to “swashbuckling pirate”, this game comes pretty close to walking the plank. Kane and Lynch either have Tourette’s or just love swearing. The language makes them seem as hardened (and somewhat evil) as they really are, but it’s the kind of thing to which small children probably shouldn’t be exposed.
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