Kane & Lynch

When reviewing a game, it is generally accepted that said reviewer should finish a game before providing a final verdict, of which I am happy to agree with. Kane and Lynch, however, is one game I am willing to break this rule for; or rather, willing to break my own legs to avoid playing at all.

Let me explain. I remember reading about this game prior to its release, in which it sounded interesting, gripping, and generally, well... good. Then the game itself was launched, inundating the shop I work at with hundreds of copies of a game with an interesting cover and more interesting name. Then we get to the back of the cover. At this point, my expectations sunk like a bleeding stone. The graphics even on the case for a "next gen" game should never leave it looking like Hitman 2.Don't get me wrong, Hitman 2 was a very good looking game - for the little Gamecube.

My grasp of the basic idea behind Kane & Lynch: Dead Men is that they're two blokes who don't like each other very much but are forced to work together. Ironically, this appears to be the main story behind Dead Men and myself.

It's not like there could be any hardware constraints, Kane & Lynch is a current (and face it, 360 and PS3 are out now, making them the current generation of consoles) generation game, only being available for Xbox 360, PS3 and uber PC. Having actually played it, I have no idea why it looks so bad.

The enemy AI appears to be based on one soul objective: fill Kane with bullets - which would be fair enough if they didn't frequently charge at a man with a machine gun, hoping that their comrades will absorb all the bullets for them. One interesting thing about the game is the idea of the environments being quite destructible; no wait, that's not interesting, Red Faction had that nailed quite a few years ago and Stranglehold pulled it off with really rather nice visuals only a few months ago. Maybe the ally AI? Maybe if the squad system off Rainbow Six ... I would say Vegas, but come to think of it, any of the Rainbow Six systems would have been an improvement on Kane & Lynch. The only thing your allies can actually do well is shout at you.

And so, having spotted these problems before the end of the first level, I knew I wasn't going to enjoy this game. In fact, I only made it to what I guess was half way through the second level before wanting to gnaw off my own hands. I guess if I'm going to be mean about this game, I should start from the top.

Firstly, as player one, you play Kane. And player one you will play because I doubt there's anyone else willing to play at all. So, Kane is the alias for the character you play, and Lynch is the alias (and surname) of your main ally. Enter problem number one, why? "Kane's" real name is Adam Marcus, now forgive me, but how can you get Kane from Adam Marcus? Nevermind, I guess I can let it go.

Next off, sticking to the character bios page of the instruction book, we find "Nationality: British Citizen" on Kane's bio. I may be one of the least politically informed members of this planet, but I am pretty certain that there are some complications involved in putting the citizen of another country on death row in America, especially a British Citizen... Should that turn out to be false I do have quite a bone to pick with his accent. In what world does a slightly sinister American accent sound like any British accent? Who the holy hell dropped the ball on that one?

The great thing about video games is that death isn't generally a painful experience. I say generally, because I've never experienced such a bad death system in any game I've played to date, and I've played Body Harvest on the N64. Death in a game generally involves being shot, laughed at by your enemies, laughed at by your real friends (if you have any) and restarting from some form of checkpoint. Bish bash bosh, job done.

So many times, we see developers messing with this system to try and make it... something. I don't think "better" is the right word, because dying works pretty well as it stands. Either way, on Dead Men, the system first appears to work out that you get shot, you die, you then have to watch Kane bleed to death while hearing some weird voices and the screen goes white, very slowly. The whole thing takes so long, you could leave it to play out on its own while you go make a cup of tea for you and everyone in your neighbourhood.

Next time I died, I started to frantically mash the pad to speed the process up a bit, only to find one of my allies had come over and punched me in the face, having apparently just given me a huge dose of adrenaline. After which, I became fearless and started jumping in front of anything with a gun, expecting a magic injection to cure me of all ailments. But no, although in the wonderful world of Kane & Lynch a small injection can cure a shotgun blast to the face, 2 or 3 of these injections counts as an overdose and you die... um... more. Somehow.

Having made a brave attempt at soldiering on in this game, I became very worried that I had somehow broken one of the analogue sticks on my control pad, only to find everything was working perfectly and the aiming system was about as agreeable as a heavily pregnant woman skewered atop a spire. Movement starts off sluggish, before flying off in any direction of its choosing so long as it's not where you wanted to be aiming.

The camera itself is... odd. Now, when it comes to cameras on games, I'm usually very forgiving. Up to the point where I think my view is constantly being obscured for some cheap effect. I wouldn't describe it as "over the shoulder", more as "film crew attached by a steel tube at a weird angle". The camera switches from being way to far to the right, to looking over the wrong shoulder when it pleases, with no way to remedy it at all.

You allies themselves seem to be made just to make your life difficult, not by merely catching bullets for the person you were previously aiming at, but by being the ones carrying all the ammo in the world and only sharing when they feel like it. Genuinely, only when they want to. In my opinion, the middle of an armed robbery is a bad time to decide you don't want to share ammo with the only person who can shoot while you play with something on the wall.

And finally, we end where I gave up forcing myself to play the game. For some reason, no one in Kane & Lynch can finish a sentence without swearing at least twice. Don't get me wrong, I don't care about swearing at all, in fact I think it shows humanity, or something to that effect, but I do mind when the ration works out at "word 1:1 expletive". When trying to run out of the bank on level 2, I was shot by a sniper, which I thought was odd because I managed to put a pillar and a wall between myself and the sniper, but I noticed that when Kane hit the floor, he had a bullet hole in the crotch. All in all, it's very clear that the game's maturity levels are on par with a game of "who can pee the highest?"

Introduction & The Godfather

As part of an assignment, I have to maintain a blog on apparently any topic of my choosing. Considering the perks of my job - I can't say what they are or where I work - I think a weekly games review could work.

So, let's start with The Godfather on Xbox 360. First impressions are frankly, bad. It looks like a straight port from the PS2 version and as anyone who read a review of Pimp My Ride will know, this is a very bad thing. It can be argued that the graphics hardly push the 360 to its limits. More realistically it can be argued that the poor machine would be very, very bored with a small chance of suffering dementia playing The Godfather.

Although I will accept that it's set in New York in 1945, EA have done something which really annoys me on GTA clones. And face it, that phrase can be used to describe any free roaming game involving cars, guns and crime. The annoying thing is that the roads all seem to look about 3 miles wide and are met with a tiny, overpronounced curb and the buildings surrounding the roads are as square and flat as something really square and flat. Let's say a big glass box.

That's a pet peeve out of the way, now down to being more mature and professional. In an attempt to give the vehicles weight (all 4 of them), there's a very subtle sound from the suspension when you drive over a bump too fast. An original idea, mostly because no one actually cares. The illusion of weight was only slightly destroyed when a hit squad chased me at blistering speed, and rammed me off the road. Literally off the road, the pavement and indeed the laws of physics when my car jumped 15 feet in the air and spun around, landing completely unharmed. Speeking of blistering speed, another thing I noticed very quickly was that the game governed the speed of everything chasing me based on just how much they wanted to kill me.

Driving more vigorously when chasing someone is fair enough, but these are 1940's American cars travelling at mach 2. On the other hand, some of the cars the game will let you drive can achieve mach 1 and corner like house flies when the mood suits them. The rest of the time, they'll happily slide uncontrollably into a civillian sideways, crushing the poor soul and making you very unpopular with the local police.

I suppose at this point I'm just being a bit childish about the driving sections, partially down to having titles such as Forza Motorsport 2 on my shelf, but mostly down to enjoying the downright evil reviews by one Yahtzee Croshaw. On a serious note, The Godfather is actually a rather enjoyable game, with an interesting (if stupidly named) control system.

Rather than the traditional idea of pressing buttons until you're foaming at the mouth or even the "radical" idea of using timed controls (I'm looking at you Assassin's Creed), The Godfather replaces the use of buttons in favour of controlling your mobster's hands using the right analogue stick. One problem of this is that the only way to do any melee attacks is to lock on to your victim, even if it's a bin in the street that rubbed you up the wrong way. The system takes some getting used to, which the game caters for by kneecapping all your victims for the first few missions so you can spend hours removing their teeth without sucking any bullets yourself.

The targetting system itself is very good, similar to Crackdown's system of locking on and selecting a body part to shoot, although it has its flaws. Firstly is the selection. For the live of me, I have no idea how it works. In a room full of enemies, the game chose to target someone far away in the corner of the screen picking his nose, rather than the bloke dead ahead getting very appreciative of his tommy gun. There is also the use of weakspots at the shoulders, knees and crotch (seriously, when I found this out I explored it extensively). A headshot is an instant kill, which is fair enough as long as you can actually hit your target, and the weakspots occassionally disappear.

The story is basically all the hits in the original film you didn't see and some you did (such as Fontane and his horse), with some dialogue lifted straight from it, which is nice. The rest of the game involves being not so gentlemanly and smashing merchant heads off cash registers to get them to pay protection money. This however, is genuinely fun, provided you don't push them too far leaving you to either kill them in any manner you choose, or running off like a little girl and pretending nothing happened. Although not as fun, the latter is the best way to make money.

So that's covered the driving, shooting and the missions. All I have left to say is that the Mobface thing is totally pointless to me as I can never be bother to make my own character because the graphic artists couldn't play nice with the writers and decided to be very lazy, and there's the fact that everytime I do try using one of these, I usually make some ugly Spanniard after playing around for hours on end.

All in all, I recommend The Godfather until Grand Theft Auto IV comes out, provided you can still stand the sight of PS2 "power".