Kane & Lynch: Dead Men

[EvilBoris]

Nope, that was one of the deal breaker for me whilst trying to play. you can invert third person, but not the first person aiming.

[hudson]

I tried the demo, but couldn't get a feel for it. One thing I did like was some of the music.

[cavalcade]

I tried the demo, but couldn't get a feel for it. One thing I did like was some of the music.

The music is totally fantastic. But it doesn't mitigate the rest of the game - it's like someone wearing a fluffy slipper while they stamp on your head.

That said, some deep perversion, or mental illness, is constantly drawing me to this on the shelf in GAME to repurchase it. I think I might love bad games. I believe putting myself through the torture of actually completing it might be cathartic.

Cleansing.

[chopemon]

I'm with you on that Cavalcade. I keep having to stop myself from buying it.

I am a sucker for Io games.

If you like the music, it's by Jesper Kyd (who has doen all the Hitman games, worked on Splinter Cell: SC and Assassin's Creed) and you can buy the soundtracks for the Hitman games.

I got the Contracts one and it is awesome.

[hudson]

Strange, when I was playing the demo there was an eerie bit of music and it made me think of Assassin's Creed. Now I know why

[Bleeders]

It's an IO game through and through, complete with bugs you'd find in Hitman games. I don't think it's half as bad as its made out, but that's just me I guess.

[mr_woo]

The music is totally fantastic. But it doesn't mitigate the rest of the game - it's like someone wearing a fluffy slipper while they stamp on your head.

That said, some deep perversion, or mental illness, is constantly drawing me to this on the shelf in GAME to repurchase it. I think I might love bad games. I believe putting myself through the torture of actually completing it might be cathartic.

Cleansing.

I'd wait until the after Xmas sales, it's already down to ?26.99 so it'll be probably away down to ?20 by January. Or just rent it and save yourself the cash

[Plisken]

half price in gamestation this week : ?22.49 on 360.

bout all it's worth mind...by mass effect instead

[Flinty]

Played the PS3 demo, I hated it, then had another go....I thought it was ok.

I wouldn't call it awful, just not great.

[TEENWOLF]

I must be playing a totally differeny game to most people here, I was looking forward to this from the previews and was put off when I read the negative reviews and thoughts of members here.

Saw it for a shade over twenty notes yesterday and took a chance on it.

It does have problems, mainly with the cover system and a few other things (the grenades are pointless, they seem to do no damage at all)

But Ive enjoyed playing through it, reminds me of Freedom Fighters but not up to the standard of that.

[kendra]

I guess I played the good version of the game =) Got it for £22.49 ages ago in Gamestation, only over Christmas period did I finish playing it, enjoyable in a Stranglehold kind of way (as in, shoot things, blow things up, ask questions later). Wanted to try a live game as that sounds interesting but alas not... also annoying you can't play as Lynch single player either, although I did complete the co-op game with a mate last week as Lynch... oh well :/

But yeah covering is awful and it's quite short which is also annoying...

[Eight Rooks]

Thing is, there's next to no reason to play the single-player again after you've done Morphine or whatever the hardest is. Most of the achievements you can get on a single playthrough, there's no score system or anything similar and the near lack of any real AI means practically speaking doing it again is going to be pretty much the same. Stranglehold has its fair share of problems but it does a much, much better job than Kane & Lynch of giving you an actual game under the WHOO STUFF BLOWS UP REEEAL GOOD aspect of it all.

[Spatial]

I thought the cover system was the least of the games problems.

How IO Interactive could have taken such an amazing concept and screwed it up so badly beggars belief. Instead of a gritty crime thriller you end up with some half baked guff that totally disregards all it's key aspects and the execution of it all is appalling.

Kane and Lynch are still brilliant characters in theory but they never maximise on their potential. The whole wacko Lynch thing is made to be such a big issue at the start but then, because they didn't seem to know how to keep it going, they decide to totally disregard it. He ends up with no Pills and drinking something that makes him care less? Wha?

And then he stops being the maniac that, not only killed his own wife but in game kills a

->Open Spoiler<-

bank full of people

in cold blood to being some sort of moral compass for the player?! Wha?

Plus the fact that the stupid design decisions made along the way mean you only get to experience Lynch's side of things in co-op which the game does it's best to make more of an obstacle than anything else (crappy vertical split screen and fiddling around with profiles).

The7 - what a waste. Such an amazing concept but totally wasted by portraying them as mercs with their own personal army, BTE's, Hind's etc. You don't even get to see enough of each one to figure out which is which. The Mute? Which one is that? Oh, I see it's at least five of them!

And then there's the technical issues and signs of struggling development - seriously at what point did they think that players wouldn't like to be able to swivel 360 on a mounted turret? Especially given that they see fit to have you being shot at from behind during the last section?!

Why is it no matter what sensitivity you crank it up to, Kane still reacts with all the speed of a laden oil tanker?

And changing Retomoto's daughter's hair to blond. Not a big issue, except you've just managed to pointlessly screw up some of the promotional material you've put out for your game.

And mumbling!!? Dear God in the last five years I don't think I've ever found anything more annoying than main characters mumbling under their breath constantly in game! Who thought that was a good idea? When Lynch started doing it, it was mildly amusing at first but when

->Open Spoiler<-

Jenny

started it too I was tempted to put a bullet in her myself.

There's a good game underneath it all, screaming and clawing to get out. You can see it in some parts like the really nice (but brief) cut scene at the end of the club. In the fact that after rolling around in the dirt in the construction yard both Kane and Lynch's jackets are covered in mud. The massive Colombian sky box standing on the cliff edge looked so good it made me say wow.

In fact some parts look really good but others look really, really poor and that's a clear sign that this didn't have the time it needed and was shipped probably 12 months too soon.

I could have written a better (and more involving) game than this. Played on the important aspects of Kane and Lynch, made more of Lynch's psycho tendencies and turned The7 in to the crime lords they should have been. After the construction site bit, have Kane's mission to be to track them down and kill them one by one. Cue various scenarios of infiltration, shootouts, backstabbing etc which would have made the environments more varied, and fleshed out The7 giving them all unique traits - the sadist, the evangelist etc

With it all culminating in one massive confrontation between Kane and Lynch who should have been at each other throats much more.

It would have been more gritty, much more action packed and truer to the game that IO wanted us to believe this could be. In fact they should be ashamed by what they've done and I can't believe that they're talking of a sequel.

Handy tip IO, if you want to start a franchise this is not the way to do it.

2/10 - and that's only because of the gratuitous use of the word f**k.

[MJ]

I was going to get this but the poor reviews put me off, so I tried the demo and after repelling down the building and smashing the window I turned it off and deleted it. The controls felt awful, the movement was clunky and it looked pretty bad. What a shame.

[Eight Rooks]

Personally I had very few problems with the basic premise of the story going from A to B, and was quite pleased they didn't do something as predictable as "now kill #1, now kill #2, #3, can you guess who comes next I bet you can't" etc., etc. I quite liked the fact that

->Open Spoiler<-

Kane was basically incompetent and got his wife killed, and it took Lynch to point out his Big Important Plan For Revenge had been falling to pieces from the word go

. I could quite easily believe that with the ending(s) written down on paper Io probably thought they had a "think about what you're doing for a second" angle going to rival Shadow of the Colossus. And please! A big confrontation with Lynch? Yeah, and make him cackle maniacally and give him glowing red eyes while you're at it, would you?

The execution was frequently godawful, amateur hour nonsense, there's no denying that, and I think everyone can agree while the game's obviously got pretty lofty ambitions it never, ever quite reaches them. But I liked the basic idea more than enough for it to get me through the game, for all the plot holes and parts it skips over. But then I think Mass Effect is wildly over-rated, so what do I know?