Kane and Lynch: Dead Men

After stuffing my greedy maw with turkey on Thursday, I had a long holiday weekend to tackle one of the many games I recently bought. After careful consideration, I went with Kane and Lynch: Dead Men.

Like many of you, I was following the hype machine for this game for the last few months and I had really gotten into the idea of playing a "bad guy". I wanted to feel like the main character in Payback. I thought this was the experience I was going to get way back when The Getaway came out, but the exceptional story in that game was marred by the awful gameplay. Unfortunately, Kane & Lynch suffers from the same problems.

The game starts in a fairly promising manner. Nice opening cut-scene followed by a "mission" where you must escape from a deadly police barrage. Things feel frantic and appropriately fast-paced. Then you receive a weapon and things go immediately downhill. This game may have the worst controls/mechanics of any game I have seen this year.

Let's start with the aiming mechanic. At first everything seems fine. The left trigger is used to zoom and the right trigger is used to fire. There is an aiming "dot" when in regular view and a cross hair in zoomed view. This is totally fine control-wise. The problem comes when you start targeting enemies for head shots. Suddenly, you will notice that the bullets spray from your weapon in random directions around the actual targeting reticule, even in zoomed view. I actually had more head shots when I just stuck the reticule near an enemy instead of on one. This is bad. I could go into why this is bad, but if it is not apparent, then you wouldn't understand this blog anyway. I would even accept that regular-view firing was less accurate, but zoomed-view firing should always be spot on. Always. Especially when some of the game's main objectives require precise shooting. Inaccurate targeting using the excuse of "That's how real guns work" is amateurish. What it is really saying is "We are too lazy to balance combat correctly". Moving on.

Next up on the chopping block is the much-debated cover mechanic. The idea behind the cover mechanic is interesting at the very least. Getting the character by the cover object is all you need to do for him to take cover. This is a great idea on paper. It frees up a button for designer's to use for something else and, more importantly, eases gameplay for the player, again, on paper. Actual in-game execution of the mechanic makes you realise that getting into cover becomes a matter of being in a specific zone at the corners of cover objects. These zones are not indicated to the player in any way. Furthermore, when the cover object is taller than the main character and the character aims around the corner, the player is allowed to move his character into a position where he cannot see or hit anything but the wall he is using for cover. "Ally" characters often move in between the player's character and the camera making it impossible to see. These are all horrible for the player and could have been avoided, but there is one thing that is entirely unacceptable and came entirely from the level designers. In several places in the game, the player is allowed to use a cover object only to find that, upon reaching the edge, there is a piece of indestructible debris placed squarely in his line of vision. That is not only an insult to the player, it is disgraceful to game designers.

The squad control was decent. It played almost exactly like Freedom Fighters, so if you liked that, you should like this. I actually found it easier to send my guys in on a suicide mission first, then follow them and clean up the stragglers. The only thing to keep me from doing this on every mission was the health system, which was fairly inventive. Each person in your squad, including the player, can be shot and "killed". At this point, the character will writhe on the ground for a period before expiring. If a teammate can get to the downed character before he expires, he will give the downed character a shot of adrenaline to revive him. It works just like Gears of War, but with a time limit. The interesting twist on this mechanic is that too much adrenaline will kill the character. This means that if a character is downed too soon after being revived, there is no saving him. The only down-side to this mechanic in the game is that there is no indication to the player when it is safe for him to get another shot of adrenaline.

The real disappointment of this game, though, is that the story is excellent and is not supported by the gameplay. If IO Interactive had spent as much time on play-testing as they had on writing the story, this could have been the game of the year.

THINGS TO LEARN FROM KANE AND LYNCH: DEAD MEN
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1. If you give the player an aiming mechanic, especially a zoomed aim mechanic, make sure he hits what he is aiming for when the cross hairs are dead-set on the target. Otherwise you are robbing the skilled players, and they know it.

2. If you are going to make a game where being accurate with weapons is impossible, do NOT ask the player to be accurate to finish an objective. That is sadistic.

3. Automatic cover may work, but tell the player where the cover spots are. Trying to guess if you are safe in a firefight is not fun.

4. Do NOT encourage the player to shoot from cover and then block his view with an indestructible object. (I can't even believe this has to be said...)

5. Being able to help characters "return to life" is cool. It is a proven mechanic at this point and shows promise for many fun variations.

6. Games can have stories that are just as enthralling as any big-budget Hollywood film. (The story may even keep the most jaded of players playing through to the end.)