Kane & Lynch: Dead Men
Walking, rather than running.
Kane & Lynch: Dead Men wants to be an intuitive third-person shooter, so, in the main, it plays things by the book. No problem there. Like a lot of titles in this crowded sub-genre these days, it's your typical two-stick affair, with left trigger to zoom into the now-obligatory over-the-shoulder view, and the control mappings are largely where they should be (with alternatives if you so choose).
Also, being a modern action game, it encourages you to make sensible use of cover, and makes it a fairly simple process to get to grips with. Sidling up to a wall, the game will assume you want to wall hug, but do the same against a low wall and it won't register as a cover point until you manually crouch first. Several other minor niggles soon become apparent, too, like the that you can't pop in and out of corner cover using the zoom view, or the enormously flaky hit detection. More often than not, you'll be facing enemies also making use of cover, yet what looks like a clear direct hit doesn't count - seemingly because your opponent was, in the game's eyes, in cover. Next to its direct competitors, Gears of War and Uncharted, Kane & Lynch doesn't quite feel as solid as the fantastic game engine suggests it ought to be, and that's a real shame after an awesome first impression.
Taking the fun out
On top of the definitely-not-terrible-but-not-quite-amazing combat, there are a few other points that tally up in the 'cons' column. Some of the missions, for example, have head-scratching, fun-free moments which negatively diminish your impression of the game to such an extent, you'll wonder how they ever made it through the design process, never mind the QA system. One in particular crops up on the message board time and time again, and involves a dump truck charging towards a hole on a building site with someone you need to save inside it. Now, killing the driver seems like the logical solution, naturally, but does the windscreen smash? Does it hell. This amazing, Teflon-coated bullet shield must bounce off about 100 bullets before it finally caves in, leaving you aggravated and exasperated over such petty-minded set-piece design.
Another level, set in Havana, sports a difficulty spike so severe I'd recommend having a Tetanus booster before you play. Seemingly content to throw an entire army at you and a helicopter at the same time, progress becomes a mixture of painstaking repeat play to figure out where the scripted spawn points are, and a little dollop of luck. Sometimes you'll be downed in one shot and have to rely on an adrenaline boost to revive you from a nearby team-mate, but more often than not, you'll end up shot because you were forced to revive one of your squad-mates. If you're lucky, they'll stay out of trouble, but sometimes it's fairly arbitrary as to whether they cop a stray shot or not.
While we're on the subject of the squad mechanics, for the most part, the game's content to just have Kane & Lynch involved, and as long as you're a half decent gamer you'll rarely have to issue commands. The AI does a pretty decent job of keeping him - or others - involved anyway. But, from time to time, it's always useful to tell Lynch and the other squaddies to fire on a particularly irksome target, especially useful as a suppression tactic so you can flank and take out weaker targets. If you want them to do all the dirty work for you, you can also send them off into a specific position, or just order them to generically follow you around (at which point they'll dynamically adapt, take up cover and select their own targets). Later in the game you get to play the sniper, taking out targets, and creating a safe passage for the person down below to follow at your command, but this is very much a one-off, and perhaps indicative that the game once had a greater squad-control element before someone decided it was more commercially viable as a straight shooter. Shame.
Heavy petting
As involving as the plot and environments are, the endless pedal-to-the-metal shooting does throw up another issue - the gameplay's a bit one-tempo for its own good. I hate to bring it up again, but current EG teacher's pet Uncharted demonstrates perfectly how interspersing the shooting with more varied gameplay alternatives not only helps the atmosphere no end, but ensures that the going back to the combat never feels dull. Unfortunately, there's so much shooting in Kane & Lynch, it overdoses on the stuff. And, as I keep saying, the combat's not the game's strongest point, either, meaning that it relies on the sheer 'wow' factor that each new scene brings, and what unhinged stunt Lynch will pull next when his medication is running a little dry. I can't overstate how much the bitter-sweet black humour coursing through the game drives you on. There's more personality in the opening cut-scene than most games manage over their entire length, so hats off for that (unless underneath that hat is a balding mullet, of course).