Reviews
Even dying is given a different slant. Take too much damage and you will drop to the floor writhing while hearing voices from your past, some from your daughter, some you may have heard from previous cut scenes in the game. This however does not mean that you are dead. If your team mate can get to you in time and administer an adrenalin shot, you will pick yourself back up and get back into the action. Get two adrenalin shots to close together and you die from an overdose, so you do have to be careful when it all kicks off. When police turn up, you need to be aware of where you are. Venture too far in the open and you will die. Sometimes when you are engaged by enemy snipers you see a sniper scope image appear at the bottom of the screen which is the view of a sniper tracking you, and it’s a good time to get back into cover when you see that. It can be a little disorientating as the perspective is reversed. This feature is unnecessary as there are bullet trails that allow you to see where they are.
Kane and Lynch is a 3rd person action shooter, and there is a big emphasis on the action. From the outset you are running and gunning. There is a healthy selection of weapons available that you can arm yourself and your crew with. Graphically, Kane and Lynch could have delivered more. Characters are well rendered with sufficient detail and the cut scenes are well placed and look good, but the levels look a little bare and bland with textures seeming a little washed out colour wise, with dull, matt surfaces giving a sterile feel to your surroundings. More texture detail and more everyday objects would have prevented the levels from looking so boring. There are some very impressive moments in Kane and Lynch that are not so much graphically stunning, but just well executed. An example of this is when you go to visit a night club manager, and you have to navigate your way through a sea of dancing clubbers. It's moments like these that gave Kane and Lynch such a distinct flavour and helps immerse you in the plot. Kane and Lynch also offers semi-destructable environments which works very well in game. Shoot chunks out of a pillar Matrix style to get at a bad guy and watch tiles fly through the air from a grenade detonation. However, it would have been good to see more destructable objects as what you can destroy seems limited.
As you progress through the game, you learn more about both Kane’s and Lynch’s past, and how they came to be the people that they are. You also get to recruit some extra muscle into your gang that you can get to order around using controller buttons. This is where the game becomes a squad based shooter. You can assign gang members roles like defending, attacking or sticking with you. This is unfortunately where we come to a major flaw in the game and that’s with the AI. All too often when you assign a target to a team member they will rush forward and inevitably get shot at which time you must risk your own life to revive them with adrenalin before they expire. This substandard AI isn’t helped by that fact that coordinating your team is more of an overhead than it should be. Keeping everyone on you is the option you will favour to keep distractions to a minimum. Unfortunately, enemy AI fares no better either. You will frequently see enemies standing in the open, taking cover and still being completely visible, or even stood right in front of you. Though the enemy are accurate when they fire, they are all too easy to pick off and this is a serious drawback with the game.
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