Normally it's the mediocre games that frustrate me the most. The games that are just a few steps away from being great. Kane & Lynch: Dead Men is LEAPS away from being great but for the most part if it kept going in its current direction it would eventually get there.


Most of these issues have been covered before but bored and annoyed so I feel like ranting (I seem to remember complaints before the game was even released).

Issue One: Swearing.
I'm not against swearing. I swear a lot. I have to make a conscious effort not to swear on BYOND. Kane & Lynch don't swear as much as they rape their lines with the f-word. Not the s-word, or the c-word or any other letter-words. Just the f-word. Over and over.
This isn't swearing like sailors its swearing like toddlers. You know, when they learn a word they aren't meant to say, and they just keep yelling it so people will pay attention to them.

Issue Two: Cover
Cover doesn't work. It's one of those 'rub against the wall and if you're lucky you might stick' systems. Anyone who has read one of my rants before will know that I'm a fan of the Gears of War 'press A to stick' style of cover, but it goes deeper than that.
Cover is a pain to maneuver, they could have done a lot better with that, however the real horror of the system is that cover is next to useless. Most of the time it offers no added protection from enemy attacks. I find I actually die more in cover than out of it because the enemies are focused on my head.
After you're in cover staying in cover also becomes a problem. A lot of the time you'll aim, then let go of the aim trigger and find you're not in cover anymore (which of course turns the quick peek-and-shoot into suicide).

Issue Three: Death
You die very quickly, but not in a Call of Duty 'you don't have much health, but you don't get hit very often' way. You get hit all the time in Kane & Lynch, and most of them you just shrug off. The problem is you randomly get shot in weak spots which will essentially kill you. In theory you can take ten shots, but sometimes you'll get that random bullet which takes out 90% of your health in one go.
The worst part is that sometimes you're in an area with a fair whack of enemies between you and the next checkpoint. In these spots you'll die a heap of times before you make it, and every one of those deaths is one of those extremely frustrating shots that shouldn't have killed you. That brings me to my next issue.

Issue Four: Checkpoints
You can't save during a level, and you can't start a level from a check-point you've already reached. This is one of the bigger factors for me. I'm at a point that is very annoying which is about five to ten minutes into the level (four check-points).
Its basically a stretch between check-points where statistically you will get shot by at least five of those random mega bullets before the next check-point. The stretch itself isn't hard in a mechanical sense, its just a case of clearing a section, moving forward, then repeating until you get there. Its just the whole lucky shot thing that ruins it.
I get so frustrated from dying and starting over I don't want to play anymore. I turn the thing off. When I've cooled down I start up again and have to work through four annoying check-points before it, by which point I'm so demotivated that I can't even be bothered attempting to beat the frustrating part.
Normally I don't mind this sort of system, but coupled with the extremely frustrating deaths it makes for a really, really painful gaming experience.

Issue Five: Accuracy
Don't bother lining your shots up. Remember in the Tony Hawk games where they'd make stats control things that should have been left up to the players reflexes and skills? Its like that but you can't even increase the stat. You aim the shot at what you want to hit, then it fires a bullet inside a rather large area around where you were aiming.
I'm not talking a GTA style 'size of the head' area, I'm talking bigger than the torso. Also, in most games that do this sort of thing, the first shot hits pretty close and it builds out. In Kane & Lynch the first shot is just as random as the last (but the aimer is moved around due to the recoil).
When you take into account that there is a lot of long range shot-outs this means you can aim at their chest and still miss the enemy entirely.
So when you're hiding behind something (taking just as much damage as if you were standing out in the open) don't bother to hold the aim button and line your shot up, just tap the aim button long enough to get it roughly where you want and hit fire. Your odds are the same. I get the impression someone made it work like this because they got a 'we're trying to be realistic memo' but forgot to actually run it by the rest of the team.
To give you an idea of how bad Kane and Lynch are when it comes to aiming stand up, take two steps away from your computer, then take off your shoes. In the time it takes you to take off your shoes neither Kane (with his assault rifle) nor Lynch (with his shotgun) would have hit you even if they were standing where your computer is. As a side note Lynch would have said the f-word 47 times in that same period.





These are the reasons why Kane & Lynch: Dead Men joins a very short list of games I just don't care about completing. I'm honestly struggling to think of other games to go on the list. I've stuck with some god-awful games in my time simply because I don't like quitting games. Normally at the very least I get stubborn but this is so sucky I wont lose any sleep over not completing it.

The only reason I care enough to post this blog entry is that if you fix those five things you end up with the sort of game that's good enough you'd be willing to buy copies for your reluctant friends just so you'd have someone to play co-op with.