Micro Reviews: Kane And Lynch: Dead Men For The Xbox 360

Micro Reviews; everything you need to know in less than 500 words.
Reviewing: Kane And Lynch: Dead Men For The Xbox 360.

Game Play:
Kane and Lynch is an action orientated third person shooter. Uses the cover system and doesn’t use a health meter. Squad based tactics, allowing you to order your allies to attack specific targets, advance to a certain area, or just follow you. You can equip your teammates as you like. Very visceral game play, and an equally gritty story. Lots of focus on character development and interaction. Feels a lot like gears of war crossed with Grand theft auto IV, but not pulled off as well as it could be. Checkpoints are many, so dying isn’t an issue. When you die one of your allies may give you an adrenaline shot to wake you up if they are close enough. Interesting idea, works well.

My Opinion:
As I said it’s like GTA IV crossed with Gears of war, but combining the poorer traits of the two. It’s not bad, it’s just outshined by many of the better games within its genre. The gritty, dark criminal story is walked all over by GTA IV, and the action focused gun fights are outdone by Gears of war, which incidentally also has a much better cover system. Kane and Lynch’s cover system is crap, half the time you can’t get into cover and the rest of the time you drop out of it at inappropriate moments. I put this down to the cover being automated. Weapons are few and bland, once you have the MP5 it’s all you need, ammo is no concern as allies can always give you more and the hand to hand move is a one hit kill.

It feels like it’s trying to be Gears of War in a contemporary setting, and to be honest if they’d use the GoW engine, it would have worked a lot better. Further more the story is generic at best and it seems the writers thought that one of the most important ways to get that visceral (I love that word) feel, was to have everyone shout fuck at the slightest provocation. This just makes the game seem immature. Saying that I do admire the writers for some of the things they did in game to keep it ‘real’ and ‘dark’. But in the end the story just didn’t grab me like GTA IV did, and considering some of the things we where promised, Kane and Lynch falls abysmally short of the hype.

In the end it’s not a bad game. It’s just run of the mill with a few poor quirks. The concept was good, and if executed differently the game may well have been a winner, but some decisions made very early on the design process prevented this from becoming a reality.

In Closing:
Gameplay: 6/10 Pretty generic action shooter.
Graphics: 7/10. They do the job, Kane and Lynch are well detailed, but the rest is mediocore.
Sound: 6/10. Guns don’t sound like guns, dialogue is very well done, but a little over the top sometimes.
Fun rating: 5/10. I wouldn’t spend a whole evening on it, but completing it is not a chore.
Overall: 6/10. Generic. Worth it for a few quid if you like action games. Otherwise don’t bother.

-Evis T.
http://www.xomba.com/user/evis_t
https://www.triond.com/users/Evis+T

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