Kane & Lynch hands on
“Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.”
- Robert Deniro (Neil McCauley), Heat
It would be easy to lose Kane & Lynch in the background noise of the coming holiday season with big titles like Halo 3, Mass Effect, and the recently released BioShock. I almost made that same mistake. After I had a chance to sit down and play through a scene of the game and talk with an Eidos representative, I realized that Kane & Lynch has a very good chance of being an essential part of many game libraries.
Before I get into gameplay, the most important thing about Kane & Lynch, at this point, is how it came to be. Unlike a lot of games that come out from major publishers, Eidos made some basic requirements about Story. They wanted a game that could deliver an unpredictable story line that has drama and is also strong enough to carry the game and not be overwhelmed by the gameplay (which I’ll get to in a moment.) So, in coming up with ideas, Eidos and Io Interactive went to the tried and true crime drama. Heat and Dog Day Afternoon were cited as major influences on Kane & Lynch. As a fan of crime movies, a major aspect of a good crime drama is the unpredictability. Will they get away with the money? Will they escape the police and live happily ever after? Will they go down with guns blazing? Crime dramas have a high degree of uncertainty in how things could play out. Such is the chaotic nature of a life of crime, I suppose.
Another ingredient that Kane & Lynch provides: dramatic characters. The characters of Kane and Lynch were specifically designed to reflect each other. Eidos described them as “two guys who both want to be alpha males, but actually they’re both probably beta males.” So, there is a constant feeling of oneupmanship. Even in the 10-15 minutes of gameplay I had, the dynamic between these two characters was almost immediately apparent. Even in the midst of a VERY chaotic running gun battle with police, the narrative shows through. This goes back to the key goal that Eidos had; the gameplay must not get in the way of the narrative. They don’t want to make just another crime game. They want to produce a crime drama.
That difference, between a game and a drama, is key. Many of the gameplay decisions in the game revolve around that fine balance. For example, the use of automatic (but well-placed) save points throughout the story. Io doesn’t want players to be popping in and out of gameplay to save the game before each major battle. Their belief is that this kind of behavior pulls the player away from the game and away from the narrative. A narrative which was fully storyboarded before production began. The pacing is important in any good crime drama, and that fact isn’t any less relevant just because this is a video game.
Although, at this point, there are inevitably going to be some of you that are wondering, “What about the gameplay, itself?” Kane & Lynch is a third-person tactical shooter. That means that there are going to be lots of po-po to take down, and you’re going to have a crew of guys to give orders to via three buttons. After playing a lot of tactical shooters like GRAW and Rainbow Six, the crew mechanic in Kane & Lynch was VERY easy to pick up and understand. This button tells them to target someone, this button tells them to follow you, and this button tells them to advance to a specific location. That’s it, and honestly, in the heat of battle, the three button commands work really well. I had my guys running around and giving me cover in no time.
Things were going great until a big red first aid cross popped up. Aw crap… a crewmember was down, and if you OR any of your crew dies, you will have to go back to the last saved game. So, I crouched down and ran out to heal the wounded crew member. Granted, this isn’t a new feature or anything. It works just like it does in GRAW. It also adds to the feeling that I am controlling a crime movie. If you’ve watched many crime movies, grabbing rounded team members and trying to desperately get away is par for the course. Eidos also wanted to make sure that Kane & Lynch was different from Freedom Fighters in that the crew are fully supporting characters.
They found that a lot of people, when playing Freedom Fighters, would send in the nameless, faceless fodder and then sit back while they all got gunned down. Kane & Lynch seeks to make your crew more than just faceless meat shields. They are part of the story. You’ll get to know them as you progress through the game. And letting them die is not an option.
After I managed to heal my teammate I continued running down the street, picking off cops, sprinting around a corner towards my objective… and I came upon a rather harrowing vista. I was looking down into a bus terminal filled to the brim with cops. I reloaded my weapon, and began the process of trying to pick my way through the chaos. This scene highlighted, for me, what level design should be in a game like this. It’s hard to describe exactly what ran through my head, but I kept going back to Deniro. WWDD? What would Deniro do?
The little time I had to actually play through the game took this from a “wait and see” to a “must play”. So, if you love heist movies or ever wanted to play through the SWAT games as a bad guy, then I think you will definitely enjoy Kane & Lynch: Dead Men.
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Joe (Aeropause)
