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Kane and Lynch for the PC is like a fine wine that you have been waiting years to open. You waited patiently for years to open it, relishing a glass to taste. But when you finally open it, it is sour and has fermented due to a faulty corking process. In a nutshell this is the experience you will have when installing and playing Kane and Lynch.

Kane and Lynch: Dead Men, puts us in the shoes of Kane, a hardnosed criminal that was part of a group called The Seven. He has been marked as a traitor by the group and they have Lynch and company break him out of prison has he is being transferred to his execution. They want him to return a briefcase that he ran off with before bringing it back to The Seven. They give Kane 24 hours to get it back or they will execute his family. To make sure he does the job, they send Lynch with him, promising to give him Kane’s seat in The Seven when the briefcase is found. Of course, lots of backstabbing ensues and you end up looking to extract revenge on the The Seven for all the pain they have caused you and your family.

Reading that, it sounds like it could be a deep and complex narrative. And it will be, if you get the game to install. Trying to get Kane and Lynch to run on an above average Windows XP Service Pack 2 machine, per the Games for Windows initiative, is like a dentist slowly extracting teeth without Novocain and putting one foot firmly in your crotch while doing it. The game takes forever to install, and upon loading the first level of the game, you are crashed out to your desktop. Sometimes you get an error, sometimes you don’t. Most of the time, it came down to a Virtual C++ R06025 error, which Eidos currently says it cannot duplicate, even though it is posted all through their support forum. Installing Vista cleared up the issue, but if you say on the box that your game supports XP, it better do so. And OS upgrade should not be required if you mention the older OS on the box.

Finally getting into the game, you notice a fair amount of detail in the characters in the game. Both Kane and Lynch show a surprising amount of detail in their body motions and facial animations. Characters show battle damage as you play through the level and it adds to the immersion that these guys are taking damage. As you take more damage, the screens start to turn red and you start staggering due to so much body trauma. It is a new way to handle damage that should be used by more games. Most of your crew and bad guys also show a fair amount of detail, but characters models become repetitive after going through several levels. Levels are very diverse and run the range of a street battle (reminiscent to the bank heist fight in Heat), a crowded nightclub and even dropping into a civil war in Cuba. You never feel like you are going through the same sections of a map over and over which again adds to the immersion factor.

The voice work in the game is good, but tends to push the boundaries of obscenities a bit much. Cursing to add to the atmosphere is one thing, but cursing just to curse is a bit much. But the guys handling the main characters add a lot of dimension to them and make you feel the prisons that they are trapped in. Most of the main cast for that matter has some great voice work that adds to the already great job done by the main characters. Weapons sound strong and give off a lot of feedback. Grenades on the other hand seem a bit weak, sounding more like a low level firecracker than a thunderous blast.

The game adds some new mechanics to the third person action genre, like rappelling down a building, and a reactionary body contact system. Throughout the game, you will find yourself having to scale down buildings, cliffs and other high areas, and you will do it via rappelling. Problem is that there is not much to it. You don’t have to gauge distance or force of your rappel. Just tap the down key until you get to the bottom. It could have become more of a mini-game to rappel down and added a little more to these sequences in the game. The other thing was walking through the crowd, you will slow down and tilt and turn to get through them. This is most evident in the packed nightclub, but it made the movement seem real.

The game takes a unique approach to healing your character and the others in your squad. Instead of finding health packs or first aid kits, you and your team carry adrenaline kits. When you or a team member take too much damage, the screen goes black and white and you start hearing voices from the game from sequences you have already played. At this point, a team member will try to get to you to give you a shot of adrenaline, which will get you back in the fight. However, you can only receive so much adrenaline during a certain period of time, so if you get too much, you end up dying of an overdose. It is a neat way of doing health, but the time period between the shots where you would not overdose seemed arbitrary and you could never gauge if you were going to die or not, until the screen went black.

Multiplayer might be good. I say might, because as of now, the multiplayer is broken in a big way. It is almost impossible to get a game going, because the server always tells you there are no games available. I decided to see if I could get anyone to join me, by hosting a server. Two hours went by and not one person joined. I went to the Eidos forums to announce the server, and I was hit with a barrage of people that stated they were trying just a few minutes before to get into a game. I gave them the map and other game info to do a custom search, but it did not matter, they just could not connect. Other Live games work fine, so I have to assume it is a Kane and Lynch thing. And the bad thing is that the multiplayer mode, Fragile Alliance sounded good on paper. You start a bank heist with up to 7 other players, but at any point, you can turn traitor, shoot them all and take the money for yourself. It sounds like a great mechanic, but it is hopelessly broken on the PC side. Co-op multiplayer is there, but one person has to use a 360 gamepad (no other game pad is supported). The box mentions cross platform play, but it is not in the box, so it was either a typo or a dropped feature.

Kane and Lynch: Dead Men does a fair amount of things right, and spins a great story filled with intrigue and mystery, and pulls no punches. The endings that you will get are not happy and will leave you either bitter or upset, but it fully defines the world that these guys live in. But having to upgrade to a whole new OS to play the game and not getting to play multiplayer, due to it being completely broken is unacceptable, and kills the mood that is built up through the actual game. Sadly, this is a property that could have had a lot more in the way of sequels, but lackluster sales on top of publisher indifference to the customer and terrible technical issues make it a game to pass on at this time. Kane and Lynch: Dead Men gets a 1.5 out of 5.