Kane & Lynch: Dead Men comes to you from IO Interactive, the creator of the popular Hitman game series. After four titles in a row for that series, IO have tried something different: a disturbing tale of two desperate convicts on a murderous rampage. Where Hitman was all about stealth and disguise, rewarding missions that were carried out unseen and unheard, in Kane & Lynch you make a lot of noise and spill a lot of blood.

Nobody gets away with what you just did

Kane and Lynch are Dead Men because at the beginning of the game, they're on their way to death row. Kane, the protagonist, has nothing: he has lost his freedom and with that everything his bloody work earned him, and now he's about to lose his life. However, his former comrades aren't willing to let him die and take his riches to the grave with him. The7, a group of mercenaries that Kane once belonged to, break him out with the help of an insider, another convicted murderer called Lynch. They have Kane's estranged wife and daughter, holding their lives ransom against the loot he took during a failed heist in Nicaragua. His life is forfeit regardless, as The7 accuse him of treason and will take their revenge, but now he has a purpose: he's desperate to save his wife and daughter.

Other people's lives and safety or principles like friendship and honor mean nothing to Kane, who's single-mindedly obsessed with his task. If there is a message in the game, it's one of warning: violence and greed will alienate you from society, your friends and your loved ones, and will finally cost you everything you value. Kane's past actions have put him in a terrible spiral where his only course of action is to kill. Even though the game's final chapter is called Choice, the player has no way of righting Kane's descent. Killing is pointless, it solves nothing, but there's a lot of it in the game. For the player, this can be a frustrating experience, as the only possible way of interaction with the game world ultimately brings no real reward. However, once you start to understand Kane, the despicable sociopath that he is, the game's powerful storytelling takes over.

The opening minutes of Kane & Lynch set the tone for the rest of the game. We see Kane's nihilism replaced with fear for his family, and his disdain towards Lynch and the two men's distrustful relationship turn into an uneasy alliance - all this against a backdrop of violence, insanity, betrayal and revenge. The criminals fight with such extreme aggression that it overwhelms local law enforcement, and early on the gameplay is strongly reminiscent of scenes from Michael Mann's movie Heat.

With the help of Lynch, the inside man, and several masked gunmen, The7 carry out a violent attack on Kane's prison transport. Kane and Lynch have to fight their way through the streets and alleys of Los Angeles to escape, and confront The7 in a scene familiar from any number of crime movies. Lynch is out of his league here: he's not a soldier, only a badly unhinged individual who hasn't received the right treatment. The game takes a stab at medicalization and the use of drugs as the only solution to psychological issues.

You can't take too many of those, you know

After hearing The7's terms - Kane's stolen loot and life in exchange for his family's safety - Kane starts his mission, with Lynch in tow as a watchdog. The two men aren't exactly friendly, and throughout the game their mutual antagonism keeps the mood tense. Both have a dark past of their own, and we find out more about them as the story progresses through cutscenes and in-game dialogue, and sudden moments of near-death introspection. When Kane falls down lethally wounded, hoping for an adrenaline shot that would revive him, the player gets short glimpses into his subconscious with haunting audio clips.

Adrenaline shots are a great twist to keep a balance between lethality and playability without resorting to health meters, medikits or extra lives. They require a little bit of tactical thinking - if a crew member isn't close enough, you won't get your shot in time. Also, too many shots in a short time cause you to overdose and die. You'll also find yourself stabbing needles into wounded comrades pretty regularly: if they die, it's game over. You need to be careful, because the game's weapons are deadly, especially in close quarters. At longer distances, none of the characters are particularly good marksmen with anything except a sniper rifle.

You can pick up a variety of weapons from fallen enemies (and the expendable henchmen you have in a couple of missions), but Kane and Lynch always start each chapter with predetermined weaponry. There aren't any unlockable weapons: the duo don't quite share the weapon fetish of IO's Hitman games. You can give simple orders - follow, attack or defend - to each of your crew members, and there's even a very basic inventory system for swapping weapons with them, but you'll probably use it just once in the game. Even though you control as many as 16 troops at one stage, the tactical squad control aspect of the game sees very little real use.

The game's cover mechanism requires a bit more finesse than the Gears of War "push a button to stay in cover" style: you have to move to the right spot behind a wall or a pillar, and your character either sticks to it for cover or doesn't. This forces more mobility than most shooters with a cover system, as does the fairly inaccurate shooting: often, you'll have to get close to your targets to take them out. Although you fight against diverse opposition - policemen, security guards, yakuza gunmen, mercenary soldiers and regular army - they tend to behave very similarly, either staying in cover, shooting from an unprotected position, or coming at you gung-ho. Pretty much everything coming at you is scripted; Kane & Lynch is less a tactical shooter and more a display of gun-crazy violence.

I should be afraid of dying, but I'm not

Of all the times an action game has claimed to be "story-driven", Kane & Lynch does perhaps the best job I've seen so far. Even Half-Life has long sections of navigating corridors and solving puzzles, where the story's put on hold for minutes. Kane & Lynch's constant, short dialogue is sown into the gameplay, bridging the gap and advancing the story between cutscene cinematics. Cutscene direction is left to the player most of the time, as the camera remains in player control even though the characters are going through scripted movements. This works surprisingly well, as there are much fewer hands-off breaks from gameplay than usual, giving the game a great feel of continuity. Levels begin and end with traditional, directed cutscenes that contain longer dialogue and a whole lot of disturbing scenes.

Kane & Lynch is not an easy game. It doesn't have hard puzzles or particularly difficult combat (only one console style on-rails shooting sequence had me reloading several times), but some of the subject material is cringe-worthy and as Kane, you both give and take a lot of verbal abuse. Kane, Lynch and their various accomplices act like the hardened criminals they are: rude, violent and unpredictable. They talk the part too: not on particularly friendly terms to start with, the men start insulting each other and swearing profusely as things heat up. Ask your crew members for ammo too many times, and you'll get f-bombs instead.

Foul language is only a small part of what's disturbing and shocking about the game. Although violence has been trivialized in games to the degree that players will happily shoot dozens of people, not really caring if they're clad in Wehrmacht or L.A.P.D. uniforms, Kane & Lynch makes you feel uneasy because the protagonists' actions are wholly unjustified. The game makes no attempt to explain or rationalize their exploits; on the contrary, chapter descriptions recap the events laconically from a non-involved point of view. For example, after finishing the "Breakout" chapter, you haven't really accomplished anything. You've only managed to escape, without the briefcase you were after, leaving behind "a disturbing body count of the L.A.'s finest".

Co-op campaign: a tight fit

Kane & Lynch sports a rare but welcome feature: co-operative campaign play with a friend. Co-op is, unfortunately, limited to split-screen play on one computer. The game was originally announced to have online co-op as well, but a tight released schedule must have forced IO to cut that feature. However, they deserve credit for not cutting split-screen co-op from the PC version, an unfortunate trend of PC console ports set by Bungie's Halo.

For split-screen co-op, you need at least one Xbox 360 controller (also known as the "Microsoft Official Xbox 360 Windows Controller"). Getting two sets of mice and keyboards to play nice together is probably quite challenging, but fortunately the game plays pretty well with the controller. However, if a gamepad is plugged in, the game defaults to that in single player mode too, which is a small annoyance. Unfortunately, Xbox 360 development has taken precedence in more design decisions than just this.

The worst part of Kane & Lynch is undoubtedly Games for Windows Live. It's amazing that Microsoft chose to copy the service almost directly from Xbox Live: the keyboard-driven interface, unnecessary confirmation popups that present a single option ("Accept" - what else are you going to do?), and frequent boots back to the title screen are my biggest gripes, when Steam and various individual games sport a far superior online service interface. I also find popups telling me about achievement unlocks and what my friends are up to a bit distracting during single player gaming, especially during a game like Kane & Lynch that relies on atmosphere and storytelling. Thankfully, you can sign out of GfW Live and still play both single-player and local co-op multiplayer.

Playing with a friend in co-op mode can be a lot of fun, and as a compensation for the reduced screen real-estate, the co-op campaign shows some scenes that are left unseen in single-player mode. Kane and Lynch split up on a couple of occasions, and seeing Lynch go crazy when he's left in charge of hostages during a bank heist in co-op is completely different from just hearing him over the radio in single player. Ironically, the co-op is a little too much fun: real-life interaction with the other player prevents you from getting sucked in by the story as you would in single player - it's like chatting throughout a movie with a friend, instead of being mesmerized by what's happening on-screen.

Fragile Alliance: online multiplayer with a twist or two

IO kept hush-hush about Kane & Lynch's online multiplayer during development; they didn't want other developers to copy their unique game mode, Fragile Alliance. It's unique all right, and a great idea - a co-op players vs. AI game that usually turns player vs. player before the end. In Fragile Alliance, a group of 4-8 players tries to pull off a heist - rob a bank or a jewellery shop, or steal cocaine from the Yakuza or mob money from a dirty politician. However, when one of the robbers (or "mercs") dies, he will respawn as an opposing Yakuza, bodyguard or policeman, and fight the other mercs.

Since whoever has the most money from heists at the end of a specified number of rounds wins the game, there's ample motivation to try and stop your former allies if you get killed - or betray them if you don't. Normally the loot gets split evenly between all surviving mercs, even if one player has done all the dirty work and collected all the money. This is where the game gets interesting: the player with the most loot starts thinking about keeping it all, and others see the tempting prize above his head. The first one to get careless and turn his back might just get a bullet in it.

Killing another merc turns you into a traitor, and you don't have to share the loot you've collected personally (but you don't get a split from other survivors' loot, either). You'll still have to escape in the getaway car or helicopter to keep the money, and if you want the loot your victim had collected, you'll have to spend several dangerous seconds collecting the money he dropped. Meanwhile, your victim has respawned as a guard, and will be looking for you, sweet revenge and an instant $200,000 bonus. The other mercs will also know you've turned traitor, and won't let you get away if they can stop you.

Fragile Alliance adds a level of strategy over regular competitive multiplayer: who can you trust, what strategies should you use, do you buy better weapons and armor or save your money to win the game. That's why the online multiplayer in Kane & Lynch works surprisingly well despite having only four maps, identical AI opponents every time, and very primitive server options - there's no dedicated server, and not even map cycling! Fragile Alliance resembles a board game that stays fresh only because of the players and their choices.

Ultimately, though, Kane & Lynch would have benefited from a more fleshed-out multiplayer. With more game modes (like team matches between cops and robbers), more maps and just tweaking Fragile Alliance with obvious features like map cycling so that the players don't have to pull off the same heist over and over again, it would have a lot more longevity as a multiplayer game. Right now it's best suited for LAN games for two reasons - there just aren't enough people playing online, and the game suffers horribly from lag.

Games for Windows Live does nothing to help Kane & Lynch. It only brings the clunky Live interface to the game; there are no cross-platform games between owners of the PC and Xbox 360 versions. You do get Achievements and Gamerscore from your feats in the multiplayer, but only if you've paid for a Live Gold subscription. You also need Live Gold to play ranked matches and "player matches" (how they're different from lowly "list games", available to regular Silver members, is hazy) as well, but don't bother: according to the scoreboard, there have only been around 100 ranked matches - in total - to date! The most ridiculous option when hosting a game is to limit it to Live Gold subscribers, when getting just 3 more players of any color to join can mean a lengthy wait.

Right now, if you want to have a great game of Fragile Alliance, get four to eight friends together and enjoy the teamwork, strategizing and the thrill of getting away with all the loot.

A view to a kill

Kane & Lynch looks a lot like an Xbox 360 title. The tell-tale signs of limited available memory - a distinct lack of variety in models and textures - are there, but the game compensates with flashy shader and particle effects. Another feature carried over from cross-platform development is great multicore support: when tested with a quad-core processor, all four cores are significantly loaded during gameplay, and they follow the same load pattern, suggesting that the game's rendering engine is threaded. As a result, any modern dual-core processor will run the game perfectly, and the video card becomes the only bottleneck.

There's some evidence of a rushed launch in the game's visuals - particularly animations, or lack thereof. Although you can see all armed characters reloading their weapons, weapon switching between your main weapon and backup pistol isn't animated - the pistol just appears in your hand, and your rifle, for example, on your back. Similarly, if you shoot a policeman who's sitting in his cruiser but scripted to come out later, he'll plop outside without opening the car door and fall dead to the pavement. Running into bugs like these takes a lot out of what's meant to be a photorealistic firefight.

The art direction and level design of Kane & Lynch, on the other hand, is superb. From the streets of L.A. to a bank vault, dark construction site, prison, crowded night club, the streets and skyscrapers of Tokyo, a battle-scarred Havana and the jungles of South America, each location is fresh and different. There's even a great, short subway sequence that doesn't involve any tunnel tramping at all! Only one location, the nightclub, is recycled, but even that's done on purpose: if you were careless about bystanders' safety on the first go, you'll get to see the results on the second.

Conclusion

Kane & Lynch: Dead Men has the makings of a great game, but it's flawed. Not beyond redemption like its protagonist Kane, but in grave need of patches to fix bugs, add polish, and flesh out the multiplayer. The way it incorporates some of the best aspects of IO's earlier work to a new franchise is very promising: especially the squad control, familiar from Freedom Fighters, which makes me wonder if there's more war in store in the sequel. Eidos has already announced the intent to publish one, but let's hope they do right by their customers and patch up Dead Men first.

Even among the amazing level of competition in PC gaming this year, Kane & Lynch stands out with its visceral storytelling. Telling a great story isn't as reliant on finish and polish as a fun multiplayer game, so Kane & Lynch gets the chance to shine in one area. Make that three: fantastic graphics design and an excellent musical score are equally important in making the single player campaign story one of the best in action gaming history. Movies and literature have long explored the dark souls of characters like Kane and Lynch, but for a big budget video game this is a breakthrough.

Kane & Lynch can't get top marks for all-round execution, though. Mysterious crashing plagues some users of the PC version, and there still isn't a patch out to fix the problem. In testing, we had to do a clean Windows installation to get rid of regular crashes. Pushing the game out for the holiday season might have made sense from the business point of view, but when the competition like Call of Duty 4 came out rock stable and nailed both single and multiplayer almost perfectly, maybe Kane & Lynch should have waited a little longer before breaking out.

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