Product Description

Kane & Lynch: Dead Men follows the violent and chaotic journey of two men - a flawed mercenary and a medicated psychopath ¿ and their brutal attitude towards right and wrong. This volatile partnership combined with innovative technologies allow for an unparalleled gaming experience. Kane & Lynch: Dead Men will immerse players into an emotionally intense crime drama with unflinching action. Lo-Interactive's proprietary technology will deliver fluid high definition graphics and lighting, highly destructible environments, massive crowd AI, single, co-op and squad-based combat, a cinematic interface, and non-stop dialog between Kane and Lynch. The title also features innovative two-player co-op and groundbreaking online game play.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3990 in Video Games
• Brand: Eidos
• Released on: 2007-11-16
• ESRB Rating: Mature
• Platform: Windows
• Format: CD
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .50" h x 5.25" w x 7.50" l, .20 pounds

Features

• This is the violent and chaotic journey of two men - a flawed mercenary and a medicated psychopath. Each hates the other but must work together to save themselves. Play Kane in single-player mode and either character in two-player co-op mode.
• Violence Erupts in Meticulously Created Safe Worlds: Realistic and responsive environments and crowds react when events get of out control. Manipulate the environments and crowds strategically to complete objectives.
• Wide Variety of Intense 3rd Person Game Play: Rappel from buildings, firing on the run or from moving vehicles, launch surprise attacks, lay down cover fire, and shoot blind from around corners, hurl smoke, tear, and incendiary grenades
• Fast and Iintuitive Combat: Lead a crew of criminal mercenaries to increase your chance of survival. You can also fight alone, you will automatically draw fire, throw grenades, lay down cover, and engage in close combat with their own signature moves.
• Two-player Co-operative Game Play: Team up and play the full story with a friend as either Kane or Lynch. At any point in the game you can choose to play the next, or previous, levels in co-op. Innovative Multi-player Levels: Up to 8 players.

Amazon.com

Customer Reviews

A Poor Game From Eidos!!?!
Kane & Lynch is outdated fare for pc-gamers with years of experience speeding or slogging or sneaking through generations of FPS games. As far as ports go, it's not the most disappointing I've ever played (WHY DIDN'T HALO INCLUDE CO-OP!!!). K&L attempts to bring squad-based combat to the seedy crime story shooter sub-genre of gaming. It does not succeed. Unfortunately for its publishers, it is probably the least competitive FPS on the PC game market today.

(I don't know how good it looks on an x-box or PS3, and I don't really care. This is a PC game review, so if you love playing this game on your console, please observe that I am only reviewing the PC port of this game.)

The first problem with K&L is the poor AI. The AI controller feels ancient after playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl and Crysis. Opponents and teammates go straight to objective points (cover positions, good firing positions, or ordered destinations), without utilizing cover or providing covering fire. Also, your teammates sometimes, momentarily, stick on walls or cover while running past, which demonstrates, among other things, pathfinding problems in the AI.

The zoom/aim fire is severely outdated. Iron-sights have been an industry standard for years in the PC shooter market, and the fact that K&L uses an old mini-zoom with a crosshair change instead of well rendered iron sights significantly drops its comparative worth.

K&L's graphics appear last-gen or mediocre when compared to its competitors (Crysis, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl). Even with tweaking to max the graphics on my machine, the K&L graphics weren't as smooth or realistic as any of the other three games listed. This might be harsh, but playing K&L right after finishing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the graphics in K&L were like cartoons.

Speaking of tweaks, this game actually required them. I personally take it as a bad sign when a game has problems playing on default settings in a system with better than recommended specs. I do tweak my games and hardware settings for performance, sound, and graphics enhancement, but a game should run smoothly, if not maxed out, when loaded onto a computer with better than recommended specs. K&L doesn't do that. I had to tweak my settings just to get it to run smooth. The publishers just rushed too hard, and compatibility suffered. This is poor coding like I haven't seen since Max Payne, that gem of a game, showed us all what good, tight code could do for a game.

Scripting in K&L is much less than smooth. Enemies can spawn three feet in front of the player if one moves too quickly for the heavily scripted AI to keep up. For example, I took the left hand slope/path toward the docks from the church. Unfortunately, I moved to the exit too quickly for the game to register, so it spawned five enemies right on top of me. Poof, there they were. This should never happen. I haven't seen spawns this visible since the 90's. More than anything else, multiple bugs of this kind, throughout the game, demonstrate very, very poor scripting.

Squad controls are extremely limited. The game doesn't allow you to hotkey the squad command submenu orders or hotkey individuals in your squad. This might sound like nitpicking, but there have been some really good squad command control structures offered in squad based PC titles over the past five years, and the K&L team didn't use any of them. In the end, the squad based controls, especially when combined with poor AI pathfinding, where more frustrating than helpful. I ended up just beating the game using ancient run and gun tactics, and only using the squad commands when they were required.

Combat controls also suffer. The fire-from-cover feature is a cool addition to gaming, but please let us control our character. Titles in the Splinter Cell, Metal Gear, or Gears of War series allow you to key into and out of cover in their control systems. Having crates or walls GRAB you when you're trying to walk away from them is really annoying. So, in this area, K&L falls short of both old and new titles.

Finally, the game is way too short. Frankly, for fifty bucks, I expect twelve hours of straight through game-play at a minimum. I don't appreciate sitting down during the week to warm up for some serious weekend game-play, only to beat the game in under five hours. It was sad. Even with all of the frustrations, bugs, and annoyances, the game didn't take up more time than a DVD movie with a decent set of special features. This, more than anything else, makes me say that this game isn't worth more than $20-$25, which is about what you would pay for audio-visual entertainment lasting between 4 and 5 hours.

I cannot recommend Kane & Lynch: Dead Men for any attribute except a decent attempt at having a story line of sorts. It is surpassed by other new FPS games on the PC market in all aspects of game design, play, and visual effects. The best FPS games on the PC market are currently Crysis, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, BioShock, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. These are all great games in different ways. They all do some really new things, or revamp old stuff in new and extremely improved ways. So, if you have to have a really good FPS this year get one of them, and leave Kane & Lynch on the shelf.

A game that could have been so much more
Man, this game is frustrating. Not because it isn't fun (because it is), but because of missed opportunities. I am a big Michael Mann fan, and as far as story/visuals go, this game delivers. Unfortunately for me, technical issues and sometimes frustrating AI ruined the overall experience.

I cannot play this game without a crash. It crashes and I see the 'send a report to MS' window. Fortunately I can alt-tab back into the game and play unhindered. I recently did a full Windows format and reinstall and still receive the error, so unless it's a random configuration problem with my machine...also, Eidos Support has no idea what is wrong and tells me to replace the media. Well, others in the official and unofficial forums have the exact same issue, and we can't figure out any commonalities. I also receive random crashes to desktop on level loading.

As far as AI, sometimes they find cover and sometimes they do not. In my experience they rarely act smart, merely adequate at best. Many times I will order someone behind cover only to see them sit NEXT to the cover out in the open. They die very quickly. And this is on medium difficulty. I don't remember having this much frustration with the AI in Freedom Fighters. No, this AI definitely needs tweaking, but it's close to what it needs to be. As it stands, seeing the AI stand out in the open while they get shot ruins the immersion.

I really wanted to love this game. Although some are bashing the graphics, I think the graphical style overall is very good. It has a gritty, hazy style that I feel fits perfectly with the overall mood and I think the textures look great. Is it as beautiful as Crysis? No, but it's still very good. The aiming is great on the PC, and the weapons feel awesome. The sound is amazing, and the voice acting and writing are great. The gameplay is overall straightforward, but that doesn't bother me. Yes, you just move from cover to cover and shoot it out with cops. That's why I bought the game.

Honestly, if the technical issues were fixed and the AI was tightened up then I would easily recommend this to everyone who would listen. The time I spent playing was overall enjoyable. As it stands, however, I can only say 'proceed with caution'.

once again the "games for windows" logo means it won't work as expected
Like a schmuk I thought that going to vista with my new HO(P) d4790y would mean a happy gaming experience with my new-ish Gforce 8600GTS with 640mb of RAM, my numerous cores of intelligence, my 4 gig of RAM (Yes, the kinfunts at HP sold me 4 when the OS can only see 3.. law suit anyone ?)
Any way, once again the "for Windows" slogo on the box persuaded me to buy the game, only to find after dicking about for a whole evening that the window they refer to is "throw this crap out of the window in anger" no hope of making it run on Vista.

AVOID THIS GAME. I even tried to run it on my lame old XP SP2 machine with a decent enough ATI card and it failed to function..

I also downloaded all the newest NVIDIA drivers. After the first install failed, it would not complete, I removed K and L and reinstalled the drivers, faced numerous system hangups.. Thanks EIDOS, you are the next best thing to a virus, you lame frigers.