If several weeks ago, LorD would have asked me to review Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, I'd have replied: "Your albums need to go triple-platinum before you can afford my services for THAT insane request". But fueled by the previous Eidos rant, I said "What the fuck can happen? I'll play it, bash it, and make the UFO readers happy". But that's not what happened. This review should have appeared merely hours after my previous article. But I'm late. Very late. Although I'm a lazy bastard, lazyness was not the reason why these phrases have been postponed. It's because I loved the game. Yeah, fuckers. Deal with it. I had to finish the game. I had to see BOTH endings. Can you deal with that? Huh?

 

Ok. I'm not going to praise this game, because from a design and technical stand point, it's basically shit. I won't go into those type of details, because the whole internet knows what Kane & Lynch is. But, along with the Jeff Gerstmann scandal, everyone crucified it without a fair judgment. 99% of the people that bashed it never even tried the game. And that's just silly. I remember that Gamespot users, in retaliation to Gerstmann's departure, decided to rate the game 1.0 to "boycott" it. Isn't that a bit retarded? I mean, I know it's Gamespot, but still. A bad kind of advertising, is still advertising. They should've just kept the video-review online and their users with their mouths shut. Oh well, moving on past the ladies that form the staff of Gamespot, and getting into the part of the game I like: the story. Yes, you can definitely say that the story isn't made of "win", and it's not Planescape: Torment. I wholeheartedly agree. It starts out like any other usual clichee, but it unwinds like a freaky Tarantino movie. I swear. It's like Kill Bill, but with more balls. The protagonists aren't smart, and they shouldn't be. They aren't likeable either. And they shouldn't be. I'll take Reservoir Dogs as an example. You might have felt something by the complex Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi is a hideous little genious that we can all adore), and started liking him after a while. It's natural. The sickos (myself included) could have loved Mr. Orange instead. And again, I agree. But these two characters were beautifully complex, without a huge back-story to cover them. They were created as absolutes. Mr. White on the other hand, can not be likeable. Not even his drama near the end of the flick can aid his cause. He's just a normal gangster with a lot of testosterone and wits. Nothing more. So, if we take Tarantino's movie, and we dumb it down a bit, we can find a similarity in style with the development of Kane & Lynch.

 

 

Again, I dye grass. The game came out in 2007 so if you want to see a spoiler warning, you can fuck off. I want to talk about the violence a bit. Yeah, it's vulgar. And not in an intellectual way either. There are some chances to drop a couple of points of IQ after playing this game. Lynch definitely has the effect of dumbing you down. I swear to you, after I heard him speak the same cheesy line for the hundredth time, I needed breadcrumbs to find my way to the kitchen. But it's all in good fun, so I might as well run with it. The thing I enjoyed most was the retarded gratuitous violence. Physical and psychological. It's not artistic made. It's just there to remind us, that these kind of people exist, not only in movies, but in real life. You probably won't see many Sam Fishers or Agent 47s around, in a sleezy neighborhood. But Lynch? Are you kidding me? Having the misfortune of living in Romania, Kane also strikes me as a familiar character that I may encounter at least once a month.

 

 

 

But getting back to the violence, I must reveal a superb scene from the game. Actually two of them, but only one got me going "Oh shit! Oh fuck!". The first interesting scene was the bank robbery, that actually felt like a bank robbery. Sure, it wasn't all sunshine and lollipops, because civilians died during the incident, but hey, it just kept it realistic. Now, the second scene I wanted to tell you about is an execution. Kane was captured, along with his wife and daughter and dragged to a construction site. The whole family was thrown in a ditch and they eagerly waited for an executioner to put a bullet through their heads. Of course, shit doesn't go according to plan, and Kane gets rescued. But in a realistic manner, not by Rorshach, nor by Superman. But by a human, namely Lynch (as I recall). Kane's wife gets filled with lead in that particular moment, and drops down, agonizing , in her daughter's arms, while the daughter screamed like an opera singer. Now that's what I call fun. And shock-value realism is always fun.

 

And now, I'll jump right to the end. Both of the endings are vaguely... bad. One of them a bit less gruesome than the other. In my first attempt (you can see both endings by replaying only the last mission, not the whole game, which is a nice thing, by the way), I chose a lesser evil and I thought, in my infinite stupidity, that a happy-end awaits me. I was wrong. And I was happy that I was wrong. Because, if a game manages to pull the carpet from under your feet, they must have a seed of awesomeness inside of them. Weirdly enough, I won't rate this game, but I will definitely recommend it to anyone who likes lots of violence and a bit Tarantino-ish mind-fucks. Yeah, it's a crappy third person shooter, but there must be sickos like me out there, just aching for this type of entertainment to enter their households.

 

This review was supposed to be a quick one. The blood just carried me away. I always considered myself unique. And after finishing Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, I realized I truly am. Because I want a fucking sequel... But with a fucking FUNCTIONAL gameplay next time. Thank you.