In the category of badass, Kane & Lynch is way up there in attitude but mediocre in gameplay.
I think that the producers of badass videogames, you know the kind, know that there's only so much they can get away with. In the end, it's difficult to compete with gangster movies, John Woo and Jerry Bruckheimer. But there is still some room for creativity in this arena as the makers of Kane & Lynch have discovered.
The premise is simple, the theme is classic, the execution complex, the results both better and worse than expected. You are Kane, a man who has been busted out of prison by a dude named Lynch. You soon discover that Kane you are a mercenary who has betrayed (perhaps not intentionally) a set of kingpins collectively known as The Seven. Lynch is assigned by the Seven to get you out of prison precisely to recover that thing that you stole, otherwise your family gets it. It turns out that Lynch is a semi-psychopath who goes postal when he's off his meds. You play a squad-based shooter that starts out with just Lynch in search of the precious stolen artifact. When Lynch, in a bank robbery kills dozens of hostages, you realize that you will both be hunted to death.
It turns out that Lynch may not always listen to your commands, and you discover exactly how creepy he is as time goes by. You pick up various henchmen and find that they have personality conflicts as well. The them of Kane & Lynch is loyalty and betrayal, and at any time, the smoothness of the narrative gets interrupted by somebody hesitating and not obeying your commands.
That's bad enough because Kane & Lynch is a very ambitious game with partially destructible environments (a la Black, a la Matrix movie lobby scene with the exploding tile columns), a cover system and squad commands. None of which work as nicely as any of the Tom Clancy titles (Rainbow Six, Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon). The controls are somewhat awkward - it's sloppier than
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