Kane and Lynch: Dead Men

We've already discussed that this game lost Jeff Gerstmann, Mr. GameSpot, his job. However implausible it may be, that's what happened. Here's the thing though...When Kane and Lynch got a 6 and was described as an "ugly, ugly game", I wasn't in the least bit surprised. If you were, you're nuts.

GameSpot's advertising deal with this shitty game was apparent long before "readers [could] skin the entire site with Kane, Lynch or with Kane and Lynch...Together". GameSpot's Video Game game show featured the game as Round 3, Owned in its final episode of the season.

It sucked then too. Alex Navarro and his colleague Justin Calvert were clearly not having a good time with the game's controls. Everyone playing it (Which included 2 members of the development and/or PR teams - it's hard to tell if people are really "developers" these days) were making an assload of mistakes thanks to sloppy controls.

It also looked like crap. In the immortal words of that same Alex Navarro (Regarding RoboCop on Xbox), "This looks like crap. [It plays] a lot like crap too".

But it's hard to see where the hype for this game actually built up. It was at E3 and it looked and played like crap there too. In a year that has seen Halo 3, Super Mario Galaxy, Call of Duty 4, Half-Life 2: The Orange Box, Mass Effect and Bioshock amongst many more great, modern games, Kane and Lynch is an un commonly old-fashioned film wannabe.

Were it made from a movie as a cash-in, it would be exactly what you expect. instead, Eidos wants to make a movie from it. The Angry Video Game Nerd says when you take a great movie, you get a shitty game and when you take a not-so-great game you get a slightly less shitty game. How does that work for making games into movies? I sincerely doubt you just flip the first half of the statement.

I can see some promise in the Kane and Lynch concept, which is probably the only reason sites like 1Up gave it the time of day at E3, but the execution is shameful. It's 10 minutes of good concept wrapped in 10 hours of shitty gameplay. Think of it as being like Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor (Half an hour of great action wrapped in 3 hours of tedium).

So, Eidos, tell me. Did you really expect this game to get a good review?

You did, huh?

Even though it is and has clearly been shit for months?

Why, pray tell, then did you expect a good review?

Oh, of course.

Josh Larson & Stephen Colvin promised you.

Jens Out