Kane & Lynch: Dead Men review

From start to finish, Kane & Lynch sees you indiscriminately blasting your way through crowds, locking against cover to shield yourself from bullets, and ordering your buddies - ex-mercenaries who you spring from prison in one mission - around with Freedom Fighters-style commands. You can bark out orders to your criminal mates to either attack a target, defend an areaor regroup to your position. Simple. But due to some idiotic AI, your blokes prefer to stand about and get shot to bits like Officer Murphy in Robocop than duck into cover. Here lies another niggle - saving your chums from death with adrenaline needles. Fair enough, you do have a duty to keep them alive - and they will return the favour if you snuff it - but, criminally, they can’t help each other, which means you’ll be doling out more jabs than a pro boxer while trying to survive yourself. Arrgh. Returning fire helps, but since the aiming is iffy you’ll be left frustrated and dead more often than not. The accuracy of weapons improves when you pick up the assault or sniper rifles, but don’t be surprised to see the person standing in your crosshairs continuing to breathe as your bullets inexplicably miss their target.

It’s almost as if this was done on purpose to show off the game’s destructible environments. Marble pillars smash to bits when pierced with bullets, wooden watch towers crumple under heavy fire and car tires hiss as you pop them. It’s all very pretty, and the pinnacle of this is the showdown inside the evil Retomoto’s Tokyo boardroom. You and your boys rappel down the side of the building, plant a mine on the window, and then burst inside in a hail of bullets and swear words as your stray shots rips the interior to pieces. It’s just a shame that set-pieces like this aren’t a mainstay.