Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Terrible Lessons of Kane and Lynch!

Heat is a thing if you’re over a certain age, a cinematic phenomenon that it was hard not to see. It hasn’t sustained itself the way that Star Wars has or established itself as a classic of crime like The Godfather or Chinatown. But it was a pop-culture sensation, and it’s hard to see someone with a duffel slung over their shoulder and an assault rifle in hand without thinking “huh, that looks a lot like Heat.”

Games, the image-centered form of entertainment they are, have kind of co-opted Heat’s imagery from time to time. Sometimes it’s just part of a much larger game, as was the case with Grand Theft Auto IV. And sometimes it’s the basis for the entire game, as is the case with Kane and Lynch.

I’m well aware how late I am to the party on this game, and really, can you blame me? Critically panned, tasteless, advertising on shock value: there was nothing to attract me to Kane and Lynch. Poorly managed cover dynamics, the word “mercenary with a dark past” in every piece of ad-copy released and a graphics engine that would’ve been at home in 2002... There wasn’t a lot of good to say about Kane and Lynch.

Nor is there about it as a game. In that regard its failures are pretty profound. The shooting is sloppy without any of the serendipitous realism that STALKER brought to its sloppiness, the cover system fails on every level, with none of the ease of Gears of War’s definitive experience and zero fluidity to make up for the lack. The story is laughably bad, and the bits of framing that surround each episode are like a list of catch phrases selected at random from various heist movies of the past decade. The characters themselves are weak tea, a few archetypal qualities wrapped around a vague backstory with no driving motivation or even personality driving the action forward. The only thing I can really give Kane and Lynch credit for is its thematic continuity: everything in the game is about a heist of some kind, and it holds to this principle throughout. Even the introduction forms around a certain kind of heist, the theft of a prisoner from his transport one fateful day.

Sure, the surrounding action, is poor and the game hardly seems aware of what it does right and what it fails at completely, but you cannot fault Kane and Lynch for inconsistency. And this consistency, this dedication to the heist, seems to be at both the core of the game as a work and its commercial success. Because despite being a piece of shit, Kane and Lynch sold. It sold well enough to get a sequel. And unlike its contemporaries, games like Blood on the Sand and other third-person exploitation shooters, it didn’t have a brand or high concept driving it. All it had was a set of potent images on offer, a set of images that we’re already intimately familiar with before the game even opens.

Every movement, from bus to bus, van to van, lobby to lobby, all of these various settings are well travelled ground, places we know from other games. We’re never shown something new, something different: instead we’re given, as with the dialogue, a best-of list of set pieces from crime games. And, in a strange way, Kane and Lynch totally succeeds because of this. There’s really nothing to provide you with a reason to play Kane and Lynch, you see. It’s not very good. But the imagery, the overarching theme thereof and the manner in which it fits together, makes it something attractive to a spectator. The idea of robbing a bank or a mansion or an armored car is a romantic one, the idea of great risk and great reward for a single act of human courage and greed, and Kane and Lynch provides a set of images that attach fundamentally to these concepts. It makes it really sell-able since literally any screen shot of the game will inevitably showcase some sort of good, hokey heist action that you’ll get a chance to play through. It’s a marketing masterpiece in many ways.

But it collapses with play, and for that Kane and Lynch is useful as more than just an example of how to sell an original IP without any originality to it: it’s a showcase for how imagery functions in games.

When a game fires on all cylinders it’s difficult to really deconstruct how it works and why it works so well. Portal, for example, can be looked at from almost any perspective and be held up as a masterpiece of both writing, design and art. It is as perfect as any game ever made has been (which is not to say it’s perfect, just that it’s as close as anyone’s probably ever going to get) and because of that there’s really nothing to say about how games could be made better by its influence. “Be a little longer, maybe?” could come out, but really, that’s not a valid critique. Short cheap games are fine as long as they’re well executed. But a game like Kane and Lynch is incredibly valuable as a object for critical derision.

See, Kane and Lynch fails so handily and in so many transparent ways that it can illustrate mistakes that game developers can make during their process and provide us with a framework where we can introduce fixes for these problems. Take the cover system for example. It’s sloppy, with ineffective collision detection governing whether or not you enter cover and loose controls governing your choice to either lean out of said cover and shoot or run out from cover and be shot. A single “cover button” or even “contextual action button” could easily fix that. Of course, this is a problem solved in Gears of War and present in a game which already has a contextual action button totally unrelated to cover. But still, had Kane and Lynch come first we could’ve learned these lessons and fixed some of the game’s crippling problems before it came along.

I’m not trying to excuse Kane and Lynch. Given its budget and marketplace stance it should’ve been much, much better than it is. I picked it up along with its sequel for ten dollars, and I actually feel a little ripped off. But I am saying that something can be salvaged from the wreckage of this game. Much as horrible movies provide examples of the pitfalls of amateur moviemaking, Kane and Lynch provides young game designers with a roadmap of what can go wrong with their first title. So please, young developers, play Kane and Lynch today. If only so the mistakes it made will never come to haunt us again.