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Kane & Lynch: Dead Men

User Rating:

ESRB: Blood,Drug Reference,Intense Violence,Strong Language
Publisher: Eidos
Genre(s): Shooting
Home Page: http://www.kaneandlynch.com/

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By: Antti Summala Dec 14, 2007

Conclusion

You rarely need stealth in the game, Kane's solution to problems is brute force

Kane & Lynch: Dead Men has the makings of a great game, but it's flawed. Not beyond redemption like its protagonist Kane, but in grave need of patches to fix bugs, add polish, and flesh out the multiplayer. The way it incorporates some of the best aspects of IO's earlier work to a new franchise is very promising: especially the squad control, familiar from Freedom Fighters, which makes me wonder if there's more war in store in the sequel. Eidos has already announced the intent to publish one, but let's hope they do right by their customers and patch up Dead Men first.

Even among the amazing level of competition in PC gaming this year, Kane & Lynch stands out with its visceral storytelling. Telling a great story isn't as reliant on finish and polish as a fun multiplayer game, so Kane & Lynch gets the chance to shine in one area. Make that three: fantastic graphics design and an excellent musical score are equally important in making the single player campaign story one of the best in action gaming history. Movies and literature have long explored the dark souls of characters like Kane and Lynch, but for a big budget video game this is a breakthrough.

Kane & Lynch can't get top marks for all-round execution, though. Mysterious crashing plagues some users of the PC version, and there still isn't a patch out to fix the problem. In testing, we had to do a clean Windows installation to get rid of regular crashes. Pushing the game out for the holiday season might have made sense from the business point of view, but when the competition like Call of Duty 4 came out rock stable and nailed both single and multiplayer almost perfectly, maybe Kane & Lynch should have waited a little longer before breaking out.

Summary of YouGamers Hardware Testing

The publisher of this game state the following specifications for their minimum and recommended requirements:

Component	Publisher's Minimum	Publisher's Recommended
Processor	Intel Pentium 4 2 GHz or AMD Athlon XP 1800+	Intel Pentium 4 3.0 GHz / AMD Athlon XP 3000+
Memory	MB	2 GB
Graphics Card	ATI Radeon X1300 128MB / NVIDIA GeForce 6600 128MB	ATI Radeon X1800 / NVIDIA GeForce 8300
Graphics Card Example	Not specified	Not specified
Free Disk Space	7 GB	7 GB
Net Link	Broadband	Broadband

To learn more about how YouGamers performs its hardware testing, click here. Through our extensive gameplay and hardware testing across the full spectrum of PC configurations, YouGamers suggests that one should use the following guidelines for an appropriate minimum and recommended setup:

Component	YouGamers Minimum	YouGamers Recommended
Processor	AMD Athlon 64 3400+ / Intel Pentium 4 530	AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ / Intel Core 2 Duo 4300
Memory	1 GB	2 GB
Graphics Card	ATI Radeon X1600 / NVIDIA GeForce 7300	ATI Radeon HD2600 / NVIDIA GeForce 8600
Free Disk Space	7 GB	7 GB
Net Link	Broadband	Broadband

Scores

To learn more about our scoring methodology, please click here.

Gameplay	86	The single player campaign is a though-provoking, sometimes disgusting, always thrilling experience. Kudos to IO for including co-op campaign multiplayer. Fragile Alliance is a great idea, but needs a bit more substance - and is currently beset with lag problems and instability.
Graphics	80	Great art direction makes it easy to forget about the lack of polish and detail in Kane & Lynch's visuals. The visuals are a crucial part of the game's effective storytelling, and look a lot more impressive live than screenshots can show.
Audio	94	Jesper Kyd's musical score is absolutely brilliant, and fits the game perfectly with its electronic ambience. The game's voice acting is top notch, and the sound effects serve their purpose.
Technology	70	Kane & Lynch features the latest technology like highly optimized multicore support, and manages impressive visuals with reasonably low system requirements. Unfortunately, the game suffers from crippling bugs, and Games for Windows Live makes online multiplayer a chore.

OVERALL

Kane & Lynch: Dead Men could be a great game. Unfortunately it feels unfinished, and falls short of that mark. It's still a pioneering effort in action game storytelling: Kane's story is disturbing, fascinating and heartbreaking, and will stay with you long after the credits roll.

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