Kane & Lynch has all the makings of a brilliant Michael Mann thriller: nuanced outlaw protagonists, grey suits, black gym bags, and intense shoot-outs, all playing out against the backdrop of a bluefiltered concrete jungle. It’s just a shame that when the cut-scenes come to an end, and the game begins, the action transpires in a manner more akin to French absurdist cinema than to Heat or Collateral. Cops cheerfully absorb entire clips of ammunition, dead bodies melt through the floor, Kane gets superglued to the side of cars, and Japanese gangsters gawk into the horizon as you fill them with lead.

Usually, videogames with strong cinematic pretensions are let down by their plot and characters, not by their gameplay. But with Kane & Lynch it is almost the opposite. IO Interactive has created two compelling protagonists and one of the most well-directed videogame narratives we’ve seen in quite a while. Kane is a middle-aged, balding, ex-mercenary, estranged from his wife and daughter, and condemned to death row after a botched military operation in Venezuela. Lynch, on the other hand, is a straight-up psychopath, convicted for murdering his spouse, and plagued with schizophrenic visions that provoke him into blood lusts.

After a gripping opening segment, in which the two convicts are sprung out of jail by a group of mercenaries, Dead Men unravels like a twisted and violent buddy movie. It turns out Kane pilfered a vast sum of money from his former mercenary employers, The7, who are going to execute his wife and daughter if he doesn’t get it back. Lynch has been employed by The7 to keep tabs on Kane while he searches for the missing loot, setting the scene for some wonderfully morbid interplay between the two. The plot itself may not be terribly original, but hats off to IO Interactive for creating two truly original and iconic videogame characters.

If only IO Interactive bestowed Kane & Lynch’s gameplay with the same level of polish as its celebrated Hitman franchise, it may have produced the most blissful marriage of cinema and videogames yet. But around an hour into the action, we couldn’t shake the feeling that it would be more fun watching Kane & Lynch than playing it. The game is essentially one set-piece shoot-out after another, which is by no means a bad thing (indeed it’s a format that most action games thrive on) but for such a formula to be sustainable, and enjoyable, numerous boxes have to be ticked. One is solid enemy AI, another is responsive controls, and a third is reliable collision detection – unfortunately, Kane & Lynch fails to convince in all three departments.

Enemy AI is unpredictable, and not in a good way. IO Interactive clearly wants you to make ample use of cover during gun battles, but it is much more economical to simply flank your opponents and shoot them in the back. This is made particularly easy because enemies are far too slow to react to such a radical tactic. On numerous occasions we stood in front of entire units of cops and all they did was stare at us inanely as we shot down each one.

Kane & Lynch wants to operate like Gears Of War, coercing players into selecting strategic cover to fire from. However, locking Kane behind walls and outcrops is an unpredictable endeavour. Some objects you can get behind and some you can’t (without any observable logic dictating which). Furthermore, because Kane moves into a cover stance by simply touching a wall, you’ll find yourself futilely pushing into various objects until you find one that works (a context-sensitive cover button, a la Gears Of War, would have easily solved this).

When it comes to long distance shootouts, the aiming system, and collision detection just don’t feel solid enough. Quite frequently we found ourselves trying to gun down enemies at a distance, but, even though the wall behind them was liberally splattered with blood, it took around 17-18 shots until they died. Team-mate AI is also pretty poor. After Kane breaks his cohorts out of jail, the player has a total of four henchmen at his behest, but ordering them around is a clumsy process at best, and at worst completely ineffective.

Nevertheless, we’re still going to give Kane & Lynch a reasonably good score, partly because of its brilliant narrative and mature cinematic quality, and partly because, despite the above problems, there are times when the AI, cover system, and collision detection, all work as they should. When this occurs the game elevates itself above nearly every other shooter we’ve played. Kane & Lynch: Dead Men is worth buying, if only to give IO Interactive the impetus to go fix what’s broken and make a truly stunning sequel.

Christopher Reynolds