When Storytelling Fails: "Kane and Lynch: Dead Men"

*Contains spoilers*

So I was at PC World today and saw Kane and Lynch priced at a very tasty £2.98. I happily snapped it up, figuring even if it was total turd such a low price tag would make it at least a good few hours of entertainment.

I've played about 2 hours (which, seeing the ridiculous speed with which the missions are flying by, seems to be about half the game) and it's such a frustrating experience.

Good things:

- Constant moral ambiguity of the central characters.
- A gritty feel to the plot.
- Continuous action.
- Reasonably solid gameplay.
- Some gorgeous level design on occasion.

Bad things:

- Constant moral ambiguity of the central characters
- The plot is so dark at times that it feels like it could really do with some lightening up. It's almost oppressively depressing.
- Some shitty level design. The gorgeous levels are about balanced out with ones that seem pretty bland and uninteresting.
- Swearing. Gritty or not, an F-bomb gets dropped several times a sentence sometimes. It frequently feels over the top, rather than appropriate.
- The story is ridiculously under explained at times (see below).
- The game seems very, very short so far.

An example of the annoyances: The Tokyo Nightclub level blew me away. Fantastic use of lighting and music to create an awesome feeling level - it was like the "Club Scene" in Collateral.

However, the level lasted about 5 minutes. Rather than really exploit the cool feeling you get when taking down a guard quietly near the dancefloor and have a proper stealthy infiltration section that goes on for a while, the developers inexplicably decide to let the player walk through the level for a very short time before it essentially turns into your typical shooting gallery.

Not to mention the music stops and the dancers all run off. It was real fun just walking through a set of empty rooms shooting people (The sarcasm here is so heavy it's almost dripping off of my fangs!)

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SO! THE STORY!

The story takes the biscuit for the most irritating part of the game thus far.

Kane and Lynch has a really interesting setup. Kane is a middle aged, haggard-looking prison inmate on Death Row for apparently doing Some Really Bad Stuff™. He is wracked with guilt over his criminality, and writes a regretful letter to his daughter at the beginning of the game.

Lynch is a fellow prisoner. He's a wild-haired, scowling man with a rather scary beard. It's gradually revealed that underneath the beard is positively terrifying - he suffers from severe psychosis. Every now and then he morphs into an absolute raving maniac, kept in check only by popping some rather ineffective pills. Half the time he runs out of his medication, or forgets to take it.

Lynch bails Kane out of his appointment with death, and goes on to form an uneasy partnership with him. Kane must apparently get some stuff he "stole" for his old "friends" - though they have his family hostage as leverage and plan to kill him for his past transgression.

Lynch hides his illness from Kane and all seems to be well - until, in the middle of a heist, he suddenly snaps and executes nearly all the civilians in the bank, to Kane's astonished horror. Lynch himself wails with despair when Kane later informs him of his mass-slaughter, which apparently he had no control over.

This very interesting concept is totally squandered with a meandering, stupid plot that makes less and less sense as the game goes on.

The game seems to act like it's the middle movie of a trilogy, rather than a debut videogame. Most characters get about 2 seconds of introduction, then seem to disappear just as fast and the setting changes as if the producers were on crack.

Take the main villains: Ketamoto (at least, I think that was his name o_0) and "The7", which are apparently Kane's old group. I say apparently, because I have no clue whether I'm right there or not - the game gives an appallingly crap amount of background info. It would seem that Ketamoto is a crime boss in Japan - and Kane used to know him. However, that's all we learn. Absolutely jack is explained other than that. We don't even know who The7 are or what they do.

There's a difference between creating an air of mystery and an air of "What the shit is happening?". K&L usually gets the latter vibe.

I've played the whole game without skipping cutscenes thus far, and I have literally no idea what the hell is going on. One minute you're robbing a bank for an item which is not actually identified (lolwut?), then you're in Tokyo randomly attacking a nightclub because "That old fucker is there" (No joke, that's literally the only reason you fly to Tokyo and start shooting - because some old guy who Kane doesn't even mention previously is there. Or something.  Maybe he just shoots up Tokyo for a laugh?)

Then you're back in the US, then you're in Tokyo again, then someone's dead so you have to bust into a prison (?!), then you're somewhere else. Lynch spends half the time asking WTF is going on, and rather than Kane dickishly telling him to shut up, we wish he'd fucking tell us as well.

Remember how I mentioned the moral ambiguity as both a negative and a positive? There's a reason for that - the characters are total arseholes at times. Both of them.

They almost did too good a job of making them tortured souls. Kane neglects his family completely, and ends up getting them killed. He leaves his heist buddies to die because he apparently can't be fucked to help them out of a burning van. He kidnaps Ketamoto's daughter for the vaguest of reasons (the guy apparently has something he needs, goodness knows what) and then stupidly leaves her with Lynch, despite his condition. She ends up dead, naturally.

What a hero!

Lynch on the other hand is rumoured to have murdered his own wife in one of his psycho black outs. This is hinted very strongly in a certain loading screen, where he apparently breaks down after "discovering" what he may or may not have done. In the present, he spends most of his time screwing up the plan by shooting innocents and butchering people they're meant to be protecting.

The areas in which they really could have deepened the bond between the characters were really missed, which I think is where the narrative drops the ball the most.

So far, the saddest scene in the game has been when Kane's wife was murdered by The7 for his failure to complete the task they gave him. They said they would at least let him talk to her before their collective deaths, but the thug in charge of the deed didn't even give him that opportunity. This causes Kane to go berserk and beat his would-be killer to death with a shovel.

Even the bloodthirsty Lynch is shocked by these events, and he leaps to Kane's aid without any of his normal bitching. Wow, I thought - perhaps the macho "Shut up", "No, you shut up" shit is finally over, and the devs will now add a stronger bond between the characters?

Err, no. Instead we get Kane grieving over the newly dug grave of his wife, Lynch starting to sympathise and then Kane being a total wanker and viciously brushing him off. Nice going with the character development!

I think if I were a wanted man, my wife had just died, my daughter was in terrible danger and I had no one I could count on, I'd be a little more thankful for the one guy who also lost his wife and got backstabbed by the same people. In this game, apparently such human traits are not present in the characters.

I shall play on tomorrow, but damn. The game really could have been neat, if there had actually been some thought put into the progression of things.

Mirror's Edge - Plot Grievances

 *Contains major spoilers.*

So, I just finished quickly replaying Mirror's Edge, and I thought to do the game justice, I would briefly go over why exactly the story creates such a frustrating experience for me.

There were two main things that annoyed me:

A: Overuse of animated cutscenes. They muddle the plot considerably.
B: Important plot points left hanging in mid air.

Plot Irritant 1 - "The Assassin Plotline" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

To quickly summarise, the main character, Faith, has a sister, Kate, who is framed by shady forces for killing a mayoral candidate (the "good" candidate who wanted to reverse the evil regime. Blah blah.).

Now, you spend about 3/4 of the game trying to find out who killed him to help out Kate, including multiple levels where you chase an athletic masked figure, who later is revealed to be the assassin.

This assassin turns out to be a close friend of Faith, a fellow Runner named Celeste who became a traitor.

Okay, I'm thinking, the scene is set for some kind of real, concrete resolution of that plot point now, right? Well, it would seem so. You grab Celeste's gun and have an extended martial arts fight at the end of one level. It ends with you pinning her to the floor.

That's when things turn weird. Apparently the developers didn't think this was dramatic enough.

Suddenly the game cuts to an animated cutscene, which abruptly shows Celeste wriggling free and stumbling away. Again. Then Faith magically appears in front of her (?!) apparently being faster now that she's beaten Cel up a bit. Regardless Cel suddenly produces a second handgun from her belt (Wtf? She can just summon guns from air?) and threatens Faith.

Then bad guys arrive and begin shooting at them both (the same bad guys Cel works for...riiight), allowing Faith to grab the gun and kill them in a ridiculous explosion. Then, as the smoke clears, Faith walks off, dropping the gun, and Cel is nowhere to be seen. Faith doesn't comment on this, she just mutters that she's off to save her sister, and the guy on the radio to her says that he "heard all [he] needed to."

And that's all that's mentioned of Cel. Presumably they're keeping her as a villain in the sequel or something, but seriously...3/4 of the game devoted to catching her, then she just vanishes? And in an extremely lame way, with none of the characters being at all interested in finally finishing her off? Sigh. Welcome to Mirror's Edge, where things don't have to make sense!

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Plot Irritant 2 - The Schizophrenic Police Lieutenant

This one's simple. There's a CPF (the original "good" city police) officer named Miller who through the whole game alternates every animated cutscene or two between helping you and being a dick.

In one (pointlessly animated) cutscene, he arranges to meet Faith, and then jams a gun in her face while talking. In another, he is seen talking with a major bad guy. Then, at the end of the game, he shoots two mercs attacking you and suddenly goes massively out of his way to help you.

I guess they did this to keep the player guessing, but it ended up making me so unsure of his character that I just wanted him to help out or die.

Obviously the same writer who worked on Cel finished this part of the plot - we never even get to know what happened to him, we just hear an ambiguous gunshot as he talks mid-sentence over the radio. Then we don't hear from him again.

Another classy cliffhanger bloody annoying ending!

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Plot Irritant 3 - The Absolutely Ludicrous Ending

This is by far the most bemusing part of the game. Kate is to be executed, and the bad guys also want Faith dead.

So naturally, when the last major baddie has Kate at gunpoint, and Faith at his mercy, he kills both of them.

Wait sorry, that would make sense, what am I thinking?!. No, what I meant to say, is he doesn't do anything except talk for ages! Yeah, that's more like it.

Then he bundles Kate onto a chopper (which is going to Loltown or something. It's never explained) and a load of SWAT guys with machineguns run up behind the unarmed Faith.

What happens next? Well, the bad guy says something cheesy like "Sometimes you have to jump Faith." He then starts shooting at Faith from the hovering Chopper, and the 4-5 SWAT guys also begin shooting.

Why he didn't shoot earlier doesn't matter, and neither does the fact that Faith can dodge 5 machineguns at once from about two metres away. She's FAITH!11one!

Anyway, then the "WTF" factor is suddenly dialled to 5000. Faith leaps into the helicopter (which is about 1-2 metres off of the roof) and kicks the big bad out of it to his death. Then the helicopter starts to crash because the SWAT guys' bullets hit it (lol) and so Faith grabs her sister and throws her out (o_0).


Then Faith leaps out of the chopper, which is spinning at about 400 miles per hour, and lands on the roof as it blows up. She then hugs her sister, and the two stare out at the city as the camera zooms out and soft music starts.


Processed all that yet? No, I haven't either!


In the review I mentioned a stupid deus ex machina ("from nowhere") plot resolution. What was that? Well, remember those SWAT guys firing hundreds of bullets seconds ago from the roof? When Faith and Kate hug on the roof as the chopper blows up, they're suddenly gone.


That's right, a whole squad of gun-toting bad guys about to kill the heroines all just cease to exist in the ending moments of the game with no explanation at all. What. The. Crap.


Plot Irritant 4 - What was the point? --------------------------------------------------------------------------------


So the game ends with a logic-defying ending, two major characters with totally unknown fates, and the radio guy who helps you all game (Mercury) dead in a brief animated cutscene.

Mercury was quite possibly the one no-BS, fully-developed character in the game that I rooted for, other than Faith herself. And he gets shot off-screen and dies in a 20 second long piece of abrupt animation.

The last thing he says is "No 'sorrys', Faith. Just don't let them win."


From that quote I assumed the end of the game would have Faith bringing the evil government crashing down, or liberating the city, or some massive event of vengeance. Instead she saves her sister, disappears a SWAT team with magic, and that's about it. Evil empire lives. City doesn't change. Merc is unavenged. Half the cast has vanished.


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So if anyone is actually still reading after this extended rant, I think really my overwhelming feeling is of disappointment. ME is a game that really feels great in places, but it's like somewhere things got cut out or rushed, and the last half or so of the story got thrown together as a result.


Gameplay videos coming soon.