Not interesting, not satisfying and not fun to play.
Story starts by introducing an ex-mercenary Kane, who is on his way to death row to be executed, when a daring rescue is made by friends of a medicated psychopath named Lynch. Afterwards it becomes clear that Kane has three weeks to get a nice sum of money back he has stolen, or his wife and child will be killed. Extortionists don't trust Kane's honesty, so they put a watchdog on his tail: Lynch. This is how a journey of these two men starts to unfold around crime, blood and a lot of shooting. Story is told through cutscenes and in-game voice acting and the ability to choose subtitles makes it a lot easier to follow the dialog in the heat of battle. Voice acting includes lots of swearing and it gets annoying really fast. At least it's a different setting for a videogame, but still it's not that interesting.
Graphics are mostly average and sometimes even below average. Character models especially are blocky and lack detail, but at least everything moves in a life-like manner. Sound design is great in terms of voice acting and sound effects, but music doesn't live up to standards: you might not remember anything about the music after you've finished playing.
Gameplay is a third person shooter with a few squad controls in it. What is the most important aspect of any shooter? Well shooting of course and in Kane & Lynch shooting is not fun: guns are way too inaccurate and their recoil makes it too hard to aim and shoot. It doesn't feel fair to use a full clip to a guy whose standing right next to you. And speaking of enemies their AI is mostly terrible: they usually just stand still and shoot. Enemies are supposed to be trained cops, but still they have no teamwork what so ever in their assaults.
Save system uses checkpoints, but they are at reasonable length apart and if you fall there's a good chance that Lynch have enough time to revive you. You can also play previous chapters as many times as you wish, if you are after certain achievement points.
This kind of game is just made for co-op fun with a friend, but here you can only do it locally with split-screen or via system link. So what's missing? Co-op through Xbox Live of course! In this day and age it's just an unforgivable flaw to release a co-op game without online support in it.
Multiplayer is interesting and you should try it at least once. It's called Fragile Alliance and all six players start as robbers in order to attack a bank. If someone dies along the way he respawns as an agent trying to stop robbers from getting what they want. When the loot has been taken there's a choice to be made: a) run away and share the loot equally or b) betray your friends by killing them and get all the money for yourself. It's an interesting concept, but still it might not keep you busy very long.
Kane & Lynch: Dead Men is an average crime story with average graphics, bad enemy AI and horrible shooting. The lack of online co-op is something that I just can't tolerate. The game tries to be different and in some ways it succeeds, but in the end the result is not a success. If you get a chance to check it out for free then by all means go for it.