Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Ambitious"

Kane and Lynch is the kind of game where you really have to be invested into who the protagonists are to get enjoyment out of it. Two guys with dark messed up pasts who really just don't give a damn. The story is interesting yet familiar. Two death row inmates reluctantly team up to retrieve spoils from a past job gone south. A schizophrenic criminal kept at bay by medication. The other a rough and tough ex mercenary, who's sole goal is to protect his daughter.
The visuals are mediocre in terms of quality, with many bland textures. Characters aren't as detailed either, but it is nice to see many various locales from a bank vault to a jungle.
The controls aren't that great. The shooting feels alright, but you never get that sense of actual power when firing your weapons. The cover system is also an auto lock on so there is no button to control it. It works fair enough most of the time but you will get stuck up a few times on certain objects.
Thankfully the game supports CO-OP. Co-op makes the game much smoother and more playable. When you take enough bullets you are downed and the screen turns white. When the screen turns white things of your past "flash before your eyes" via audio. In order to get back up your ally must give you a shot of adrenaline before you bleed out. Be careful too many adrenaline shots will result in you overdosing and you will have to restart from your last checkpoint. Having a human counterpart is preferable as the AI is sometimes unresponsive and will just stand around you while you bleed out.
You will also be commanding allies to shoot, defend or move to a point you set. The AI is alright but they will let themselves be shot and you will have to run over to revive them.
As for replay value, once you beat it, it kind of loses its flair. Most of the fun is to see what strange place you will end up next. It is fun to go back to certain missions and try and get the achievements though.
As for online, its pretty much the same situation as the single player. Fragile Alliance is a really neat idea with players joining together to rob a bank. The twist is that you can kill your team mates to keep more of the loot. But your betrayed comrade will return as a cop to try and take you down. It can be a lot of fun if you overlook the small annoyances with the cover system and feel of shooting.
Kane and Lynch is a good game, but what holds it back is the amount of polish. It has some great ideas, one I really like was naming the difficulty after drugs. The harder the difficulty, the harder the drug. The characters were also really interesting. The only problem I found was that it seemed like the game shipped prematurely. If the controls were tweaked a bit and there was more of a variety of missions, this game could have really been a hit.
You will find there are some fun moments with Kane and Lynch, but if you go into it with high expectations, you might be disappointed. Taken at face value the game is just average, but if you invest some more into the characters and let the little things slide, then this will be the game for you.