Kingpin was a game with big ambitions, that didn't quite meld together.
Not quite FPS, not quite immersion sim, it sits somewhere in sits decidedly in the middle to be declares neither. A hub world, but still wholly linear. The ability to interact with non hostile NPC's, that end up being mostly window dressing. A shop, that's limited to the point of uselessness. And of course hiring goons, much like having Barney support the player in Halflife.
The AI of Kingpin is a thing to behold. Hirelings. Compared to Halflife these guys really hold their own. While other games deliberately design levels around companion AI's limitions, these guys can follow you regardless of obstacle. Climb up ladders, jump across and down from ledges, crawl through vents, open door. This is a 1999 game and positively makes modern FPS AI look terrible.
Like old FPS of yesteryear, story is throw-away. You are man, something bad happened, get revenge. The game uses a notepad to give indications where to go, and the occasional swear riddled cutscene or NPC waiting in a hub area. But it's nonessential background noise to enjoy the games gameplay, mostly held up by the setting, which is a dark deco reminiscent of 1940's future seen in Batman: The Animated Series.
The games visuals, around from Quake 2's jelly wobbles around the edges hold up well, not great, but at the same time not offensive. Kingpin is probably one of the best looking games on the engine.
Shooting is great, but the guns are wholly imbalanced. For example. the default pistol can be upgrades, but after the first area it becomes moot. Other weapons like machineguns become moot and in my case, the heavy-machinegun, which almost always resulted in 1-2 hit kills was the go to weapon, rendering everything else obselete.
The games balance across the board is somewhat broken. The opening area is brutal, with specific RPG like tasks required - collecting money from the dead, buying a crowbar and an introductory stealth mission that goes nowhere. From that, you just shoot everyone in the face while they swear at you.
And boy, does this game love to swear. It's like a rebellious Metallica fan raging at his mom for being told to tidy his room. Every single character, including your own, has no redeeming qualities of any kind, this is a nasty game for nasty children.
The enemies are mostly clones of each other with boss characters having higher HP. But they are given a wide variety of weapons to mix things up, which mostly works. Enemy count also increases late game to encourage you to play around with the games grenade and rocket launcher, which can be pretty fun at times, though once again, inferior to the heavy-machine thanks to it's pin-point precision.
All in all it took me 9 hours to finish and no patching with the Steam version, a simple config change for 1080p, although it somewhat made part of the gun off-screen, wasn't too big a deal.
Kingpin never quite made it to classic or even cult game status, which is shame. Underneath it's flaws it was brimming with ideas. It's AI absolutely disgraces the genre 20 years and it transcends it's own genre while simultaneously remaining true to it.
Best game ever? Nope. A great few hours spend at the week end? Sure.