Good Things About Bad Games: Kane & Lynch
By Barry White
In the first in a planned series of articles, Barry asks whether we overlooked one important aspect of the otherwise mediocre Kane & Lynch: Dead Men.
“I don’t have to listen to your shit. Lynch, snap out of it. Lynch, don’t kill the hostages.” – Lynch
Kane & Lynch: Dead Men: what Hitman developers Io Interactive did next, and what some regard as their great folly. After the release of the superlative Hitman: Blood Money, Io seemed to be at the top of their game, and the pre-release speculation and hype over their next project was roundly positive and anticipatory. No one was predicting the arrival of a decidedly average, flawed action game that would eventually attain a peak Metacritic score of only 67. What fame (or more appropriately, infamy) it achieved during its release was due to anything but the work Io Interactive had done on the game, and it has subsequently sunk mostly unsung, a mistake everyone would rather forget in the hope that Io get back to making Hitman games.
I’m not here to make any attempt to defend the game that was Kane & Lynch: Dead Men. It’s clunky, rough and buggy, and the title thoroughly deserves the middling scores it received on release. My problem, though, is that there’s one excellent aspect of Kane & Lynch that’s always totally forgotten about whenever people discuss the game. They focus on Gerstmann-gate or the pedigree of Io Interactive, and try vainly to figure out where they went wrong.
Bad games like this are usually wholly dismissed as just bad games. If the entire package fails, nobody ever seems to care if certain parts of it might actually have been brilliant, or interesting, or worth talking about. No one, in my experience, ever thinks or talks about Adam “Kane” Marcus and James Lynch. This duo is the one truly good thing about this bad game.
//Double-act
Kane and Lynch are how Lethal Weapon’s Riggs and Murtagh would’ve turned out if writer Shane Black had made those characters criminals instead of cops and Smokin’ Aces’ Joe Carnahan had been around to direct.
The similarities between the two sets of characters and their relationships are striking. Kane and Murtagh are the straight men. Both spend most of their time trying keep their respective partners (who they’re forcibly paired with) in line, and they care inordinate amounts about their daughters. Both are clearly too old for this shit. Lynch and Riggs are highly unstable psychotics with bad haircuts, who can always be relied upon to drive the action and the story forward into unexpected places by just going berserk. Riggs will try to tear down a house with nothing but his pick-up truck. Lynch will start killing the hostages. If Riggs and Murtagh are the kings of the buddy movie, Kane and Lynch are their twisted gaming counterparts.
They take every part of that established cinematic template and pervert it. Riggs might be crazy, but he’s also a wise-cracking, tireless pursuer of justice. Lynch is just out and out nuts. Murtagh is the family man and hyper protective of his loving children. Kane’s family hate him enough to wish him dead and he’s obsessed with trying to reconcile with and protect a daughter he hasn’t seen for fourteen years. The relationship arc between the main characters in a buddy movie is supposed to start out frosty and begrudging, but become closer and closer as challenges and trials are overcome. With every new problem or situation, Kane comes closer to cutting Lynch lose. The two men are constantly at odds with one another for the entire story, with no possibility of reconciliation ever presented. The whole thing is an inspired piece of writing, taking a tried and tested framework and turning it on its head to produce something players probably won’t have seen before.
They are, uncharacteristically for game protagonists, utterly amoral, even evil. Games have their heroes and their anti-heroes; tough action men, honourable soldiers, flawed individuals with hearts of gold, rogues who are as likely to betray their friends as they are to do the right thing. Wherever our heroic avatars fall on the spectrum of good and evil, there always seems to be some little spark that allows us to relate to them in some way. This might not be too important a feature in something like Crysis, where the player character is, for all intents and purposes, anonymous and faceless, but in any game where an attempt is made to make an actual character out of the player’s avatar, this kind of work is key. Gears of War’s Marcus Fenix might look a bit like a serial rapist and spend all his time chainsawing things in half, but when he cracks a joke with a comrade or we see some semblance of emotion flash across his disfigured face during a cutscene, that’s a window for us to try connect to his character a little bit, however crudely fashioned it might be. Games that make the effort to connect you with your digital avatar on a level other than the press of a button or flick of the mouse are often the better for it.
But Kane and Lynch are extraordinary in that they fly completely in the face of what you’d expect from main characters in an action game. They’re absolute bastards, and totally unrepentant about that fact. Forget flawed heroes, anti-heroes, or whatever label you think you might want to apply – these characters have not a single redeeming nor admirable quality between them. Even something that seems overtly positive or good, like Kane’s protectiveness of his daughter, is in reality totally obsessive and in keeping with his destructive personality. There is nothing within these two men to like or to love or to respect. And that is what makes them unique and, if you’ll permit me to say, brilliant in the collective lineup of game protagonists through the ages. The developers, when writing the characters of Kane and Lynch, effectively created two people it was impossible not to dislike.
//Drawing connections
It’s an extraordinarily brave decision to make and it’s not without its potential pitfalls: a friend of mine recalls how he was unable to enjoy the game on any level simply because he hated the pair of them so much. That’s the big risk. And it’s a risk that’s not just brave within the context of games. In film (and Dead Men tries hard in other areas to emulate movies such as Michael Mann’s Heat) our heroes are usually heroic. The better heroes have their flaws, and may not always do the right thing, but in genres like action it’s always made very clear who the hero is. Never, ever, will you see protagonists with such wretched, wholly irredeemable personalities as the main focus as you do in this game. It would be like sticking up two fingers to the audience. It would be madness. But Kane & Lynch does it and, if I may adopt the vernacular of the game for a moment, it doesn’t give a fuck if you like it or not.
Does this mean we’re not able to connect to them in any way at all? Are we just detachedly piloting these two horrors toward their inevitable end while trying to enjoy some of the shooty bits along the way? Not necessarily, but the risk of player alienation is always there. Within the car crash that is Kane and Lynch’s relationship, the game is able to mine some nice veins of jet black humour that my poor soul is able to revel in, but it’s by no means a common taste. I laugh out loud when Lynch confusedly says something like “I was aiming for her leg”, but to the next person this is just another reason to dump the game and walk away in disgust. More than that, I find myself fascinated by these two characters and their interactions in the same way I’m fascinated by the great cinematic villains, like The Third Man’s Harry Lime. They all represent a totally uncompromised picture of the depths to which human beings can sink, and while it’s easy to be abhorred by their words and their deeds, it’s their overall integrity as fictional characters that appeals to me most.
All of which, if anything, makes the reality of the game’s mediocrity all the more painful and disappointing. You already have every reason not to play this game and, if the picture of the two men I’ve painted above is an unsettling one, you can go ahead and add one more to the list. But I still think it’s important not to forget about what Io Interactive managed to create here. They might have made a mess of everything else, but I’m not convinced that’s a good enough reason to overlook the one shining high point. They took a huge risk in fashioning the characters that they did, and in having the chutzpah to turn around to players and say “Why yes, you do have to assume the role of a violent traitor and a medicated psychopath. We’re going to make you murder cops, hostages and civilians, and neither character is going to get a happy ending.”
Kane and Lynch aren’t cool or clever, slick or sexy. They’re bad, bad men – and that’s what’s so damn good about them.
It takes a writer committed to good fiction to create characters like that in this industry. Even just having an unhappy ending is so unusual for a game. I read my first book with an unhappy ending when I was, like, four (it was the original Little Mermaid, whose ending Disney changed for the film), and it took me a while to get over it. Why couldn’t she just, you know, get the prince?
When I say a while, though, I mean maybe a couple hours. You’re invested in characters and, when they don’t get what they want, it’s natural to feel shock and disappointment, sadness even. Maybe the games industry is like me when I was four, and just too young to appreciate the value of a little melancholy, a little depth? What if the best games had the deepest plots?
Yes. I think you’re right, it was important that Io took that chance. Another of my favourite books is Lolita, which is what sprung to mind when you mentioned completely, utterly evil protagonists. The narrator in Lolita is a very sick, obsessive, manipulative, downright despicable man – the writing is sublime, though, and it’s a great book, but you want to strangle him on every other page. It’s a vibrantly interesting book for that very twist, and one that throws into sharp relief the relative immaturity of our own medium, teh vidja gamez.
I think that any step a game can take towards maturity should be taken.
In a game, it’s obviously a bigger risk. You read a book distanced from the narration. In a game, it’s you being these twisted individuals. That is indeed a pretty bold statement to make, and I think it’s something worth exploring further.
But of course, we do have to accept that the same is true of something like Manhunt or GTA. It’s you doing these things, y’know? The anti-violence lot might have a point in that respect.
I think there’s much more that’s great about K&L than the characters themselves, but I’ll come back to that in a second;
But the pair of them are absolutely grippingly realised. There is some incredibly grim comic genius in the game at times, and the sheer savagery of their unhinged behaviour is fantastic.
But they are part of their world, and I think it’s the wider style, aesthetic and darker-than-life aggressiveness of their environment and story that really makes them and the game fascinating. In their world, Kane and Lynch are neccesary – they are its products, its exports, but also they’re exactly what is required to try to win the day. A clean-cut nicey hero couldn’t survive the game’s plot – the subtitle “Dead Men” is hugely appropriate because like characters in a Leone film, they have minimal expectations of reaching the conclusion alive. Like Harmonica, there’s something about them, “something to do with death”. Everything they touch dies. It’s a classic anti-hero conceit, but taken further than most… all either of them are any good at is destruction, chaos, killing. They’ve failed at love, at family, at humanity. But they exist in a world so compromised that ultraviolence can, theoretically at least, win a bitter victory.
The game has serious flaws, but I still thoroughly enjoyed much of its gameplay, personally. I think we have far too few games set in worlds approximating ours – fantastical ones are all very well but personally I’d gleefully lap up some more Mann-inspired games. Some of the levels in K&L captured that perfectly, especially the attack on the Japanese skyscraper, I could definitely play that all day quite happily.
“Good Things About Bad Games: Kane & Lynch
There is nothing good about that game!”
My response when I read the title. However. After reading I do believe I was mistaken. The charachters are quite brilliant and it shows the kind of hope I believe Io had for this game. I sort of hope they dont just abandon it and do something with the charachters. Either a sequal with improved gameplay or some other form of media.
[...] Barry White picks up the sort of thing I like to see – looking for good things in bad games. He starts with Kane & Lynch. This sort of nuanced thinking is increasingly important to me. If you reduce something to rock or [...]
Maybe it’s just that I’d played Freedom Force and knew what Io’s control scheme was trying to do, but I really don’t see why people think it controls so badly. The only thing it’s guilty of is not playing like Gears of War.
Otherwise, it’s just a case of uneven gameplay quality. The bank robbery, club, and Tokyo Tower shoot-out are fantastic. There are a couple of unskippable cutscenes before boss fights and some other game design crimes. And as soon as you get to Venezuela, it turns into a mediocre action game.
And the plot…you hit it dead on. There’s no other game that has you playing characters as such absolutely awful people. It is definitely something new.
This is a good idea for a series and probably a useful one, but I am afraid I must disagree with your initial offering. Kane and Lynch are certainly unlikable characters. Unfortunately, I found them to be juvenilely, and perhaps worse, uninterestingly so. The whole thing seemed like a clumsy attempt to create a franchise (damn that concept), and at “maturity” through amorality.
I’d suggest another reading of Kane and Lynch. In most action-y games, the player basically commits mass murder. The whole enterprise is basically cruel, vicious, and depraved. Sure, there’s some sort of story that more or less justifies the whole thing, but that is subordinated to the gameplay experience. Kane and Lynch made that process untenable for me; guiding the actions of these unpleasant fellows made me feel annoyed, if not angry. I had no ability to choose an alternate path: the game did not include a “just stop running around like an asshole murdering people” ending. I could not identify with them one bit. I wanted them, and thus myself, to lose. Thus the shadowy connections between the violence on-screen, the character, and myself were short-circuited. Enjoyment became impossible.
Once again, I fear the problem is one of video game formalism. Games are second-person. It’s what makes them potentially so powerful, but also the cause of Kane and Lynch’s failure. Would Lolita have been the same had it been a Choose Your Own Molesting? I’m not a hateful thug like Kane or Lynch, and I don’t want to be forced to pretend I am. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a place a place for these characters in “art” – just that they don’t make good video game protagonists.
Your reading seems to me basically the same as Barry’s. They’re absolutely horrible characters. They’re impossible to like. And, for many, that’s going to be a real turn-off.
I don’t think that makes them uninteresting characters (I’ve not played the game, so can’t comment on that part) by default. If anything, it’s a fascinating decision for a developer to make. You’re guiding these people through atrocious actions. That’s pretty powerful stuff, potentially.
Barry here.
@blug
Lewis beat me to the reply there, but I’ve something to add. If what you say about most action games is true, then I’d suggest that K&L is one of the first games to openly acknowledge and play up to the fact that “the whole enterprise is basically cruel, vicious and depraved”. It’s remarkably honest in its callousness, and that’s something you rarely see. And that’s the kind of stuff that interests me, so that’s part of why I find these two characters fascinating.
You’re not alone, as will be apparent in the piece, when it comes to being unable to enjoy the game at all because of the nature of our two protagonists. Their very nature handicaps your attempt to “get into” the game. And that’s the potential problem with this kind of approach, as I point out. It’s got serious risk attached to it. But I think that’s why it’s so brave and unusual.
[...] Good Things About Bad Games: Kane & Lynch: Kane and Lynch are how Lethal Weapon’s Riggs and Murtagh would’ve turned out if writer Shane Bla… [...]
Having played the game start to finish in co-op, I have to agree that people did overlook the strengths of the main characters. They’re certainly both nasty individuals, but the interplay between them does help drive the game.
I always thought it was a shame they put Kane out as the “main character”, with Lynch relegated to player 2 or computer status. In co-op, you actually remain in control of Lynch during his moments. So in the bank, for example, you see policemen streaming around the lobby, and your first natural instinct is to shoot them. When Lynch’s medication kicks in shortly afterwards and you realise what you’ve actually been shooting at, it’s rather chilling. Not that K&L was the first or only game to attempt this sort of thing, by any means.
Personally, though, the interest of the characters can’t be sustained as the plot spins wildly out of control and unravels. The early half of the game felt like it was trying to emulate classic heist movies, but the second half veers off down normal shooter territory – the prison section is a bloodbath, and once the game switched to a full on civil war in Venezuela I found it hard to care.
Kane’s attempts to keep control of events in the first half of the game put him at odds with Lynch and keep the two-character dynamic interesting. That sense of everything falling apart that sections like the Bank or the kidnapping evoked are lost once the game goes all gung-ho, and that’s a shame. It wasn’t a good enough shooter, but with some tighter writing and a better second half, it could have at least been a good story.
(Gah, no edit button)
Also, I’m not sure I’d agree with your suggestion that their relationship gets worse as the game goes on. In the first half, both characters have wildly different motives and loyalties – when Kane is prepared to listen to Renamoto’s (Or is it Sakamoto’s) plan for dealing with the7, Lynch’s loyalties lie with them and he tells Kane not to do it. The fact that Renamoto’s daughter is then shot is left ambiguous – was Lynch having a turn, or did he actually shoot her to stop Kane breaking off the deal with the7 (and by proxy ruin Lynch’s chance for promotion, which he believed he was getting).
But once both are betrayed, their goals become the same – kill the7. There’s still tension between the pair, but it becomes more about methods than outcomes. It’s still conflict between them, but it isn’t as pronounced or interesting.
[...] been wanting to do for a while. The bast! Looking in more depth at universally criticised games, he begins with the characters of Kane and Lynch. This is being linked around for a reason. Excellent stuff, and I look forward to seeing what he [...]
I’ve not played enough of Kane and Lynch to comment on the game itself, but I know that I’d rather have control of a pair of villains than the guys from Army of Two, who are just arseholes.
I love the concept of the series. It’s a failing of the industry that ideas are only lifted from successful games, while there are dozens of games with great concepts and poor execution that are begging to be picked over for the creamy goodness in the middle.
That said, there’s also an annoying tendency for the wrong ideas to be stolen. How long was it before GTA’s sandbox gameplay was copied, instead of the cars ‘n’ guns ‘n’ gangsters?
I think Kane & Lynch dead men was supposed to be a really good game. Some of the ideas in there are good and quite frankly I enjoyed some of the later sections as far as dialog went as well as the fact that both endings were bad(Damned if you do,damned if you don’t.. ;P). The game feels very unfinished, some textures look better than others, the voicework is kinda nice too. What I’m trying to say is that eidos didn’t want it delayed or they’ve cut fundings. I loved the charachters myself, ths game could’ve became a cult classic granted the gameplay wasn’t so annoying. I don’t really want to comment on the ‘people getting turned off because of unlikeable charcachters’ thing although i didn’t think they were unlikeable, maybe indivdually yes, but as a duo I loved the interplay, the word exchange in the middle of a heist or gun fight. The multiplayer was also an interesting concept and I felt that with more time and money it coul’ve been expanded. K&L2 is coming along and I’m hyped about it.