Danger Dance

That’s what must have happened. It’s the only way to explain how every character in the game is a humorless prick. I mean, if there is ever a burgeoning market for humorless prick simulators, IO Interactive will be at the forefront. Remarkably, even the kidnapped daughter is completely punchable. The moment you rescue her she points a gun at you and starts explaining how she wishes you were dead. Maybe it wouldn’t be so annoying if you hadn’t just fought an entire army of Spanish speaking troops to get there, like you were playing Commando: The Game.

Hi. I’m Jeff Gerstmann. I just got fired for giving Kane and Lynch a 6 out of 10 over at GameSpot. I don’t know what the big deal is. At most American High Schools a 60% is just barely passing. So, Kane and Lynch still has a bright future as a Junior College graduate. If I were to review it again, knowing what I know now, I would definitely give it a solid and completely objective score of “Junior College”. So hey, can I borrow five bucks? I’m good for it, dude. Seriously.

Sure, his daughter might be understandably angry due to some time previously when Kane was an jerk to her and the entire planet of Earth, but how about other human emotions? How come everyone in the game has their emotions turned all the way up to titanic jerk-bag? How about trying something basic, like happy or sad? Perhaps in Denmark the only emotion available is asshole. Actually, I just checked and asshole seems to be their biggest export, so it’s definitely possible that they experience no other emotion, but I’m guessing that the writers of Kane and Lynch are so good that they just left all of the human emotions to our imagination. It’s a little subtlety from a game where the opening level is about shooting cops in the face.

To come up with a dazzling array of diverse white characters and an intricately clichéd plot, IO interactive had FIVE people write this game. FIVE. Two of the main writers were the game’s director and the lead animator. You may have noticed how I took a page from Kane and Lynch and used subtlety to point this out in the earlier writer’s room reenactment. IO Interactive should have taken a page from their own subtlety playbook and subtly told the lead animator to stop writing and get back to animating, so I didn’t have to repeatedly see characters magically get injected with adrenaline—the game’s way of reviving dying characters—by a hand three feet above their chest.

At least one of the FIVE writers must have had a full-time job just replacing every single comma in the game with the f-bomb to make it more “mature”. If the same effort had been put forth to make the actually characters more mature, instead of emotionally retarded, the game probably would have had at least one almost-enjoyable character, other than the crosshairs.

To be fair, Kane does supply the base level of affection for his family necessary to move the plot, but his desire for their safety is usually used as an excuse for him to be a jerk to everyone else. However, he does seem remorseful about his role in life as a Grade A jackass, at least when he reflects on his life as it slips away. Every time he and by extension you die the audio of a previous cut-scene telling you how you suck or how someone wishes you were dead is played. It’s a bold move on IO Interactive’s part to use the same psychological punishment as an abusive spouse to convince gamers to continue playing. “I know I never do anything right and you wish I was dead but you still love me, right?” It must have worked because I saw this train-wreck relationship all the way to the bitter end.