In some bar over the weekend, there's a little garage band that showed promise. They grew up listening to Metallica, Guns 'N' Roses, Nirvana... Heck, they even wrote some of their own songs and had aspirations of touring a little with their songbook. Then, age got to the band and they decided to cover their favorite bands note for note—but something's a little off. There's no feeling behind the music, the spirit just isn't there. Such is the case with IO Interactive's Kane & Lynch.

Upon first seeing the game in screenshots, I could only think of the Michael Mann tour de force Heat. The camera angles, the washed out look, it's unmistakable. Throughout the game, it's hard not to see scenes and venues snagged from the best action films of the past couple of decades. Kane & Lynch excels in setting up a beautiful stage for what would potentially be an amazingly cinematic experience.

Sadly, the actors setpieces don't live up to the stage set by IO Interactive. Everything, from the gameplay, to the character interaction, to the storyline advancement are broken in ways I just can't fathom. Instead of being a blockbuster masterpiece, Kane & Lynch winds up feeling like a game that had a cut budget and a deadline that didn't allow for a proper movement from the testing stage to a retail product.

Much can be said about the flaws in the gameplay, but it boils down to a lack of meeting the standards set by the industry in the third-person-shooter game. Sure, it has the over-the-shoulder view and zoomed-in view that every other shooter has. And yeah, it does have a cover system much like half the genre throws out nowadays. However, neither works particularly well.

Shooting is the most basic part of gameplay, one of the most primitive setups that really doesn't involve much thought. Point at an object, shoot, and move on. In Kane & Lynch, even after zooming in, it's particularly difficult to get a good shot in on someone. The spray-and-pray mentality from, to mention them again, pretty much every action film of the last couple of decades, is in the game with a vengeance. Depending on the mission, the ammo available isn't really steadily available to make such a thought process effective.

Of course, the inaccurate shooting system would be excusable if the cover system worked. Instead of assigning a button to it, or merely letting the player push against a wall to set into cover shooting mode, Kane & Lynch deems it appropriate to run up to walls, move somewhere around a perpendicular stance to it, and hope it works. When the cover system works, it's great—but then again, it's back to contending with the poor firing system.

In the game, the protagonists wind up being a gruff mercenary and a psychopath whose homicidal tendencies are so over the top it's hard to take seriously. Neither is a person that a typical gamer would want to be, let alone be around. As well, neither has any real human bond to anyone in particular other than Kane to his daughter—but even in that case, the game decides to rear back, snort up some mucus, and hock a loogie into your face at the end of your journey.

Not only that, but most every character in the game other than the player-controlled ones proves to be completely worthless. Antagonists are completely brain-dead, only knowing to fire on anything that moves as soon as they see even a pixel of them. Moving is usually outside of the question, and if alone, they're easy pickings for anyone who wants to run up and melee attack them.

All that said, the game isn't too far off from greatness. Of course, a better script would have worked wonders—but to say that in the context of a couple of months is unrealistic at best. However, a little more time working on improving the effectiveness of weapon usage and the cover system would knock this game up an entire letter grade. Improving the AI would be another. Heck, even putting in online coop would improve the game greatly. If it had been given the proper treatment, budget, and amount of time, Kane & Lynch would have easily been an A-/90% game. As it was released, it feels like a preview build that somehow hit retail shelves.

(User was fired for this review)