Kane & Lynch: Dead Men Hands-On

During a recent meeting with Eidos we had an opportunity to spend some quality time with a pre-alpha (early work-in-progress) Xbox 360 build of Kane & Lynch. The version of the game was the same one that we saw a couple of months ago, but on this occasion we were allowed to play for ourselves and took in a different level. The "Tokyo Streets" level that we played through directly follows the "Tokyo Highrise" level that we saw last time, and sees Kane, Lynch, and their crew leaving the skyscraper and making their way to a getaway van that's parked behind a bus terminal a few cop-filled blocks away.

Open areas like the Tokyo Street level offer a different challenge to the highrise interior.

The Tokyo Streets level picks up right where the previous level left off, with Kane and Lynch leaving the elevator that they fought so hard to reach on their way down through the upper levels of the skyscraper. Innocent civilians attempting to flee the building fill the lobby, and it doesn't take too long for the police who are posted there to recognize and open fire on your crew. There are plenty of columns to take cover behind in the lobby, and the way that you back up against objects automatically simply by walking toward them works well. The columns are destructible up to a point, but not so much that you'll ever have to worry about one toppling to the ground in front of you.

Similar columns are located outside the main entrance, and you'll need to put them to good use if you're to stand a chance against the small army of police that's waiting for you out there. The cars that the police are using for cover are much more destructible than the aforementioned columns, and with a couple of well-placed grenades it's possible to really make a mess of things for the local law enforcement. The enemies in Kane & Lynch: Dead Men are intelligent enough to look for new areas of cover, of course, and they're less likely to poke their heads out if they know that your entire crew has its weapons pointed at their position. Enemies running between areas of cover aren't always easy to hit, so the trick is to get them focusing their attention on other members of your crew while you--and maybe a colleague or two--attempt to flank them. This is more challenging on the street than in the highrise, because as soon as you leave the relative safety of the building's entrance area behind you, you'll find that you're in a wide-open area with enemies attacking from all sides.

Working well with your team will dramatically increase your chance of succeeding.

The police waiting for you outside the building are only the beginning. There are more taking cover behind civilian cars directly across the street, a group taking up positions behind barriers to the left, and incoming squad cars on a street to the right, where police snipers have already taken up positions overhead on bridges and such. The sniper rifles in Kane & Lynch are very powerful, and as a result you'll often come under fire from enemy snipers long before you've even noticed them. All of the bullets in the game leave visible white tracer lines in the air, which makes enemies a little easier to locate, but with so many bullets flying in so many directions the tracers aren't always as helpful as they might be. The fact that one of your number (Lynch) is a little trigger-happy at times doesn't help, either, and on more than one occasion we became convinced that there was an enemy taking potshots at us from behind only to turn around and find that it was Lynch unloading into a nearby dead body for kicks.

Eidos and Io Interactive still aren't ready to show off the cooperative gameplay that'll see a second player assuming the role of the schizophrenic Lynch, but we're pleased to report that the uncomplicated squad commands in the single-player game afford you plenty of control over your disgruntled crew. Your guys will complain and call you names as you give them orders, but they'll get the job done and, based on our experiences with the game thus far, they're intelligent enough to interpret your orders and adapt to changing situations if they come under fire while carrying them out, for example. The three basic squad controls that you'll have at your disposal are follow, stay, and move to/attack. By tapping or holding down the face buttons that those commands are assigned to you can choose to issue the order to either an individual or to the entire crew, and using left and right on the directional pad you can choose which individual you want to give the order to. It's possible to have everyone on your team do something different, then, but there are definite advantages to having your team stick close together, including the fact that when team members "die" (that includes you), any nearby colleagues can bring them back to life if they're quick enough.