Your Regularly Expected Programming
Kane and Lynch: Dead Men
The original reviews for this game panned it, pretty much. I didn’t read them too carefully, so when I saw this game for 18$, I decided “Ah, what the hell.”
This game is bad. No, scratch that- It’s Bad with a capital B. The studio that made K+L is where game design goes to die. The number of monumental errors in this game is… well, about as monolithic as the errors themselves . First, though, the good. The story is not total crap. I like the way that Lynch keeps derailing what should be pretty simple operations for a well-connected mercenary, and he’s funny in how incompetent and horrible of a human being he is. The controls aren’t bad, either. It’s just that they’re the exact reverse of Army of Two, which is the game most people are going to compare this to. I guess that’s all the good I can say about it.
The Bad- Where do I even start? The graphics are a terrible abuse of the engine- washed-out and too much shiny on everything. The sound design is crap- everything is tinny and anemic. The difficulty levels have a massive disparity- too few enemies on easy, too many on normal and hard (IMO). The “healing” system is vague and hilariously exploitable. If you’re revived too many times in a short period you ‘overdose,’ but the time period itself is never mentioned, neither is overdosing, and it appears to vary wildly between levels. The cover system is finicky and often useless, impeding your fire more than helping it. The mission objectives are vague and poorly-explained, and the minimap is utterly useless. The level design is bland, uninspired, and barely gives even the slightest nod to realism. Instant-death zones or objects are numerous and rarely indicated, as are mission-failure conditions. Split-screen co-op splits your screen vertically, down the middle, as opposed to horizontally, like every other game in history. This limits your field of view so much that it’s basically impossible to see anything, resulting in co-op play being full of unnecessary tribulation. In addition, the missions change so much in co-op that there’s almost no correspondence between them and their single-player versions, making it two confusing, badly design games in one, which I suppose is some kind of sick bargain.
In conclusion: Damm, this game is bad. It’s REALLY bad. I can’t stress enough how bad this game is. Good lord, I feel like such a chump for buying it.
Assassin’s Creed 2
Just started playing this game, so these are more preliminary impressions than anything else. First off, the story is good. I like it. Second, I do NOT like Desmond at all. I was one of the “screw the future, screw swords” people in AC1, so I’m glad that they seem to have addressed my complaints. Ezio is a cool guy, though, even though I play him like a total dick. I beat up men in the street, rob them, shove them into canals, into walls, and kick or knee them in the nuts until they wish they’d been born women. And I LOVE it and have no trouble with the controls, which is a far cry from AC1. The random jumping/falling off of buildings is much more rare in this game, as opposed to AC1, and they added fast travel! So it pretty much looks like all the complaints I had with the first game were addressed, game-design-wise.
The bad? Well, this game is an abuse of the Unreal Engine. It’s not detailed AT ALL, and looks about as flat as a 6th-grader’s chest. The characters are ok, but have some wierdness. The animation is mostly crap, no weight or punch to it at all. It suffers from some wash-out too, but not nearly as bad as K+L. Your character still acts a bit like a tank, with some odd control issues when the camera isn’t EXACTLY parallel to your direction of travel.
All that said, still a great game. I have high hopes for the rest of it and the series.
