The Gospel According to Kane & Lynch

The creators of Hitman and Freedom Fighters bring the best of both to their new PC and 360 game.

With movies like Heat and Man On Fire serving as inspiration and IO Interactive's bullet-riddled resume already listing such games as Hitman and Freedom Fighters, it's no surprise that the word that comes up most frequently in discussions about the developer's new game Kane & Lynch is brutal.

Developer IO Interactive told us the game, to be published by Eidos, is a straight-up action game, but you can best imagine it as an amalgam of the third-person shooter gameplay from the aforementioned Hitman series with a good measure of the squad tactics from Freedom Fighters.

Just don't call Kane, Lynch and the rest of your crew a squad.

IO is making sure to steer Kane & Lynch away from military shooters, and to that end you won't even have an inventory menu in the standard sense. Rather, the other members of your crew serve as your inventory in addition to helping you through mission obstacles. They'll use mimicry to keep up with how you're playing, attacking when you attack and sneaking when you sneak.

"Some areas of the game have fairly tactical scenarios to them," explains IO. "But most of the game is more raw."

That rawness flows through not only the game but the lead pair too. Kane is the level-headed one - a flawed mercenary, as IO puts it - whereas Lynch is a volatile psychopath, always teetering on destruction and kept in check by medication. They're very different people, but they're unwillingly united in their atypical path off death row involving a group called The Seven.

Kane & Lynch is set in varied enclosed and open-air environments, and to use them to your advantage you'll have to acquaint yourself with the unusually focussed smoke system. "Smoke is much more important to you than normal weapons," says IO.

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This awareness of your surrounding stretches to your health. Joining the trend seen in shooters such as Gears of War and Rainbow Six: Vegas, IO has eschewed a health gauge for Kane & Lynch. Rather the game screen becomes increasingly more crimson, warning you to take cover behind the destructible environment.

While IO was keen to talk about the singleplayer and co-operative aspects (a second person will be able to play as Lynch) of Kane & Lynch, the developer was keeping multiplayer to itself.

"The multiplayer is something that we feel somebody else should have done years ago," IO told us. "It feels like it's a new online mode."

Kane & Lynch will be out for PC and Xbox 360 later this year.

Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo