Lynch and Kane: Unpleasant Guys

Adam Marcus — AKA Kane — is a career criminal: a former military man turned into a mercenary; part of The7, a notorious group of guns for hire, with whom his ascent through the ranks led him to be part of the seven crime lords that make up the leadership of the group. He’s cold, calculating, highly efficient, intelligent and objective oriented. He’s the kind of guy you would turn to organize a hit on a bank that would end up quickly, fast, and clean.

James Seth Lynch is a henchman for The7, one who’s been promised a position alongside the top of the organization, tasked in being Kane’s Watchdog. He’s a psychotic, murderous criminal that’s not above violence to reach his goals. He suffers from schizophrenia and has bouts of hallucinations that he often forgets. He doesn’t deal with stress very well and prefers to shoot his way out of problems. He’s probably the kind of cannon fodder you would need for an armed assault on a small base.

While the technical description of the two characters might throw you off, I’m not just describing Kane & Lynch. I’m also describing something else: the persona players take on when representing a character in shoot’em up games; something that might let you know what Kane & Lynch is. But we should probably start from the beginning.

The Games

Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, a squad-based third-person shooter, was released in 2007 by IO Interactive to solidly mediocre reviews, though whatever few gamers played it, they mostly enjoyed it. The common criticism was directed to the less than stellar gunplay, floaty controls, and lack of polish on its mechanics; still, reviewers often liked the setting, the great setups for scenarios, and great presentation. A few of these reviewers commented on how relentlessly dark is Kane & Lynch, which is one of the most notable features, so to speak, of the series: K&L is one of the darkest, most depressing game series in gaming.

Ostensibly inspired by Michael Mann’s brilliant Heat (1995), Kane & Lynch: Dead Men puts you in the shoes of Kane, a former mercenary walking into death row for the massacre of 25, in a job gone wrong in Venezuela. He was busted out of jail by his former allies, The7, not out of kindness or camaraderie, but for him to give back the money he supposedly stole when he betrayed them during that job. He is placed under the watchful eye of Lynch, a rather unbalanced henchman of The7, and given time to give the money back or his wife and daughter — who are held hostage — would be killed.

Kane & Lynch: Dead Men

Even though nowadays is remembered more for the controversy surrounding Gamespot’s firing of Jeff Gerstmann — due to how badly he reviewed it — , the game did well enough for Eidos, the publisher, to ask for a sequel and IO Interactive (apparently begrudgingly) accepted, and gave us Kane & Lynch: Dog Days (2010); this time giving us control of Lynch who, after the events of the first game, lives in China as a gun for hire with his wife and receives a call from Kane, who’s passing by to complete a gun smuggling deal, and asks him for help. Things go wrong and you need to lead Lynch joined by Kane to escape Shanghai.

Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days

Leaving out the smooth criminal idea of the first one — and instead adopting an admittedly creative but ultimately a bit annoying guerrilla-style, reality TV presentation where the camera seems to be manned by a very brave cameraman who follows the pair around — , this sequel was mostly savaged by critics for its short length, even darker outlook to life, and for keeping the same issues as the first game, plus being even more violent and bleak than it. Fans of the series were puzzled by the game and it ended up being in some of “Worst of the Year” lists.

And once again, it is more memorable for the brutal scenes of torture the characters go through that forces them to wreak havoc through the city naked, than for any gaming merit.

I wasn’t joking.

I am not even gonna try to pretend these are two good games; two undiscovered gems. So why would we look back on them?

Kane and Lynch, Deconstruction Extraordinaires

Kane and Lynch are two of the most unlikable characters in gaming history. They are two irredeemable, violent criminals. They don’t even like each other — or even themselves — very much. You don’t really have to like them. They are also two middle-aged men suffering every inch of that: both are balding; Kane spends most of the game with a broken nose and has an unflattering scar over his right eye that probably left him blind, and Lynch looks every bit of white trash possible and sports serial killer glasses. But, if anything, they are two memorable ones and, once you wrap your head on how neatly they line up with the stereotypes of action gamers everywhere, it’s almost brilliant:

Adam “Kane” Marcus

Kane: The calculating player. The one that carefully plans the journey through a level, studies the opponent’s routines in order to get in and get out as clean as possible. It’s who sticks to a plan and figures out alternatives. The sniper, the silent assassin.

James Seth Lych

Lynch: The aggressive player. The one that really does not care and is only in to cause as much destruction as possible. The amount of bodies in the way of the goal is but a number, and the shotgun and rocket launcher are good friends.

Despite how lazy they can seem at first — hell even their design is so familiar you could give them personalities based on the portraits — , they are deceptively deep characters. Kane’s scars give him a perception of a thug and remorseless violent killer; and Lynch’s long, slick hair, glasses, and facial hair give the impression of a more refined, by the books player. It’s actually the other way around, which might come as a surprise due to the marketing campaign which makes it look like it’s a “criminal buddies” show.

Both are deeply broken characters. Kane seems to want to be a family man, but his job got in the way and he’s spent years in jail awaiting his execution. All those years he has spent dwelling in his failures. Lynch’s mental illness has made his life a living hell and it’s not getting better; he probably murdered his wife, with the jury still out if he doesn’t remember it or just can’t care anymore. Through the games, they both go through some severely traumatic events, and the game’s not shy about the fate of the characters. This it’s probably both its blessing and its curse: The notable ending of the first game includes Kane- He is either abandoning his allies and earning his daughter’s unending and infinite hatred — despite getting her out of a military base alive — , or trying and failing to save them and getting her and Lynch shot in an agonic escape.

This isn’t even the worst moment of the game either.

The sequel does kind acknowledges this by starting with Kane’s daughter alive, though estranged, and his motivation to get the money is to help her while giving Lynch an anchor in the form of his girlfriend, who seems to be keeping him sane. It’s as if the developers felt the first game was too much of a kick in the ribs.

At least for a while. The sequel kicks off with the duo being tortured with box cutters after Lynch’s girlfriend is killed, and ends with the pair hijacking a commercial plane to escape China, taking the entire passenger line hostage. It’s anyone’s guess how hopeful that ending is, but it’s par on course with the series; a series that took upon itself not to only deconstruct the entire criminal action genre but also the happy endings, the suave criminals, the insane killers. Everything that can go wrong will go wrong and, at best, you get out of there with your life and little else. Kane & Lynch are a miserable pair and you might not like them, but you will feel sorry for them.

Let There Be Violence

These games are divisive: some people enjoy them, some people don’t. All of them will agree, though, that the games are violent.

The series is notable for its unflinching depiction of violence, and it’s very aware of it. People get routinely executed, killed in battle, tortured. There is at least one instance of implied rape and the criminals are cruel, merciless monsters, not any kind of Hollywood kingpins. Hell, Kane and Lynch are amongst these merciless monsters themselves, even though they might hold a modicum of human decency; and despite not even liking each other, they have each other’s backs in times of need, which happens in both games. In a way, they are stand up guys, with a ridiculous body count but stand up guys nonetheless, considering how they ally when needed in both games.

Of course, the only reason you might root for them is because of the antagonists: the big bosses are even worse. Through the two games, you get to shoot plenty of bad guys, but a lot of the targets your bullets will find are either innocent bystanders or cops doing their job. Kane at times seems to realize the butchery and will argue with Lynch about it, but in general the ridiculous carnage seems like a parody and self-aware of the situation, much like when Captain Walker suddenly screams “This is not right” at a certain point of Spec Ops: The Line, or when Patrick Bateman shoots a police car, it blows up in flames and he runs away dumbfounded with how surreal the scene is in the climax of American Psycho. It’s hard to say if the game is just playing to the gameplay side of things or if the deconstruction goes that far, considering the moral stance of the characters, their charisma — or lack thereof — , and the constant escalation of bad situations the pair are subjected to, but it’s also hard not to wonder about it.

Despite that, the most violent moments don’t come from the voiceless hordes that you mow down through the 8 or so hours the game lasts. It’s the small, self-contained assaults that will make you feel the most uncomfortable, with cold-blooded murder such as Retomoto’s, or Kane’s lethal shovel beatdown on Mute, being examples of how gruesome the game can be and how little it cares to make itself more digestible.

Good bye, Mr. Retomoto

The sequel takes all of this violence and turns it up to eleven, though the “Reality TV” gimmick adds a sick joke to it all. Censorship blur is added to the wounds you cause for large parts of the game, though in the infamous segment when Kane and Lynch get tortured with box cutters, you will get to watch all of their wounds bleed in all of their glory, albeit their genitals do get blurred. And yes, once again you get to shoot up a few thousand of Chinese criminals and cops, controlling for some time two completely naked forty-something criminals with a serious case of alopecia under a thunderstorm, until you escape Shanghai. Your last enemies? A pair of dogs.

So What Happened to Kane & Lynch?

The Short Version is Dog Days but the real issue deserves a few more lines.

Goddammit Lynch

Truth be told, as I mentioned before, neither game is particularly good, but none are really as bad as the Internet would like you to believe. They are just fairly generic, third-person shooters, however ultimately spectacular enough to stand up to any of those fairly generic ones that infested the latter part of the ’00s,

Dead Men is unfairly hard: your squad is often braindead and the shooting is ridiculously bad, only the interesting plot and crapsack situation escalation being enough to pull you through the game. Dog Days drops any pretense and it’s even worse, even more violent, even more depressing, and even worse in its gun handling. It’s also very short and lacks the set scenes of the first, although this can be argued gets compensated by a really original gimmick. The second game has also turned into an unintentional, outdated period piece, considering the visual style has lost a lot of its punch in media as a whole.

The games grotesque violent content isn’t everyone’s cup of tea either. Coupled with two main characters that are almost impossible to relate to, it can make the games a tortuous experience. Furthermore, much like the aforementioned Spec Ops: The Line, it’s very hard to market a game where everyone’s an absolute dirtbag and your player character is literal scum, instead they decided to pull a marketing campaign focusing on these two tough as nails bank robbers who claim “Once this is over, I’m gonna kill you!”, eliciting some unwarranted laughs, and later you end up realizing the threat isn’t a buddy cop movie line but an actual, very real one.

There were talks about a movie deal, but one of the sticking points was turning our unlikable, medicated schizo Lynch into a well-spoken, educated man played by Jaimie Foxx. It’s not a surprise it died in development hell.

The Line that’s on the Bottom

Personal anecdotes and bias time: I actually like some games that are considered by most people as “bad”; this extends to movies, series, and music. I tend to look for the bright side of the media I consume, and I appreciate when a creator tries something new or brave. I remember playing Primal Rage back in 1994 in some random arcade in Argentina and some (much older) idiot came up to me, watched me, a ten-year-old, try miserably to perform some combo, and spit “man this game is so bad even the players are bad”. I didn’t do anything back then, except directing a — what I thought was — menacing glare at him, but I do remember thinking: “This game isn’t bad it’s just clunky. I mean it’s giant dinosaurs beating the tar out of each other. This is something new!”

(Of course, I would later find out that it wasn’t new, but I was a 10-year-old kid let loose in an arcade. I would have found some other excuse to drop money in that terrible game.)

This is kind of the reason why I have a soft spot for Kane & Lynch: these are bad games, but also these are two games that not many developers would even try to make. Making a wildly violent, nihilistic, mercilessly dark game with two unlikable jerks as main characters, and not giving them any kind of respite over the course of two different games — because, let’s be honest, they are so evil they are beyond redemption and even make the two games as raw as possible, avoiding any kind of rose tint over them — , that’s a tough sell. Most games that star characters that perform similar actions are excused in some way, Assassin’s Creed gets away with having a serial killer as a protagonist because of some ancient organization or something. Kane & Lynch might have motivation but not an excuse. Kane could have thought of a better idea to get his wife and daughter back, instead of assassinating a few hundred individuals on the way.

But that was not the vision of the game. The games are made to break through that convention, and they did, but ultimately the result probably wasn’t the one expected. One has to wonder if the games could have been more engaging if gamers as a whole would have been more ready to embrace the series, but mediocre gameplay didn’t stop Spec Ops: The Line (a similarly nihilistic, violent and dark game) from having retroactively turned into a cult title.

Still, the series stuck to its guns. And that, I can respect. Did you play them? What did you think?