Covering, command system
Throughout the game you play as Kane and it’s standard shooter fare for the most part as you shoot your way through cops, security guards and mercenaries, but you also need to issue squad based commands to a team of up to four people and due to the ‘brick-wall’of enemies that you’ll often encounter, it’s difficult to progress without using your team-mates to help clear the path in front of you.Commands are issued via three basic commands: attack, defend and follow. You can order them as a group or individually by pointing at places in the environment and ordering them to move to that position or by selecting a target and ordering them to attack. So, you can flank enemies with your team-mates and draw their fire enabling you to move forward to attack as well as use the commands for other tactical scenarios. The problem is that it just doesn’t work as well as it should because the AI often has a mind of its own.
The covering system works automatically, so if you send a team-mate or move yourself towards a wall or a car they are supposed to automatically get into position enabling you to fire from relative safety. Strangely it seems that cover only works against certain objects so time and time again you’ll run to find cover only to discover that Kane or a team-mate won’t get into the required position and then you'll have to scuttle off in the hope that the next object you find will allow you to take full cover.
The AI problems continue when you try and use the command system and sometimes, especially when you command a team-mate to attack, they’ll expertly take pot-shots from behind cover, but other times they’ll just run blindly down the street towards their mark and just get peppered to death by the cops. The action in Kane & Lynch Dead Men stops and starts frequently due to amount of pressure put on you by enemies, meaning that you need to find cover and work your way out of a situation, but the AI of your team-mates and the enemy is so inconsistent throughout that the experience isn’t an enjoyable one.
Click for larger image
Click for larger imageThere’s also a problem with the game’s damage system. You can put a couple of pistol bullets into one enemy and they’ll fall to the ground, but then you can rain a clip full of bullets from a machine gun into their midriff and they’ll take a full clip before going down.
The problems with game mechanics continue with the over-sensitivity of the controls. They can be tweaked in the settings menu, but targeting is still pretty poor and jumpy throughout. The small white target reticule also provides a problem when you come up against some of the game's white backgrounds (walls, columns etc).This means that the cursor seems to disappear against these backdrops at the most inconvenient moments.
