Kane & Lynch: Dead Men - Awesome Multiplayer Thrill Ride!

Just when you though that there would never be a great multiplayer cooperative game for the Xbox 360 console, aside from Perfect Dark Zero and the astute Halo series, bam they hit us with this intensely awesome masterpiece. While you can play this game as just one player, people take my advice—this game is best shared with a friend. The narrative and the plot are totally original, it’s like your are playing a movie, but they don’t riddle you with endless cinematic cuts that bore you to tears and take away from the game, like we all saw in Jericho. What you will find with this timeless classic, which was the spawning of Eidos Interactive, and that saw a late 2007 release date, if you could even find a copy, is that this game is awesome, well done and original. It will engulf you from the get-go and it’s a bloody battle that offers nonstop action and fun, all packaged nicely into a game that they finally offer a two player coop mode on; thank goodness for that!

When you play two players one of you is Kane and the other is Lynch. You must be rescued from a truck that is carrying you to prison, and then the action starts and never stops. The plot gets thicker as you progress through levels trying to stop a mob boss from killing the rest of your family. The enemies are smart and will duck and dodge and come at you from all sides. You must work together in order to beat boards. And they offer a candid and valuable checkpoint system, so if you get too far in a board, you only have to backtrack so much if one of you dies. And you can heal each other, provided you have healing kits.

The weapons are realistic; the basic set, shotguns, machine guns, and so forth. Like the great ducking feature that is found in Rainbow Six Vegas, this game offers an easy to use left trigger activated ducking system, that will greatly come in handy if you are trying to avoid bullets from taking your scalp off your head. The graphics are some of the best that I have ever seen in any shooter, and they rarely lag, even though like fifty enemies will attack you at once. I will say that the Xbox Live play is not all that great, simply because there is so much to load that the play can lag greatly. However, if you can move past slow Xbox Live play time, this game is a win-in.

It is rare that games of the excellence come out for any video game system. The fact that you can play coop is priceless, and also very rare. The graphics are amazing, the narrative is fabulous, and the premise is original. When it comes to first person shooters, it does not get a whole lot better than Kane & Lynch: Dead Men!

My Score: 9.9 out of 10