Apart from the Retomoto office battle and the lovely bit where you bust into a prison to round up your men for a big job, Kane & Lynch will leave you cold. You’ll get plenty of gun-toting action and plenty of baddies to carve down, but for every moment you go “Wow, this is pretty good,” there’s another when you’ll be cursing it to hell.
Take the bit where Kane’s daughter is brought to a building site to be executed. She’s cowering in a hole as a screen-filling dumper truck rumbles toward her. It does make you gasp as it thunders along, but taking out the driver is needlessly tricky - the windshield seems to be made from bulletproof glass. A couple of clips from a machine gun help, but IO have made it seemingly indestructible in order to prolong one of their money shots. They’ve done the same thing with the police cars’ tires during chase sequences, as aiming at the wheels while hanging out of the getaway van will only knock the cars off course for a split second. This unfairly makes the game more difficult than it needs to be, because Kane & Lynch is easy enough to pound through in about six hours. It’s that short.