IO Interactive

The Path of Blood

HIGH HD Traditions of the Trade.

LOW Trying to sneak up on someone in Silent Assassin.

WTF Aaaaaah! G-g-g-g-ghost!

If Agent 47 and Sam Fisher had a Lovechild, Absolution Would be its Name

HIGH Absolution has the most realistic living world I've experienced in a game.

LOW The checkpoint system is totally broken.

WTF Who casts badass Vivica A. Fox just to give her a tiny bit of dialogue?

The Most Murderous Janitor in History

HIGH Sneaking around as a scarecrow while killing nuns is so surreal it's sort of fun.

LOW Having a guard 100 yards away see right through my disguise.

WTF Who left all these empty dumpsters around for me to hide in? Why does no one ever look inside them?

Duckwalk Supreme

HIGH A handful of missions have the genuine "Hitman" feel.

LOW The ill-conceived "Shaving Lenny" level.

WTF What numerically-impaired person numbered these chapters?

In a short period of time I have played three games that may not seem to be similar or related. The co-op shooter Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, the straight-up cover shooter Max Payne 3, and the thriller Heavy Rain share a third-person perspective, though, one that reflects their central cinematic aspirations. Although their critical reputations vary, each of these games is an interesting failure in the project of creating a playable movie.

Caught in a Bad Bromance

HIGH: Unique and visceral camera work.

LOW: Everything else.

WTF: The level where you run around naked with more open bloody wounds than Jesus in Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ."

Game Description: Experience 48 hours of hell with two of gaming’s most notorious criminals. In Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, Kane and Lynch face the consequences when a simple job gone wrong sets off a desperate and frantic struggle to escape the entire Shanghai underworld. Experience intense action in Single Player, online and offline Co-op, Fragile Alliance multiplayer and Arcade modes. Ground-breaking art direction, relentless action gameplay, and innovative multiplayer re-define the action-shooter experience and position this product from IO Interactive as the stand-out shooter of 2010.

Hearing that IO Interactive was working on a 2-player title with a crime theme, my mind jumped to the only logical conclusion—that they were making the co-op Hitman title that all right-thinking people have been demanding for five years now. Upon playing Kane and Lynch, I suddenly remembered that in addition to that franchise, IO also produced Freedom Fighters, the cartoonish squad-based shooter about a plumber thwarting a Russian invasion of America.

Game Description: Kane & Lynch: Dead Men follows the violent and chaotic journey of two men—a flawed mercenary and a medicated psychopath and their brutal attitude towards right and wrong. This volatile partnership combined with innovative technologies allow for an unparalleled gaming experience. Kane & Lynch: Dead Men will immerse players into an emotionally intense crime drama with unflinching action. Lo-Interactive's proprietary technology will deliver fluid high definition graphics and lighting, highly destructible environments, massive crowd AI, single, co-op and squad-based combat, a cinematic interface, and non-stop dialog between Kane and Lynch. The title also features innovative two-player co-op and groundbreaking online game play.