Kingpin: Life of Crime

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Review: Kingpin: Life of Crime

Half-Life gave us a vivid and consistent world. Jedi Knight gave us Force powers. Aliens vs. Predator gave us three distinct races. Rainbow Six gave us realism. Descent gave us vertigo. Sin gave us half-hour load times. And Kingpinwell, Kingpin gave us the F-word.

Don't get me wrong. I love the F-word. I use it all the time when I'm upgrading my computer or reinstalling my video drivers after DirectX screws them up.

But it's not much of a legacy. And, in Kingpin, it smacks of a bunch of white game developers trying to sound streetwise. "We're street! Really! C'mon guys, we are!" Even the repetitive Cypress Hill beats have the tone of a desperate attempt to sound authentically inner city. But the game's mishmash of drab levels, conventional weapons, and neckless thugs never really comes together as anything but a competent and unspectacular shooter in search of a style.

In fact, most of the game suffers from an oppressive sameness--a kind of dim homogeneity that, even in the later levels, never really breaks out of its forced urban squalor. Kingpin is as consistently dark and grimy as Quake was brown. The endgame makes a valiant stab at polished settings--like something from Fritz Lang's Metropolis--but it's not quite up to the scope of its inspiration. Although it can handle some impressively large rooms, this modified Quake II engine just doesn't do justice to outdoor settings. The city streets feel like wide, sparsely detailed corridors. Buildings are more like walls with corridors drilled into their sides. The surface textures are top-notch. But running past mile after mile of stunningly textured dirty walls loses its charm after about an hour.

Kingpin's potentially biggest gameplay innovations, character interaction and weapon purchases, ultimately fall shy of their potential. The character interaction is no better than what Valve gave us in Half-Life. Whereas Half-Life's conversations were amusing little vignettes between bewildered scientists and security guards, Kingpin gives us absurd and profanity-laced hip-hop non-sequiturs. You can hire bodyguards to fight with you, but their main occupation seems to be standing between you and your target. The Pawn-O-Matic, which appears in each of the game's sections, supposedly sells weapons, but no matter how much money you save, guns are only doled out as the game sees fit. Instead, this is little more than a place to heal yourself and stock up on ammo.

Although the weapons are robust, nothing new or different crops up here. The character animations are pretty good--particularly the way Xatrix gets so much mileage out of the same models by using different skins. And the multiplayer game, which, sadly, is missing a cooperative mode, is surprisingly laggy, given that it's based on Quake II's solid networking code.

But this isn't the sort of game you're liable to still be playing a few months from now. It's a competent and mildly interesting example of a first-person shooter that would probably have slipped quickly and quietly out of sight if it weren't for the bogus controversy about its violence. (Kingpin is no more violent than a dozen or so other games that come to mind.) It isn't quite a dud, but it is a flash in the pan.-- Tom Chick / GamePro