The creator of the Hitman series as well as the underappreciated Freedom Fighters, Io Interactive has a history of making games that never quite achieve mass appeal. I went hands-on with the Danish studio's new original game, Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, at PAX 07 to see if a game about a sociopathic Odd Couple could be the developer's breakthrough title.

Though the game's title implies a duo, the single-player campaign has you exclusively controlling the mercenary Kane. It opens with Kane on death row for a botched heist that resulted in 25 civilian deaths, but Kane's former comrades, the criminal mercenary group The Seven, have a score to settle, and have planted the psychotic Lynch in jail with Kane to "rescue" him. The Seven want the loot they think Kane lifted in the failed filching, so they blackmail Kane into getting it for them, with Lynch tagging along to supervise.

I played a street level in Tokyo that requires you to fight your way to a location indicated on the on-screen map. It's a third-person, squad-based shooter, and you directly control Kane while giving commands to Lynch and three other teammates.

Io is using its own Glacier engine, a modified version of the proprietary engine from Hitman: Blood Money, on Kane & Lynch, and that's a pretty good description of how the game appears--at least on the Xbox 360 version I played. It has a similar style to Blood Money, and is still a little jaggier than you'd want in a 360 game. The demo was based on a fairly complete version of the game, so I wouldn't expect much improvement before the title ships.

But in other presentational areas, Io's engine provides some great enhancements. The realistic crowd AI works well in Kane & Lynch, with hysterical pedestrians swarming to safe locations in the city like packs of roaches. And enemy AI seemed fairly proficient at finding better vantage points to shoot from--it was hard to stay even partially in the open without being pelted by projectiles.

Because of this, I made sure to take full advantage of the game's squad tactics. The portion of the game I played pits your team against a city full of sharpshooter police forces. I could cycle through individual squad members with the D-pad, telling each of them to attack an enemy in my sights, move to where I was looking, or follow me. By default, they attack enemies around them, but I had to direct them to attack specific enemies to get any real combat done.

Though it was fairly easy to command the squad, I really only used the attack command in this portion of the game, assigning a different baddie to each of my members. It almost seems like it would have been more fun if my squad could have done this automatically. Some of it even felt a little more like babysitting than commanding an elite tactical outfit, which is partly intentional, but still a hassle. Lynch, for example, will torture civilians if left on his own. Cute, but not very helpful.

Directly controlling Kane felt a little on the sloppy side. I had some trouble with the automatic cover system, which seemed to arbitrarily decide whether I could attach to a wall or not. Thankfully, it became more natural through the course of the demo, but aiming my weapon never felt quite right, and the only safe way to move between cover points, a crouched crawl-walk, slowed the gameplay considerably.

Hopefully Io will be able to add more polish to the game before it retails, as it seems to have a pretty interesting narrative behind it. To learn more about other aspects of the game, I chatted with David Bamberger, senior marketing manager at Eidos--Kane & Lynch's publisher.

Shack: EA's Army of Two is coming out around the same time as Kane & Lynch, and also featuring a seemingly psychotic duo. Are these new buddy psychopath games the new Tango and Cash?

David Bamberger: Well, Army of Two is a kickass game. They are heroes, though. They may be bad-guy heroes, but they're still heroes. Whereas Kane & Lynch, it's trying to tell a good crime story. If you look at Dog Day Afternoon, Bonnie and Clyde, or any movie that has two characters, part of what Io felt they could do with two characters is inform you of the protagonist [by] having the secondary character. And that dialogue helps deepen the story.

We're very dialogue-intense, in that sense, and we're really kind of diving into the whole crime genre because it tells a good story. But yeah, the whole buddy stuff, I think you're going to see a lot of movie techniques, storytelling techniques in games where you'll see two prominent characters, maybe even three, as long as you can pull it off.

Shack: There will not be online co-op, correct?

David Bamberger: It's offline co-op. Split-screen.

Shack: Why not have online co-op in a seemingly duo-centric game? Were there ever plans to do this?

David Bamberger: Io was very adamant about making it an offline experience because of the story. As the marketing guy I kind of go, "Maybe you want to make it online? A lot of guys want it online." But Io's kind of that way. They figure if they can't do something new, different, they don't really want to do it because there's a lot of games out there that are like that. Like Gears of War, stuff like that.

I don't know. I kind of feel like, you have [two characters], it's called Kane & Lynch, but, you know. When you play the game, they're doing some fun things with offline co-op that people can experience.

Shack: But non-cooperative multiplayer will be online?

David Bamberger: For multiplayer we're doing four-versus-four--up to eight player multiplayer--with a new gameplay mode that I think is going to be fun and interesting that we'll premier in about five weeks. We've had to keep it under a lid for about 12 months because it's an obvious idea. We want to make sure that our competition doesn't deliver the same idea.