Kingpin — Life of Crime

Ey fuggedabout it

Kingpin has quickly become one of my favorite games. I was interested in it when I was younger because it was a Quake 2 engine game and I love the blocky brush-based level design, but I could never get past the beginning of Kingpin. The game does not have a tutorial and you have to stealth a segment at the start that I couldn't figure out. I'm so glad I came back to this game with fresh eyes and finally finished it. The game has retro-futuristic urban decay art direction beautifully made in blocky brushes. Viktor Antonov even assisted with the art of the game, which a fair amount of maps in the game look like they could be HL2-beta maps mixed with early 20th century architecture. Factories, steel mills, alleyways, subway systems and the game finishes with a beautiful city environment with plenty of verticality. I took so many screenshots, I just love how this game looks. The level design is full of twists and turns and feels like a rollercoaster ride like all great FPS games do. I'm huge into FPS games that make you plan out your encounters and support a defensive, careful playstyle. The enemies in Kingpin will headshot your ass in a second and mess you up. I found myself crawlin…

[i]"I'm gonna bury those two motherf***ers."[/i] Kingpin: Life of Crime was made by Xatrix Entertainment (eventually became Gray Matter Interactive) who also made Redneck Rampage, Quake II: The Reckoning, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein. KP is an original one-of-a-kind grungy, industrial, thuganomics FPS with some RPG elements like a pawn-o-matic shop and gun mods. You play a nameless thug (he's not a good guy but at least he lowers crime rates by killing everyone) who decides to take down the kingpin (Marcellus Wallace ripoff) and everyone who works for him after getting beat up by Nikki Blanco's goons. In this depraved world, everyone wants to kill you except a few that help you by giving you items required to progress or being a gun for hire. Also, everyone in this game looks like they eat 1000g of protein daily. The guns are gorgeous and fun to use. The HMG (heavy machine gun) is the star of the show. Most of your guns are pretty standard. But the HMG is a heavy-hitting, triple-burst cannon that is your saving grace for long distance kills. It's the closest thing to a railgun in a game with no sci-fi weapons. Combat plays like old school online deathmatch. You'll occasionall…

BADASS

The kind of game I would describe as avant-garde, an original concept for its time, a game I could have easily imagined being developed by Rockstar Games given its style, but in 1999 it was clearly ahead of its time. It's a late discovery for me; it's funny how the cover art has absolutely nothing to do with the game itself. You roam through seedy neighborhoods to a boom-bap soundtrack, where thugs rule. Radio City and its outskirts, a fictional city inspired by the cities of the American Midwest and Northeast's Rust Belt, with a retro Art Deco style, cartoonish elements, and reminiscent of The Chaos Engine and GTA 2. It's a portrait of an America dominated by red brick and sheet metal, factories, abandoned warehouses, docks riddled with traffic, rusty subways, a city in industrial decline. Hey, this reminds me of Manhunt... The game is cool because it lets you interact with NPCs using positive or negative responses, so things can escalate into insults. It caused controversy; it's so outrageous that there's a censorship mode. The writing style and characters are inspired by gangster films like Pulp Fiction. You can hire a mercenary for a few dollars and send him to do the job. I …

It's a good game, but ♥♥♥♥ you Interplay for bumping the price up to $20 USD/$30 AUD just because that ♥♥♥♥ remaster was a complete failure. Either that or you're just a bunch of greedy bastards.