Kane & Lynch: Dead Men opens bombastically with an explosive car crash, sending you tumbling free along with an array of criminal scum and professional psychos. The truck, carrying the lot of you off to complete your death sentence, has been tactically ambushed, setting you free to scurry and battle your way through a litany cops if you want to survive. Bullets shear the air as you guide Adam Marcus (a.k.a. 'Kane') towards cover among the gunfire, helping to keep this mercenary alive, a man with a family that kindles a special sort of hatred for him; he's a man with the sort of regrets that loosen the fear of death, a man who has made peace with the public verdict bestowed upon him.

But instead of the 'publicly just' death sentence he was about to receive, he's been let loose, albeit cruelly. The crash? Nothing but a planned escape from a group named 'The7', a collective that Kane previously wronged and left for dead while he collected the reward they sent him to retrieve. Now The7 want payback. They want Kane to recollect the reward or else his family will bear the weight of his crimes. And the man they have to watch over Kane while he collects their dues? A bent man named 'Lynch', a loose cannon who routinely breaks out in exceptionally violent bouts and later rewrites his actions as rational. He's your 'guardian', your 'buddy', your 'lifeline', but he's also an untrustworthy fuck who can launch into an incomprehensible fury at any second.

These are men spiraling downwards, bottoming out, and utterly incapable of doing anything to derail their ever-worsening situation. And yet we, those animating their skins, are expected to 'make the best of a bad situation', just like they would.

And so I did. I plowed on through, gritting my teeth, turning an blind eye (and occasionally, my aim) away from the cop killing, as Lynch and I drove towards our objective. Even as he senselessly murdered hundreds, including several key, and very necessary, characters, even as The7 battled back with insurmountable odds, I was there to battle back. The Yakuza, cops, prison guards – they couldn't stop us. Erratic third-person perspective aiming, dodgy hit boxes and hopeless objectives? No matter. When I'd succumb to gunfire, Lynch was there to bring me back, thanks to a jolt of adrenaline, as Kane helplessly laid there and recounted his prior life, piquing my interest to see just how far these two would fall.

The following contains severe spoilers.

It wouldn't take long. Thanks to Lynch, The7 take Kane's wife and daughter hostage, then kill off his wife and run off to Havana with Jenny, Kane's daughter. Kane & Co. follow suit, only to find themselves embroiled in a Cuban Civil War, funded by The7. At this point, we're practically traveling on rails, plodding along without a thought of the circumstances around us, oblivious to the rationale of the civil war. We're mindlessly following the routine orders delivered via on-screen sub-titles, not questioning bizarre truck-based bosses or the extreme change of scenery as we venture into The7's darkness, uncaring of anyone's needs – not even the soldiers we enlisted to help find Jenny.

And so we use the soldiers for our own needs and spit them out. Squad-based tactics here are practically useless – despite the gameplay command options, you're too busy staying alive to issue them and they're too busy dying to follow them – you're best left looking after yourself and Lynch while storming Havana, no matter whether it results in mass causalities or not. At the end of the Cuban nightmare we're reunited with Jenny but Kane's offered the opportunity to fly Jenny and yourself out of Cuba, ditching your fellow thugs in an inescapable firefight (and completing the game), or try to save those you dragged into the quagmire. While escaping Cuba will grant you Jenny's life (and never-ending scorn), Kane is a man pursuing nothing but absolution through death. He has to see this through to the bitter end, even if it means endangering the ones he swears to love and protect.

Flying off to help your enlisted, Kane lands in a war-zone. Jenny insists on aiding you, brandishing a gun and becoming another member of your squad. Upon reaching the chapel housing your fellow ex-fighters you find that all but one, a reborn Christian named Shelly with quite a history with Kane, are dead, and those who did die went to their graves cursing Kane's name (thanks to his caustic remarks concerning how disposable he considered his team, remarks he believed his team couldn't hear). And once you battle off the initial wave of incoming fighters, Shelley storms off again, leaving Jenny, Lynch and yourself to survive the rest of the onslaught, a battle that unfortunately, fells Jenny.

Kane refuses to acknowledge the inevitable and doggedly foists her onto his shoulders (a moment that would be poignant, if it weren't for the developer's decision to exploit an upskirt opportunity), restricting his ability to ably aim his gun, effectively preventing him from shooting anything, much less able to run or evade enemies. Consequently, his life is mostly left to Lynch's severely incapable hands, leaving you little to do but limp along. Lynch manages to drive the straggling forces back and, as you approach the pier, you find yourself stepping over Shelly's dead body, a portentous symbol of the upcoming trip. Kane, Lynch and Jenny's husk push off from the pier when one last skirmish appears and a bullet smashes into Lynch's shoulder, slowly pulling the man into unconsciousness while leaving Kane to muse over Jenny's body. The game closes with Kane drifting alone, mulling over the letter he wrote to his daughter at the opening of the game. The boat bobs across the waters, full of dead weight, wandering aimlessly in silence.

It's a cold, but inevitable, ending and I'm glad it's an ending that they followed through on. It'd be all too easy to skimp out and simply have 'the good ending' and 'the bad ending' but the Xbox Achievements label the endings appropriately: 'Damned if you do' and 'Damned if you don't'. Kane's a doomed man, he's a man utterly entranced by the allure of a burning flame. Whether that ember was burning prior to him becoming a mercenary is questionable but, whatever the reason, Kane has enough baggage and guilt from his prior crimes to want to take himself out, to embrace his death sentence, but is too weak to do the job himself, despite knowing that his continued existence threatens everyone he's ever known. Lynch is in the same boat, but he lives in a perpetual state of delusion, ignoring the consequences of his actions – even ignoring his actions – in the name of eluding guilt. He's crazed, disconnected from reality, unaware of his own actions; is it any wonder why he's the computer-controlled sidekick?

Consequently, Kane & Lynch: Dead Men becomes a lyrical (albeit, occasionally in a stream-of-consciousness way) trip into how far guilt can delude a man. Kane repeatedly purports that he's doing this for his family, but they end up dead in the end. His soldiers? Dead. His worth? Nothing. He's a man running on fumes, and the amazing stakes invoked by The7 are utterly superficial. He knows it, they know it, and the player (hopefully) knows it. Dead Men is a futile tarantella, the player endlessly dancing around Kane's dirty little secret, leading him along all of these missions, only to find no absolution. The end of the game finds Kane with no reason to continue on but nothing to put him out of his misery. The7 have been dispersed and everything else of worth has been lost along the way. And you, the player, brought him to this point. You ruined him en route towards your quest to 'beat' the game, leaving him unsatisfied, left as a tortured soul.

And that's the tragic beauty to Kane & Lynch: Dead Men: The player's forward progress does nothing but damage the main character. Every step you take, every button you push digs him in deeper and scars him, and those around him, more and more. The best path in Kane & Lynch is inherently damaging, inherently unrewarding for everyone involved.

But I found value in the coldness, in the lack of redemption and empathy. Kane & Lynch: Dead Men tells a tale that many narrative games have been reluctant to do, expecting a player to guide an irredeemable hero towards failure. IO Interactive set this guy up for the fall and, in my book, it paid off in spades. Granted, it's a terribly frustrating experience at times and obscenely difficult at others, but the end result heralds in a degree of interactive character exploration that we, as gamers, rarely see: His success in every objective results in bitter failure, and he's left scarred and defeated as a result, left to face the consequences of his action and existence, an existence that'd probably be best left nullified.

While Dead Men is hardly quantifiable as fun, this journey has meat on it, it has well-articulated baggage that the player adds to instead of alleviating (or worse, ignoring). Kane & Lynch deserves to be praised for pinning its characters into a corner, and for forcing the player to be part of that experience. While the process of completing Kane & Lynch may be lined with complications and frustration, the end bestows us with Kane's unadulterated regret, loss and realization. And if that's not worth seeing a game through to the bitter end, I don't know what is.

This review was written in regards to the Xbox 360 version.