Review by Trotterwatch
Views: 11769
Date: 2002-12-05
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Kingpin was made semi famous within the PC Community because it contained a lot of swearing. Of course the majority of PC gamers want a game with substance to go along with the swearing. The game was popular because it contained this swearing - however the main selling point is also the games main detrimental feature. I will explain further later in this review.

The fact is if used sparingly swearing can make impact. The problem is every conversation in this game is riddled with FUCK, SHIT etc After around 5 minutes of this the dialogue becomes very yawnsome, very soon. There is an option to remove swearing - which although welcome is pretty pointless anyway as the overall theme of the game is so adult anyway.

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NOTE TO DEVELOPERS
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Removing swearing and blood does not make the game child friendly when you can still shoot people and bludgeon them to death with Crowbars.....



Ok, so far I have explained that the dialogue probably won't be winning too many Oscars. I will now explain more about the game:

This game is a First Person Shooter as far as FPS games go this isn't a classic. It suffers from having unbalanced gameplay (some parts are too easy others too hard). It also suffers from having badly designed levels that give you no impetus to continue on with the game. This is a shame as Kingpin does contain some decent weapons, along with decent graphics that still look good even in the current climate of abundant graphical brilliance in the games market.

Characters look satisfyingly real though the same character models are used ad infinitum making you think that this game is using Human Cloning to a vast degree. Also in cut scenes that are rendered using the games own engine, the characters skin seems to take on a liquid form. It ripples when it shouldn't and just looks very odd.

The AI for computer characters isn't too bad. Virtually all of the computer characters can be interacted with and spoken to using three different commands. Positive, Negative and Hostile responses can be given using 3 different keys. Sometimes a character will offer to help you out for a payment, this tends to work well.

Sound in this game is good, though sadly the script problems I mentioned earlier help to ruin any potential atmosphere this game could have induced.

A sequel to Kingpin would be welcomed by me. If they managed to take out all the annoying flaws that stopped this game from being the classic then it would be a vast improvement.

Multi-player mode is included as is par for the course in any respectable PC game nowadays. I haven't played the multi-player aspect too much, though I wouldn't think that a game such as this would work very well - the selection of weapons isn't good for multi-player, nor is the athleticism of the characters.

Kev


Again this is one of the reviews I wrote for a site quite a while back, I have changed a couple of things though..... I'll write some newer, more relevant, and original reviews soon (with screenshots... woooohooo!)