Kingpin Reloaded Is Embarrassing

[Music] the original Kingpin life of crime is really one of those underappreciated games that you just don't see people talking about all that much you got the box or what developed by yrick entertainment who would eventually become Treyarch and work on the Call of Duty series it was one of the first mature theme shooters that I can ever remember playing better back off those guys will rip you to shreds you played as an unnamed Thug shooting his way through a crime riddled City killing copious amounts of unscrupulous criminals along the way all in a quest for vengeance against your former boss a guy who was a blatant homage to pop fictions marcelis Wallace how far do you want me to go with this it was a pretty tough Journey too which meant you'd often need backup in the form of all the various hide guns you come across literal guns for high that would follow you around and watch your back all right let's go helping out you're in combat and generally just being absolute Bros there's three freaks in that tunnel you want to join us you got to take them out with a crowbar you had weapon upgrades there were different routs throughout the levels items to find and missions to complete for different groups hey come back anytime H thanks for shopping panomatic and all of the environments were designed by a guy named Victor Antonov who also worked on games like halflife 2 and Dishonored giving the whole thing a very unique and stylistic [Music] setting all topped off with a Tred by Cypress Hill with members of the band even voicing certain NPCs so you can see how original and oneof a kind the whole thing was which made it doubly disappointing that it never really got the kind of Legacy that it deserves mostly because it's one of those games along with sin that had the unfortunate timing of coming out around the same time as halflife did I still remember playing it for the first time back when I was a dumb kid and the first thing I did was run around whacking people with the metal pipe quickly realizing though that that's not how you intended to play because along with other titles like Dex and System Shock 2 it really helped to introduce the idea that firstperson Shooters could be more than just circle strafing around until you found the exit button combinations those things try to perect I just feel like it's one of those titles where if you know you know and every year or so I always find myself coming back to replay again I mean yeah I really like this game I liked it enough to do two videos on it for my channel somebody turn on the lights so there really was an opportunity here to update a decades old cult classic and introduce it to a new audience which is something that's been sadly sconed here with Kingpin reloaded developed by slipgate Ironworks and published by 3D Realms and look I don't know if I've just become too accustomed to really good remasters lately but even still man like Kingpin reloaded just does doesn't do this thing Justice yo he man and it brings me no amount of pleasure to say that in a lot of ways it's just outright [Music] embarrassing first announc way back in 20120 over the years there's been little to no information surrounding the project and about all we've ever gotten was a few screenshots and some admittedly dope concept art I knew something was up though when they showed off that updated Gameplay trailer recently and for some reason no one seem to notice that they'd use footage for the reload Edition both times you know instead of actually properly comparing it to the vanilla footage and then finally hopping into the full version things didn't fa much better either and if you were hoping for this to be the definitive most accessible way to play through that original campaign well then I'm sorry to be the bear of bad news but this just ain't it firstly though on a more positive note what does the remaster do well well I mean I guess I like the new dialog wheel where you can now easily choose from the available options when interacting with other NPCs hey what's happening I like that they got rid of those stupid dollar sign icons whenever you kill someone which they showed off in that old Gameplay trailer I like that you can run the game in widescreen resolutions with a proper aspect ratio without having to mess around with fan mods 2o plus I like the fact that the campaign is here in its entirety with all the swearing the character cliches and stereotypes with nothing sensored well as far as I can tell anyway I mean we all know that if they removed a single cut scene or a single swear word from any of this that there'd be people up in arms riding over it so luckily they had the good sense to not do that characters often use the FW like it's a comma and the Kingpin himself still drops dialogue almost verbatim from PP Fiction with such dis guard that it's a wonder that they never got sued I'm prepared to scour Earth for this [ __ ] I'm prepared to scour Earth for that [ __ ] and off the back of that too I like how you got the option to skip through these cinematics which is a nice inclusion if you're going to be replaying through the campaign all of the character models still have that whole wobbly Quake 2 engine thing going on too which is absolutely part of what makes that engine so nostalgic so a lot of the charm in the character of the original game is still there and that is an absolute positive in a world where old the forms of media are constantly being Rewritten and modified there's even the option to play through the entire game with the so-called original gameplay as well though I can't imagine why you'd ever bother because I mean at that point you're better off just actually playing the original but at least I can't fault them for including it the thing is though everything outside of that is where the remaster just kind of suffers good Lord what is happening in there now the first thing I noticed was just how odd a lot of these new fonts and icons look some of which just look almost out of place plus the main menu has been completely redesigned looking absolutely nothing like the original which removes a lot of the grunge and that gritty tone that the old one used to have but the main menu is the least of the issues this remaster has because visually this is often an absolute mess and it arguably looks worse than the original game in almost every instance the key I thought you had it you done that I told you to get the key Nick's going to [ __ ] [ __ ] when he hears you thought you forgot it what do you mean when he hears I forgot it you little red the biggest issue these enhanced Graphics have is just this insane amount of fog and lens flare which is prevalent almost every single time you enter a room and turn a corner and even turning these settings off in the options didn't really seem to improve things either you can toggle back and forth between each mode here by pressing a single button on the keyboard which is a nice touch and I do think that those original Graphics often look better than the enhanced ones no [ __ ] but even then like comparing the original Graphics in the remas to the actual original Graphics you know what I mean like actually running the old game it still looks worse in comparison I mean I'll show you a few comparison shots all back to back and you be the judge [Music] it does look like [ __ ] lad times are often super long too upwards of 30 seconds the movement and the mouse aiming feels really choppy too and there's even some people who can't launch the game at all kind of reminds me again of the Metal Gear Solid Master collection how the PS1 emulation for Metal Gear Solid looked and played worse than running it on an actual PS1 then that brings me on to the lighting and the Shadows now I don't quite know what's going on here but all I can say is that the Shadows often don't make any sense and you'll see them on surfaces that they're clear not supposed to be on at which point it seems like they've just taken on a mind of their own oh man you got and look man I don't mind if a 24-year-old game wants to add in real time lighting and shadows a lot of those night dive remasters seem to be doing that now and it looks awesome when it's done properly but when it just creates these Shadows that look more like anomalies that have broken out of an SCP confinement compound it doesn't quite have the same appeal that's a damn shame I tell you you know what it reminds me of it remind reminds me of that old Dracula movie from the 90s when you'd see Gary Oldman Shadow doing all these weird things in the background or to a lesser extent I guess Mr Burns in The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror Simpson excellent some of those other lighting effects like the lens flares from all these bright light sources is so overpowering that it literally makes it impossible to see which which really makes me wonder if any of these effects were even fully tested once they were implemented so my advice there is just to turn as much of that stuff off as you possibly can still though that's not really going to fix things like the explosions which also look completely off like they just messed up the scale for how big the explosions were supposed to be and accidentally multiplied it by 10 [ __ ] Perfection and I don't even know how to describe Des what occurs when you use the flamethrower but I can only imagine it's the closest I'm ever going to get to having bleach thrown into my [Music] eyes apart from that all of the textures have been updated and overhauled to bring them up to a more Modern Standard apparently I mean they've definitely been updated in size that's for damn sure because Kingpin reloaded download size is about 12 GB compared to the original game which is like 800 MB and again like I'm not fully sure what's going on with these new textures or what processes they talk but at least for my eyes they do have all the Hallmarks of something being AI upscaled now I've been told by someone at 3D Realms that they didn't do that and they've all been done by hand and you can definitely see with some of these textures that they've clearly been made by another human but then for others I've got to admit that that's kind of hard to believe and when you look at some of the ones with text or other images they often come across as borderline gibberish and nonsensical I mean compare how these two versions of the same sky box look for instance the so-called enhanced heads up display is also a bit of a mixed bag with this odd icon representing the player on the bottom left of the screen which barely even resembles the guy to begin with weirdly too with the enhanced HUD turned on when you're wearing body armor it doesn't actually show the amount of armor points you've got remaining yet if you go back to the classic HUD the numbers are right there clear as day so I don't know I guess it's an enhancement now to remove Vital Information that the play might want to know it's a damn shame I tell you even more annoyingly is that the enhanced heads up display doesn't even show how much damage your allies are taking during combat meanwhile and this is really what I'm talking about man it's just all these minor but frequent little oversights that keep popping up like this bit here during the cut scene on the motorbike how the background isn't even scrolling properly and keeps lagging [Music] behind speaking of the actual bugs and glitches like that too well where do I begin I mean I experienced stuff even as early on as the starting area in skidrow there's a bit early on there when you're supposed to wait for a couple of guys to get distracted by radio so you can then sneak past them and get into the nearby warehouse and it was a creative little sequence that really taught you to think outside of the box showing off that this really wasn't going to be another mindless run and gun shooter and yet the first time I played it in the remaster it didn't even work properly and one of the guys just glitched out completely forcing me to restart the entire [Music] [Applause] campaign there's plenty of other little random bugs too like enemies getting stuck on Ledges caught on ladders stairs or doorways like it's daat 1.0 R part of what made the original game so good for a time was how intelligent the AI could be to the point that they'd often make these really impressive jumps across platforms and be able to almost follow you anywhere and consider too that in other games like halflife you pretty much had to Cod all the friendly NPCs step by step to get them where they needed to go and yet here was a game like Kingpin where you could almost forget about them and they'd usually keep up so for it to often be arguably worse here in the remaster is another massive disappointment I also found too that a lot of the time and seemingly at random my buddies would just turn on me and start shooting and I couldn't figure out what the hell I was doing wrong here I mean I sure don't remember that happening much in the base game and yet I lost C the amount of times it happened here what the [ __ ] did I do wrong I think my favorite bug though was one where I got killed right at the same time as I also killed the final enemy in the level at which point the game still showed me the ensuing cinematic of one of the main bad guys getting away only to then cut back to my very still dead body you stupid and yeah look I know that the base game was always kind of janky and had similar issues too but definitely not to this extent but besides that like you kind of expect this stuff to be fixed or at least improved in a so-called enhanced Edition I mean even the sound design is just so lacking with there being an outright absence of ambient audio to the point that I wasn't even sure if it was a bug or just another over side part of what made the original game so much fun to play through was how you kept hearing all those Cypress Hill Loops playing in the background usually coming from a radio or something like that and it worked really well to keep the feel and tone of this gritty crime infested Journey here though it's usually completely lacking and the vast amount of areas are just dead quiet and again like I hate to bring out the comparison stick but let's look at the same starting area again back to back at first I thought this might have been like a licensing issue like they couldn't get all those old Cypress Hill songs back or something I was playing to that du Nukem remaster on the Ade last week and I was kind of shocked to find out that all of Bobby Prince's music from the second game wasn't able to be licensed so I know that this is a real issue with some of these remasters and the absence of this can totally kill the vibe of these older titles it it's all a commotion however it turns out that's actually not the case and instead I think it just might be an issue with how the music is projecting during the game because I noticed that some of the radios are still playing those iconic Jingles it's just you have to be standing right next to the radio to actually hear [Music] it which again just all makes me wonder what they've actually been doing with this thing for the past 3 years it's pretty [ __ ] far from okay I know a big part of what they were trying to nail in this enhanced Edition was to balance out the combat which was a real problem that original game had and it does seem like they've improved upon that stuff early on I mean don't get me wrong Kingpin is still a crushingly hard game at times but there is a noticeable change in how some of these earlier areas now play out with it being fireless punishing I still can't help but Wonder though what they've actually done on the whole though because weapons like the flamethrower the grenade launcher and the rocket launcher still pretty much useless in comparison to something like the Tommy Gun and those enemies in the final few areas still soak up bullets like it's a slap on the ass so you're trying to tell me that this really took them three something years to put together some minor balancing changes along with some barely cobbled together visual settings that are being passed off as enhanced yikes and I sh that onto the back of that too that this is just all the stuff I came across in the 4 or so hours I spent with it I'm sure that people are going to Deep dive into way more in the coming days and weeks and fully explore the extent of all the downgrades now look I don't want to act like this is some kind of irreparable crime against humanity and I know that 3D Realms are going to be patching this thing over time so I'm sure that at some point it's going to be a lot closer to where it needs to be but right now man Kingpin reloaded is a hard [ __ ] cell and there's just not really any reason to play it considering it's just a worse off looking and arguably worse off playing version of the original game Kingpin just deserved better than this man we all did and when we're living in a timeline where games like qu 2 Power Slave and two Rock 3 are being lovingly brought into a new era things like this it just doesn't cut it guess everything we heard about you is true come on let's go I guess everything we heard about you is true come on let's go come again I hope that can do a better job in 2036 when they finally released sin reloaded but if this is the kind of treatment that that one's going to get to well maybe it's better off staying back in 1998 hey come back anytime thanks for shopping [Music] [Music] good [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: GmanLives

Views: 312,083

Keywords: video games, 3d realms, kingpin life of crime, kingpin reloaded trailer, slipgate ironworks, video game, nintendo switch, kingpin life of crime review, kingpin review, kingpin reloaded fps, kingpin reloaded 3d realms, xbox one, kingpin reloaded, kingpin reloaded interplay, quake 2 engine, life of crime, xatrix entertainment, kingpin: life of crime, kingpin reloaded review, xbox one x, video game awards 2023, kingpin reloaded gameplay, gmanlives, gggmanlives

Id: viBpln4LB2s

Length: 18min 42sec (1122 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 06 2023