Kingpin: Reloaded Review - Out of Ammo

The thing I love about remasters for old-school shooters like Quake II and Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition is that I'm able to play these titles without having to jump through hoops for them to run on modern hardware. Now, if only I could say the same for Kingpin: Reloaded, which, despite having a new engine with enhanced visuals, feels outdated and clunky.

Promising enhanced visuals and polished gameplay, Kingpin: Reloaded aimed to make the game more accessible for first-time players such as myself. The result of this bafflingly lackluster result that left me wondering why Kingpin deserved a remaster in the first place, since I certainly didn't have a great time with it.

The Port Quality of Kingpin: Reloaded

I haven't played the original, but I'm always open to trying out older titles from one of my favorite genres. From what I can tell, it's a bit of a cult classic among old-school FPS fans and was at the center of the ol' "violent games are bad" debate back in 1999.

As a first-time player of Kingpin, I wasn't enthused. Though its graphics are impressive for a game from 1999, it's definitely aged over its nearly 25 years of life. This remaster promises enhanced visuals to complement the improved gameplay and accessibility for modern systems.

You're able to quickly switch between the new and old visuals on the fly with the press of a button; the switch is seamless and I wish more remastered games did this. Unfortunately, the changes are extremely subtle. Textures are less blurry, sharper, and models are just slightly more crisp, but it was sometimes hard to tell what changed when pressing the button.

Kingpin: Reloaded is undergoing changes through patches already, and one much-needed remedy was to change bloom on the updated visuals. Lights had so much bloom, it almost made me sick from the hazy look. This aspect of the remaster is, at the very least, fixed. The same cannot be said for some of the more glaring issues.

AI in Kingpin: Reloaded is abysmal. Enemies run around like chickens with their heads cut off, often not engaging you in combat. Companion AI gets stuck on level geometry as well. The first few times enemies dropped the f-bomb on you and ran away was funny, but after hours of dealing with brain-dead AI, it gets old.

Other than that, the gameplay feels a bit clunky. Movement isn't smooth, nor is the performance for Kingpin: Reloaded. It should run well on just about any PC, but I did encounter some performance problems throughout. Frames might drop unexpectedly depending on the level you're on. Weirdly, firing a shotgun on a certain level caused intense lag every shot.

I don't want to downplay the amount of work that went into Kingpin: Reloaded, and assume I know why development some issues are occurring. As I understand it, the entire game's source code was lost and had to be rewritten from scratch since the original was lost. Hiccups are surely bound to result from this, but it desperately needs more time in the oven.

Were this an Early Access release, all of these problems would be acceptable for the time being. I mean, loading into a level can take longer than most AAA games, for goodness sake. With more patches on the way, Kingpin: Reloaded might start to feel more like a remaster than a demaster, but only time will tell.

Kingpin: Reloaded is One Strange Beast

Looking at it from a gameplay perspective, I really didn't enjoy Kingpin: Reloaded's gunplay or mechanics. This is disregarding the poor port quality and from a gameplay perspective only -- it's one of the most bland shooters I've played in a long time.

Gunplay is arguably Kingpin: Reloaded's weakest point. The roster of weapons is pretty basic, giving players a pistol, shotgun, Tommy gun, and so on and so forth. Nothing stood out but I mainly used the Tommy the entire time, as it was the most consistent weapon in terms of damage and ammo.

I don't have too many qualms about how the machine gun felt to use, but other weapons felt lackluster in terms of power. I hardly used the flamethrower and grenade launcher as they felt too risky to use, and the rocket launcher didn't seem all that useful either, with some foes tanking the explosions like some sort of superhuman.

The heavy machine gun, a powerful rifle that shoots in bursts, has such a sluggish rate of fire that I was wondering if something was wrong with the gameplay. It's just a relatively unpleasant and unreliable weapon to use, especially when you might be facing multiple foes at the same time.

Gunplay aside, the level design of Kingpin also left a lot of room for improvement. I can't even conjure up many words to describe how uninteresting most levels felt, besides light immersive sim elements by giving players vents to crawl through and some branching pathways.

Kingpin: Reloaded tries to spice things up by giving players the occasional companion to hire with money, but they don't do much other than make for a decent meat shield. From the original is also a dialogue system that is poorly implemented, which amounts to spamming the "talk" or "taunt" button to gain information about your next objective.

Kingpin: Reloaded Review | Final Thoughts

If there's one thing I enjoyed about the experience, it's that later levels start to have more personality and look alright; the art deco-inspired vibe of the city is a really cool look that could have been more prevalent throughout the experience.

Levels could use some more complexity, but I felt like I was going down the same corridors or exploring the same streets and buildings for most of the experience. On the other hand, the sound design (which was untouched from the original) was another standout, with crisp audio that reminded me of Thief.

Despite being excited to play Kingpin for the first time, I hoped for a lot more. As I mentioned, there are ongoing efforts to patch this remaster, so it's only up from here, right? That said, no amount of patches will change the fact that the bones of the original Kingpin are clunky and simply not fun to play.

Kingpin: Reloaded was reviewed on PC with a code from the publisher over the course of 7 hours of gameplay. All screenshots in this review were taken by the reviewer during gameplay.