Kingpin Reloaded (PC)

Back in 1998 shooters changed, with the launch of Valve’s original seminal shooter Half Life. It would take something special after that to be noticed by the community. Kingpin: Life of Crime launched in June 1999 to some decent reviews but despite these, it’s not as fondly remembered as other games of the era. Luckily after a long 3 years in development 3D realms and Interplay present Kingpin: Reloaded. Let’s see if this underground crime shooter hangs with the other remasters.

Kingpin reloaded follows the story of our unnamed protagonist, we find him at the start of the game being attacked and left beaten by some of the Kingpin’s cronies. It’s up to us to climb through the crime underground to get our revenge.

The plot is pretty basic but there’s a lot going on in game, we have a good amount of NPC’s we can deal with in positive and less positive manners. Everything story wise runs pretty smoothly, it’s absolutely profanity filled but in general it’s aged pretty well in a retrospective manner.

Gameplay sees you traversing through the different areas of the city, meeting NPC’s who’ll give you some missions before you progress, these are pretty typical affair such as, find the key, blow the safe, etc. But the game in combat feels good, with it being slightly on the tougher side at the start, but once you start getting better weapons everything flows nicely.

Looking at how 3d Realms have pieced this together is a different story unfortunately. I will give 3D Realms some credit, as the original source code for Kingpin has long been lost, they’ve managed to create a strong visual replica of the original game and keep the feel as close to the original as possible.

However… unfortunately at the moment Kingpin isn’t looking in a good shape, visually the enhanced version feels really rough, with some exceptionally rough lighting effects, models on the enhanced edition look fine, with some slight intentional warping to keep a retro aesthetic. I think the new UI isn’t as good as how the “original” looks, with some missing stats for where your armour should be. I did find myself playing on the “original” visual set up instead of the enhanced version. There’s a few more issues with NPC’s being very inconsistent behaviour wise, lots of getting stuck behind doors (and then blocking said door), behaviour on ladders is very very erratic, and in a few occasions floating in the sky.

Audio is kept as original as possible, with 3D Realms retaining the services of Cypress Hill, to keep that soundtrack as authentic as possible. However unfortunately most of the audio is locked to radios in the game, of which if you stray too far from, you’re unable to hear the beats provided. Voice acting is on the better side too, despite everyone being a tough guy I think it’s voiced pretty well.

Performance on the remaster is a pretty mixed bag too. Where I was able to see pretty alright performance mostly, it’s been reported that some weapons can tank frames, with the flamethrower being especially bad, but other weapons being quite rough too. I hit 100 fps at one point, with a pretty steady 60 but did notice drops to 30 when using the pistol of all weapons.

Unfortunately it’s not even a mixed bag with Kingpin Reloaded. I wanted to really enjoy this, however in the state it’s shipped in, even with 3 years of a full rebuild of the game, I can’t recommend this. Especially when the original is still available on Steam and Gog, this right now needs to be left in the alley.