Kingpin: Reloaded Review: A Life of Crime That Looks Like Grime

Kingpin: Life of Crime is one of those historical footnotes in gaming. When people are excitedly talking about all the transformative FPS titles that came out during the turn of the millennium, one might say of Kingpin: “Oh yeah, that was also a game that existed.” With a mix of FPS and RPG elements, it didn’t really excel in either, but did have a deliciously millennial edge to it with its profanity-heavy, copiously violent criminal setting. It felt like a terribly naughty game your parents wouldn’t like you to play. Now it has been given a new lease of life thanks to this remaster Kingpin: Reloaded. Still, is this grimy world worth revisiting?

Kingpin: Reloaded has a simplistic yet sometimes nonsensical story about a badass criminal whose boss orders him to be brutally beaten and disfigured. As the sociopathic main character, it’s your goal to gun down hordes of hoodlums on a quest for revenge against your one-time kingpin. The main character sounds irritated at even having to talk to others at all and would rather blow a taxi driver’s head off instead of paying the fare.

The story and presentation are where Reloaded is at its most dated. About half the dialogue spoken by the characters is just self-consciously edgy swearing, and none of the characters are developed or remotely memorable. Almost none appear on more than one level, and none build any sort of lasting bond or rivalry with the laconic protagonist. If Kingpin were a purist shooter of the era this might be forgivable, but since it dips its toe into RPG territory, this lack of decent narrative is pretty disappointing.

Guns down criminals with the tommy gun like it’s the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre!

Speaking of RPG territory, one notable aspect of Kingpin: Reloaded is how you can speak to various characters you find, accept quests and even pay them to be your temporary bodyguard. The follower functionality is very underdeveloped though. You can do little more than order them to follow and hold position, with them shooting at any of your foes along the way. They are not much more than bullet sponges though, charging headlong into the enemy and getting their health whittled down. Occasionally they may have special skills that you can order them to use such as a lockpicker you’ll meet at a shady bar, but he can only use this skill exactly twice before you move on and never see him again. The follower functionality is so limited that it’s a wonder it was implemented at all.

In its day, Kingpin: Life of Crime was an interesting but clumsy mix of FPS and RPG. As an FPS, it is also lacking.

Kingpin is a very dated shooter by today’s shooters and Reloaded stubbornly refuses to update the gunplay. Enemies don’t always stagger when they are shot or hit and their weapons hit-scan you, leaving you unable to dodge when they fire. Damage doesn’t appear to be locational either, so using headshots to try and take down foes quicker doesn’t work. Melee combat is equally woeful with no ability to block or parry the attacks of foes, meaning that it becomes just a matter of battering your opponent and hoping you have more HP by the end of it.

Lots of guns to use. It’s a shame none of them are much fun.

There’s only one really good weapon in the game: the tommy gun. It has decent accuracy, damage and rate of fire. The heavy machine gun weirdly feels like a downgrade from the tommy gun, despite acquiring it later. The grenade launcher is way too risky with little payoff, as likely to blow yourself up as the enemy. The rocket launcher doesn’t do anywhere near enough damage for how cumbersome it is. The shotgun is disappointingly weak, even when used up close. Weapons are just generally unsatisfying. If you want, you can turn the gore slider up to make the baddies explode into bloody goblets more easily, but even this can’t save the mostly underwhelming gunplay.

Enemy AI is godawful. They run around like headless chickens, often in circles, and the only difficulty in dispatching them comes from how random and unpredictable their movements are. Often

There are a few little improvements to be found in Kingpin: Reloaded over the source material such as improved textures for the world and characters. What’s pretty cool is the ability to quickly switch between the new and old visuals with a tap of a button. The improvement is subtle but noticeable.

There’s plenty of ugly shades of brown to be found.

Unfortunately, these upgraded textures are often like putting lipstick on a pig. Indoor levels are often the ugliest, such as in factories, warehouses or sewers, full of hazy lighting and walls of various shades of muddy brown. Some of the street sections where you can see some of the Art Deco style architecture are nice. Kingpin was originally intended to be set in an alternate history universe with a retro-futurist aesthetic and there are a few remnants of this idea in the art design. 

On one level, Kingpin: Reloaded is an impressive achievement. The original source code for Kingpin: Life of Crime was lost, meaning Reloaded had to be remade from the ground up. This makes it somewhat more understandable why it was initially so full of issues.

For a game of this vintage, loading times are insanely long. It can take longer to load some levels than it would to load some AAA titles of today. Some visual quirks still need ironing out. Using the flamethrower has so much bloom it is like looking directly into the sun, making it borderline unusable.

On release, Kingpin: Reloaded was plagued with countless other issues like this. Though the development team is admirably putting out patches and doing their best to fix the issues, Kingpin: Reloaded will always be marred by its troubled release.

Kingpin: Reloaded is a very problematic remaster of a shooter that wasn’t exactly a classic even in its heyday. Though there are some nicer textures and quality-of-life improvements, there are plenty of bugs, glitches and missed opportunities as well, so the source material isn’t elevated above its mediocre status. There’s little to value here unless you’re desperately devoted to millennial shooters and willing to be forgiving to the developers as they continue to patch the game’s problems. It turns out that when Kingpin was being reloaded, the magazine was filled with blanks.

Final Verdict: 2.5/5

Available on: PC (Reviewed); Publisher: 3D Realms, Interplay; Developer: Slipgate Ironworks; Players: 1; Released: 5th December 2023

Full disclosure: This review is based on a review copy of Kingpin: Reloaded provided by the publisher.