YMMV / Kingpin: Life of Crime

• Anti-Climax Boss: Compared to the earlier, definitely challenging arena bosses of the game (featuring Lieutenants wielding flamethrowers, high-caliber battle rifles or rocket launchers), Kingpin's Final Boss fight turns out to be this. Despite the excellent build-up (requiring players to fight off a Recurring Boss, the Kingpin's elite bodyguards, and a pack of rabid dogs to be able to even reach the Kingpin's suite), the actual final fight is a disappointing Dual Boss battle, featuring The Dragon with a battle rifle and the Big Bad with... a pair of pistols. It also doesn't help that the only challenges we face are all due to Fake Difficulty: the final arena is a hard-to-navigate multi-storey maze, while The Dragon of the fight is Immune to Bullets (for no other reason than to act as a Sequel Hook that was never followed upon later). Standard procedure for the final fight is to neutralize The Dragon with the flamethrower (the flames don't kill her, but she can't fight while on fire), then pump as much lead or rockets into the Kingpin as you can.
• Disappointing Last Level: Compared to the pseudo-open world nature of the first four chapters, the final third of the game's campaign (the Railyards and Radio City) turns into a mostly linear corridor shooter, with a lot less neutral or recruitable characters, and no side missions available on the maps.
• Fan Nickname:
  • The player character is usually referred by the "Thug" Meaningful Name by the community, mostly due to the fact that the game also reinforces this. Thug is the default name given in multiplayer, but the Villain Protagonist of the campaign is also referred to as such when using the Chat function in single-player mode.
  • "Marcellus Wallace" for the Kingpin, due to him being a blatant Expy of the character from the film.
• Goddamn Bats: Throughout the game, the most annoying enemies you will face in the city will be... the rats. Hard to hit, and numerous in numbers even in small rooms, you lose a health point each time you step on one. You can easily lose a good portion of your health even just by running carelessly between mission points. On the human side of things, any enemy wielding a flamethrower should be a priority in any firefight: though relatively weak, those guys can easily chew through your health and armor, quickly leaving you at the mercy of their gun-toting colleagues.
• Magnificent Bastard: "Thug", real name unknown, after being beaten to near-death by Nikki, vows revenge on Nikki and anyone who hurt him. After cutting through the Sewer Rat and Scorp gangs to steal a battery for a motorcycle, Thug then assists Louie in stealing some documents from Nikki, before confronting Nikki in their office, pursuing him when Nikki escapes. Teaming up with Big Willy to take down Heilman at the wharf, Thug later goes to Steeltown to free Moker's workers from his grasp, and slays him. Also killing Tyrone en route to Radio City, he strikes an alliance with the Jokers against his own odds, and reaches the Crystal Towers with their assistance, completing his revenge by killing Nikki, then killing the Kingpin to take over his syndicate, ending the game having gotten everything he wanted while improving the syndicate the Kingpin once owned.
• Memetic Mutation: In Russia, this game is mainly known for its infamous translation made by Fargus Multimedia, which turns hamminess of voice acting up to eleven and replaces half of the dialogue with lots and lots of Russian swearing. It's still one of the most commonly used sources for Russian YTP videos.
• Moment of Awesome: The first thing your protagonist says after getting his ass handed to him offscreen.
  Protagonist: I'm gonna bury those two motherfuckers.
• Narm:
  • The sheer amount of profanity said by everybody can be more hilarious than hardcore to modern gamers, who thanks to games like Grand Theft Auto are far more used to such language being used naturally in video games today.
  • The Shout-Out's to The Big Lebowski and Pulp Fiction are so blatant to anyone with even a passing knowledge of those films, they're more likely to inspire snickering than anything else.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: The game had the unfortunate timing of being made on the heels of the Columbine shooting, and as such received calls to be banned from US Moral Guardians and even members of Congress for its violence and profanity. As a result, most US retailers refused to stock the game, and this is a major reason the game quickly sank into obscurity in North America. To this day in North America, it is remembered for this controversy more than any of its own merits or faults.
• Porting Disaster: Due to the missing source code, Reloaded was reverse engineered from the original game and ported to the Unity engine, and was released in an incomplete state. This remaster was heavily criticized for its plethora of missing features, performance issues, and bugs not found in the original game. The entire multiplayer mode was also taken out.
• Retroactive Recognition: Modern gamers might notice some similarities between this game's art style and those of Half-Life 2 and Dishonored. This was one of the earlier video game efforts of Viktor Antonov, an art director and conceptual artist who would go on to make major contributions to the art design of the latter two games.
• Scrappy Weapon: Alas, there are several of them, in spite of the otherwise entertaining combat:
  • Compared to the damage the handgun-wielding enemy AI can dish out with their laser-sight accuracy, players would think the pistol is a viable starting weapon. They are wrong. In its basic setup, the gun is next to useless even in medium range, given its inaccuracy, slow rate of fire, and relatively low damage output. Albeit most of its stats can be boosted with purchasable mods (increasing its damage, rate of fire and reload time), player's will definitely retire the handgun as soon as the shotgun is acquired and the Tommy gun shares ammo with the pistol further making it inferior when that is obtained. The fact that enemies can also wield Guns Akimbo while the player cannot also doesn't help.
  • The Grenade Launcher. Most grenade launchers in video games either fire grenades that explode on contact with enemies, hold more than three rounds in a magazine, let you carry more than 18 rounds total (especially if the game's bazooka has a clip of five shots and an ammo cap of one hundred rockets), take less than four seconds to explode, exist in games where enemies aren't smart enough to run like hell before the 'nade goes off or some combination of the above. Kingpin's grenade launcher is not any of these things. It's so bad that not even the AI can figure out how to kill you with it.
  • The flamethrower doesn't do nearly as much damage to enemies as you'd think it would. Enemies lit ablaze with it mostly run around flailing for a few seconds before returning fire again. In fact, since they can do damage to you while running on fire it can be just as dangerous to you as enemies. Of course, flamethrowers used by the AI can quickly chew through a player's full armor and health in seconds.