A Beatiful Excercise in Frustration and Monotony

Shank has received a lot of praise for its uniquely stunning art-style which definitely amounts to what is a beautiful game. Despite aesthetic beauty and some well matched music, the game is an exercise in frustration and intense button mashing. It is a standard brawler with an amazing disguise that attempts to mask the fact that the game quickly gets stale and repetitive.

It’s obvious that Klei Entertainment has a large and talented art/animation division because of the beautiful work they have done in Shank. The game’s iconic art style draws inspiration from modern graphic novels, and the accompanying animation of the characters is absolutely stellar. Every movement has fully articulated animation and this holds true for combat as well as basic character movement. Despite the abundance of different weapons and attacks, all of the animations in the game are fluid and well done. The levels themselves receive similar treatment as they are all drawn in unique styles with loads of details in both the foreground and background. When paired with the surprisingly fitting soundtrack, Shank really looks and sounds amazing.

However, not everything in the game is amazing. The simple controls work well and are easy to learn, but they don’t add enough depth to the game to last the entirety of the storyline. With three main combat buttons, gameplay amounts to grouping enemies into a corner and alternating between melee, heavy, and gun attacks. Although chaining attacks into combos is fluid and satisfying, the novelty wears off quickly as you’ll find yourself mashing the same buttons, in the same ways, merely to get a large combo. In standard brawler fashion, you’ll find yourself facing hundreds of enemies in rapid succession. These enemies are generic and boring with a few exceptions which amount to nothing more than larger enemies with a riot shield or with some other special weapon. Although a grapple move and pounce attack are options in Shank’s repertoire, they don’t really serve a purpose in anything but one-on-one battles because of their long execution time and the fact that they end combos.

Boss battles are some of the few moments in which Shank doesn’t require building up combos. This is because they all involve triggering an event that stuns the boss to allow Shank to grapple them for damage. Despite the slight differences between battles, the bosses are all largely the same. This isn’t true for the final boss fight which is actually more frustrating than any of the earlier battles. Although the fight itself is split into three parts, the game only provides a single checkpoint at the beginning; which leads to deaths in the second or final phase of the fight only to have to start all over. The difficulty of the final boss is also incredibly disproportionate to the rest of the game which is fairly well paced and has a difficulty level that ramps up slowly.

Story clearly took a backseat to art in Shank, as the story is basic, bland and usually quite boring. Its basic premise is a tale of revenge much in the vein of the Kill Bill series. Shank’s girlfriend is killed and he embarks on a journey to avenge her death by killing everyone involved. His story emerges through flashbacks which detail the involvement of each particular person  before a battle in which Shank gets his revenge. The story is obvious and doesn’t have any surprising or interesting moments. Cutscenes are weirdly placed and some bosses get more introduction than others which is confusing and seemingly random. Despite the lackluster story, some of the encounters are on the verge of being funny with some cheesy one-liners such as: “Forgive me father, for I will sin”. What’s interesting is that the local-only cooperative missions almost have more fleshed out story elements than the main single-player game. These missions follow Shank’s life before the events of the main story and feature new locations and bosses which aren’t repeats from the main game.

Shank is first and foremost a brawler and it definitely shows in the game’s repetition and monotony along with frustration in quite a few of the boss battles as well as in general gameplay. Despite having a beautiful art-style and absolutely incredible animations, the game is only fun for a small part of the already short game. Co-op does add some replayability to the game, but it suffers immensely without online play. Spend some time with Shank’s demo and pass over the full game unless you particularly enjoy brawlers.