Shank starts off with a rather cool animated intro of the titular character entering a bar and having to dispatch dudes while gaining his arsenal in the progress to be used in the game. It's stylish, it looks stunning and it immediately sets the tone: wild, crazy, gorgeous and violent....and then the game starts. It's not enough to be immediately apparent the problems the game has but it feels like the most it goes on, the more you notice your huge excitement for the game starts to drop. Fiddly controls, cheap moments, and frustrating boss encounters make Shank an incredibly easy game to admire from a distance but get up close and every little thing sets you off about what's wrong with it and you'd probably forget about it if the visuals weren't so damn pretty.
The premise of Shank is so simple it's practically archetypal: you play as the titular character who witnesses his girlfriend raped and murdered and it's off to play the revenge game as you go through the mastermind's cronies and bigwigs slicing and dicing and make it to the last boss. There's quite a good deal of emphasis on the story but the problem seems to be they spent so much time animating sequences you can't quite get attached to anyway. There's also a co-op campaign which acts as a prequel which I can't unfortunately play since I for one, don't have another PS3 controller and second, it's couch co-op online so unlike games like Scott Pilgrim where the game was perfectly viable single player but became funner in multiplayer, having a mode where a second controller and another player right beside you when online is a perfectly viable option seems baffling.
Combat in Shank is pretty basic, you have light and heavy attacks, your gun as well as grenades you can toss. You can bring a knife/chainsaw combo, dual machetes, chains wrapped around your fists or a katana with a shotgun, dual handguns and an uzi providing firepower. The combat works generally well if you do one thing: slow down as this is not usual beat-em-ups where you tend to hammer on your buttons a lot more but because nearly everything is animated from putting your shotgun away so you can bring out your uzi to taking out your handguns from their holster so you can fire them, enemies tend to not be where you want them if you just hammer away. Instead it becomes almost like a rhythm game, slower but more precise button presses that allow Shank to deal some big damage but even then the controls can get really unresponsive, at times too sensitive and even a bit of latency. Playing a game like Bayonetta or even another Xbox Live beat-em-up, The Dishwasher, I was surprised how immediate the controls were and how they never got in the way. Shank on the other hand doesn't feel quite as snuggly as I would like.
Then we come down to some of my biggest issues which is the cheap moments, parts in the game where you die, get a frustrated look on your face and say out loud: "who honestly thought that would be a fun moment in the game?" Being shot at during platforming sections only to fall right off the screen and die, enemies firing at you overhead where firing back becomes an exercise in trying to juggle not only standing in the right spot so you can fire back but also not get shot first as well as not getting beaten up by the guys that are on the ground with you. Then there's the final boss who will seriously get on your nerves after you keep replaying trying to beat him. And if you want to get even more frustrated, Hard Mode where not only are enemies more beefier but the mid-level checkpoints are completely absent so want to beat the level well you have to do it in one shot or back to the start for you. But when you beat the game and look back on all your deaths and the parts that got you frustrated, you go "you know what, no way".
It's too bad the game isn't as fun as I would've hoped because it looks really amazing from the quality and ultimately, the clarity in the character animations, the backgrounds and levels to little cool moments when you're backlit and it's all taking place in silhouette, the game oozes style. So much so in fact that the thing that kept popping up in my mind, that of Samurai Jack, would be an incredibly fun Shank-like game to play since the 2 share quite a bit aesthetically. But is it worth 15? No, game's short enough as it is, the additional unlocks are relatively easy to get, co-op campaign doesn't last long plus it's not online and hard mode might not be worth the frustration. It's a pretty good and valiant effort, it's just not enough to make it worth everything that comes with it.
