I was sold on the original Shank in about 30 seconds; from seeing the main character linking combos, moving like an acrobat, and grinning in his half-cute/half-sadistically violent yet incredibly clean art style. As long as the developers didn’t mess anything big up, the game was going to be fun. And they didn’t, and it was.
Having just finished Shank 2, going back to the original feels like playing a prototype of the same game — it’s a bit slower, a few of the buttons are mapped differently, and the art is less detailed, but it’s essentially the same thing. To a certain degree, that’s expected — such a comparison would be true for many titles after their sequels release. But in Shank’s case the similarities stand out because it feels like the developers took another chance to get things right instead of moving on to big new ideas — in an attempt to make a better version of the same game. And they did, and it is.
