We’ve all long since stopped bemoaning the death of the side-scrolling beat-em-up, I think. The torch was passed to 3D spiritual successors like Devil May Cry and God of War, and outside of oddities like Castle Crashers and a crapload of flash games, the genre hasn’t really shown its head in a while (and barely moved forward when it did). Then Shank comes along and reminds us all that hey, these things could have continued evolving down a completely different branch of the great cladistic tree of videogames, to become something completely new and every bit as kickass.
Shank is bloody, violent, adolescently indulgent, and absolutely beautiful in execution (and in its executions.) Two things absolutely need to be understood if you’re even a little bit on the fence about the game: It’s gorgeously, fluidly animated, in both its cut-scenes and within the actual gameplay, and the game’s controls are split-second responsive even with the absurd amount of lovingly rendered action happening on screen. Even better, all these obsessively detailed eviscerations are animated in a style almost indistinguishable from Genndy Tartakovsky (Samurai Jack, Star Wars: Clone Wars) against a backdrop that’s pure Robert Rodriguez (El Mariachi, Desperado, and the upcoming, and remarkably similarly titled Machete). All that makes for one stratospherically anticipated game.
