Game Reviews

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.

hank doesn't disappoint. Slashing, dodging, pouncing, chainsawing, blocking, grappling, dodging, and every other ability in the game uses every button and button combination available on the controller, but it's all so intuitive that it somehow never overwhelms you. Even better, all of these options are strategically important. If the game has a strong point, its in the gameplay itself. Some of the surrounding tissue...well, that could have used a little more work.

Cut-scenes between levels are nothing short of gorgeous, but the sound work is spotty in places, with more than a few cut-scenes where sound effects are either absent or so softly mixed that I couldn't help wondering if I had water in one ear. The voice acting is passable, and features some excellent cheeseball one-liners ("I should call you Lazarus." "And I should call you... Fucked!") but on the whole, the script seems like it was written to impress a teenager. Maybe I missed the irony or something. Still, cheese be damned, I couldn't help but give a crap by the end. Enough that I've been pressganging people into playing through the multiplayer mode with me just so I can get more of the game's backstory (though cooperatively disemboweling a few hundred more mooks also feels pretty good even without the reward of plot.)