Review by: Michael Barnes

Shank is a new 2D brawler with a visual presentation cribbed straight from the Adult Swim style guide and a script Xeroxed from a mid-1990s Robert Rodriguez picture. It’s also the worst video game I’ve played in 2010: a repetitive, sadistically juvenile title that is completely soulless and empty yet filled with ugliness and crudeness.

The rudimentary gameplay requires zero skill and features no sense of dynamism barring some basic, no-threat platforming. It makes old school brawlers like Final Fight look sophisticated by comparison. By playing right into the criticisms of detractors that claim that brawlers are nothing but button-pressing frenzies, Shank almost single-handedly undoes the genre’s growth over the past five years under the knuckles of such innovative greats as Bayonetta, Castle Crashers and Madworld. Don’t be fooled by the cool cartoon artwork – Shank is rank.

The story, written by the writer of the God of War games finds the titular character seeking bloody revenge against the lowlifes that did him wrong. But the sparse, half-assed writing on display makes Kratos’ ‘roid rage hollering look like something written by Proust. There is not a single likeable or interesting character in the lot, and it doesn’t help that the voice acting is horrible. A few stabs at comedy either fall completely flat or are in poor taste; the rape and murder of Shank’s girlfriend by a masked wrestler is very nearly played for laughs. I suppose some of it might be funny if you still guffaw at the thought of a guy coming out in a “gimp” suit some sixteen years after Pulp Fiction. The game breaks its own spine bending over backwards to be “edgy” and to mesh with a sort of grindhouse-style presentation. Unless you’re the kind of person that gets shocked when a cartoon character bleeds or drops the F-bomb, you’re more likely to see the proceedings as childishly crude.

Shank’s revenge on the various street thugs, mobsters, strippers, and miscreants that did him wrong is exacted through a couple of weapon choices and a variety of attacks. For the first level of the game, I played it like any other brawler. I tried combos and worked on timing. By the second level, I realized that I was wasting my time. Without exaggeration, I played through the remainder of the game by literally pressing the three attack buttons simultaneously over and over again; I just wanted to see how far I would get doing so. I cleared the game that way. Despite the availability of new weapons over the course of the game, I found they were mostly useless except for the shotgun, which made my “three button mash” technique even more lethal. At one point, I was checking email on my phone with one hand and beating up bad guys with the other. I didn’t even have to look at the screen as long as Shank was pointed at the bad guys. That should not possible in an action arcade game.

Anyone that claims that there is hidden depth or subtlety in the game is kidding themselves. The game is actually more difficult if you try to hit combos and use the grapple or pounce attacks. Inexplicably, in the later stages it’s possible to just run past almost all of the fights. Four of the boss fights are exactly the same: get the boss to run into something that distracts or incapacitates them, then press the right trigger. The game’s final boss is at least different, instead relying on cheap tactics and a massive spike in difficulty. I can’t believe I beat the whole thing.