4cr Preview – Shank

Despite the awesome name, I originally had minimal interest in Shank. I thought, like some stuck-up snob, that it was just a 2D brawler where you play as a Rambo look-alike with lots of blood so it’s probably going for the mindless violence demographic and clearly not for me.

But then I found out who was making the game, and then I talked to them about how they made the game, and then I played the game.

Now, I really, really want Shank. (oh wait, maybe it would’ve been cooler if I said something like “And now, I’m ready to get Shanked.”)

Shank is mindless violence, but only in the same sense that a brawler, by its very defintion, must be. Yet, even by that measure this game seems to have an edge by how much more fluid it is than the traditional sidescroling action games that it builds upon. The E3 demo showed off a train level in two parts with the first half requiring the titular hero to run down a series of train cars and the last bit involving a boss battle.

One of the first noticeably cool things about this game is that there are a variety of moves mapped on to the face buttons from the start. The arsenal featured in the demo included the standard shanks, chainsaw, and akimbo pistols which were later exchanged for a shotgun. Each weapon acted as the standard weak/strong and distance attack moves, but the relationship between moves felt more complex than just that. I often found myself facing off against three or four enemies at a time and each move seemed to have a greater purpose than just slower animations that deal greater damage.

Jamie Cheng and Jeff Agala, Studio Founder of Klei Entertaiment and Shank’s Creative Director respectively, explained during the demo how they wanted combat in the game to feel very fluid and it didn’t take too much playtime for me to figure out how exactly they meant this. Jamie told me how to perform a “Wolverine pounce” in which I jumped into the air and landed on an enemy–shanks first–and then proceeded to just stab him into the ground, pausing only to shoot other enemies when they got too close for comfort. In other situations the “Double Dragon grab” was more appropriate, from which I could decide to keep pummeling the bent-over enemy, throw him up into the air and riddle him with a barrage of bullet fire, or perform the crowd pleasing act of shoving a grenade in his mouth.

So after a few hectic encounters with several groups of thugs and noticing the room full of people seemingly as impressed as I was by the on screen action, I told Jamie that all the violent combat felt, strangely, like ballet- a remark which seemed to please both him and Jeff.

If there is a complaint I had about my experience with the demo, it’s that everything felt a little too fluid. Like a lesser extent of picking Maxi in Soul Calibur, there were a few times where I was stringing together long combos that I didn’t feel particularly responsible for. Furthermore, during the boss battle (a gun fight with an enemy jeep) I was fighting off groups of enemies only to accidentally roll in the flow of combat right off the front of the train. This mistake happened a few times, but it felt more like the sort of error that occurs when you only have fifteen minutes to learn how to play a game after three days of little sleep. In fact, perhaps the most enjoyable part of the demo was when I would roll dangerously close to the edge of the train and everyone else in the room would start yelling and pointing at the screen frantically telling me to get back.

I feel that the visuals of Shank also demand some praise. Whereas the fluidity of the gameplay is what made the game fun, similar fluidity in the animation made it look impressive. If I recall correctly, Jeff informed us that the animation in the game was all done traditionally on pencil and paper before being cleaned up in Flash. The attention to detail shows because, as far as brawlers go, Shank looks better in motion than most.

For a hyper-animated-violent game, Shank has more appeal to me than it should and think that’s because even though it is violent, it’s not mindless. It’s a great looking game that plays very well and hopefully it’ll play just as well as a full experience as it did with my fifteen minutes of hands-on time with it.

Shank is being developed by Klei Entertainment who you may know as the people behind the charming puzzle-platformer Eets. It’s set to be released on PC, XBLA, and PSN during Q4 2010.

To see the game in action, you can check out the Game Videos clip of the demo below: