I Pack A Chainsaw
The early 2010s were a great time for indies. They were getting more and more popular, with the Xbox Live Marketplace giving mainstream audiences a taste of these smaller games. They did a good job of it, too, preparing indie game celebrations that were a lot like the Steam fests we get today. They would showcase cool, upcoming indies you could try, and get for a few bucks if you liked them.
We had the platform darling Super Meat Boy, the Supergiant smash hit Bastion, Limbo was dazzling console audiences with its moody atmosphere, all following in the wake of Braid’s dazzling popularity. It was a great time to discover these new smaller, indie experiences.
Shank was one such game. Made by Klei, with a small budget and a small team, it was billed as an indie, even though it was published by EA. This is something companies used to do more often, where they’d publish smaller, more experimental titles as digital releases before self-publishing took over.
Shank caught my attention all those years back for being an indie beat-em-up with a striking style. The violent action combined with the gritty tone and setting made it stand out among the other retro-styled and artsy indies of the time. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but Shank was unapologetically a videogame-ass videogame. You were gonna stab dudes for a few levels, play a grindhouse movie, and have fun while doing it.
And they weren’t kidding. It was fun.
Gameplay
Shank is a 2D beat-em-up action game where you play as Shank, a guy on a bloody quest for revenge. Use your titular shanks, along with an assortment of other weapons to stab, slice, shoot and maim hundreds of mooks. Every now and then the game asks you to do some basic platforming, which is inoffensive for the most part. It’s a straightforward kind of game.
With this being a beat-em-up, the combat takes center stage. There’s a wide variety of attacks with different uses. You can link these attacks into each other for combos, letting you juggle enemies in the air. Send them flying, then blast them with your pistols, grab them and throw them, that sort of thing.
It’s a 2D beat-’em-up in a style similar to Ninja Saviors, in the sense that you move left and right; it doesn’t have the up and down z-axis of other belt-scrollers, so enemies will come at you from the left and right. You have to watch your back when fighting a group of enemies, since others will spawn behind you.
The game is pretty simple, but what’s on display is good. The combat feels nice, the enemies are tough and bloodthirsty and the platforming is functional, mostly.
Combat
You have your standard light and heavy attacks along with grabs and some more interesting tricks like the pounce. For ranged options, you have guns, which are good for crowd control, and grenades, which are limited in ammo, but can blow up most enemies in one shot. Think of them like bombs in a shmup, but they don’t clear the whole screen, just one guy.
Shank, true to his namesake, spends most of his time shanking dudes. The light attack has Shank do a quick combo with his shanks. Good for locking enemies down and getting quick hits in. Pressing down with light attack does a launcher, which sends enemies into the air. You won’t be doing any air combos like Dante. Launching enemies is more of a tool for crowd control, but you can follow up with one of many options.
The heavy attack button uses your special weapon. You start with a chainsaw, but there are four in total. They’re all pretty similar, but they have enough differences to be noteworthy. These are slower attacks that do more damage and have a larger area of effect, letting you lock down large groups of enemies while damaging them.
Most of the heavy weapons’ differences comes from the grappling system, so I’ll explain that real quick. You can grapple your foes, then press a button for one of many different outcomes. You can press the light attack to shank them, doing some damage, much like the grapple strikes you’d see in any other beat-em-up. Pressing heavy lets you do a powerful attack with your equipped melee weapon. Shooting a grabbed enemy sends them away with a blast from your gun. Jumping after grabbing sends you up into the air to throw your enemy in the direction you’re facing, knocking down anyone in the landing area. Finally, pressing the grenade button shoves a grenade in the guy’s mouth, which kills him instantly and does some good area damage if you manage to knock him into a group.
Now on to the heavy weapons. They have different stats; the usual speed and damage, making them suited for different enemies and encounters. Here’s a quick rundown of them:
Chainsaw- Good damage, slow, good area of effect. The grab does heavy damage on one target, which looks brutal. It’s decent and can get any job done.
Katana- Glorious Nippon steel folded over one thousand times. It’s quick, has good horizontal range, and can do good damage to a grabbed enemy. I use this one when I want to feel like the protagonist of one of my Japanese animays.
Machetes- Shank can duel wield machetes, because he’s cool like that. These are quick, with good reach and the last attack in their combo can launch an entire crowd. This weapon looks unimpressive at first, until you use its pounce attack and realize it’s the most overpowered thing in the game. If you pounce on an enemy, which I’ll explain in a second, you do a quick strike which kills most enemies in one shot. Abuse this if you don’t want to play the game.
Chains- Shank just wraps some chains around his hands and now he can deal triple damage. The chains are very short ranged, since it’s just Shank’s big, meaty claws, but they deal a ridiculous amount of damage. When you grab an enemy, you can choke them out with these for a long time. Now, it deals less damage than the machetes’ finishing move, but unlike the machete, you can use it on the big enemies.
The weapons are a bit similar, but they have just enough to make them feel unique. You can freely swap them out at any time. There aren’t any that are bad or unusable, but the machete with its one-hit kill move is a clear winner.
Shank also exercises his right to bear arms, not just by wearing a sleevless shirt. You have a few guns to work with, each with their own uses. They’re more varied than the heavy weapons, but the variety is still a bit narrow.
You have the dual pistols, which you can use to juggle an enemy in the air like Dante. You can also shoot these in two directions at once, which is a great way to finish off low-health enemies on either side, or keep thugs away from you for a bit. There’s the Uzi, which fires off in an arc, letting you take down jumping enemies or anyone who gets too close, and last but not least is the shotgun, which does big damage, has a slow fire rate and anyone hit by it gets sent to the next postal code. Great for creating space.
On top of all those tools you also have the pounce. By pressing the right trigger, Shank will do a Wolverine-style jump to an enemy, pinning them down on landing. This is a kind of grab state where you can then do any of the options mentioned before, with slight differences. This pounce grab lets you shoot guns freely in either direction, mash on the enemy by pressing light attack, throw them away by jumping or press heavy to do a special, more damaging heavy weapon finisher. This is where the machete shines with its one-hit kill.
The pounce is pretty overpowered, letting you skip around and fly right at someone and kill them, but the game limits it to keep it from being too much. Larger enemies can’t be pounced on. If you try it, they’ll reject your advances and throw you away. You can’t pounce on enemies that are knocked down. Strange thing to mention. Could it be some kind of foreshadowing? Bosses can’t be pounced on, either. These slight limitations rein in the pounce a little, but you can still fly around like a crazed sugar glider stabbing everyone with the machete. I wish this move wasn’t as powerful as it is, as it overshadows a lot of your other tools.
The combat overall is solid. Hits feel good, there’s good feedback with the blood splatters and the hitstun, and stringing moves together feels stylish and intuitive. Each attack has a specific purpose and its own use, and if you want to get through the game in one piece, you’d better learn to use them. It’s a good time, even if the pounce is a little overtuned.
Bosses
You’d think a game with decent combat would have some good bosses to complement it, but no, there’s no such thing here. These bosses suck. They go against everything established by the rest of the systems.
Instead of fighting the bosses like you would in any other beat-em-up, the bosses here are all gimmick fights. Most of them have you standing around waiting for their special mechanic to happen so you can deal damage to them.
The first boss is a good example. It’s a bullfight. You know, the kind of fight against a big enemy that charges at you, so you dodge out of the way, he hits a wall and then you hit him while he’s stunned. That sort of thing. It’s dumb, but apparently the developers were really proud of this boss since you fight three versions of him throughout the game. Yippee.
The other bosses don’t fare any better, either. There’s one where you have to wait for him to grapple an enemy, then you can hit him. This means you spend your time running around, trying to put the enemy between you and the boss so he grabs him. There’s another where you have to push a guy into some fire by attacking him, and he has a nasty habit of doing a flip kick which gets him really far away from the fire. For this one I worked out the exact spot to stand in, waited for him to come to me, then I dodged and mashed light attack hoping it would push him into the flames before he could flip kick his way out of it. Another has you fighting a Jeep in an encounter that would feel more at home in Metal Slug.
Unfortunately, the bosses don’t get my approval. I’m sure the developers will be crushed, but the fights aren’t interesting at all. They’re about waiting for the enemy to do their big, dumb move so you can punish it. It doesn’t use the interesting combat at all. A real shame. The only fight that kind of comes close to using the game’s systems is the one against Cassandra, and she can’t be comboed or juggled. At least you can damage her and she attacks back, you don’t have to wait for a specific prompt.
Miscellaneous stuff
There are a few light platforming sections in the game. They’re not very deep. It’s all timing challenges where you press a button at a specific time and auto jump across gaps. It usually doesn’t get in the way, but there are a few sore spots here and there.
One is that there are some jumps that are memorization-based. It’s nothing major. You don’t have to memorize gotcha traps like in I Wanna Be The Guy, but there are a few misaligned platforms you have to be on the lookout for. There are some wall runs that, if you don’t enter them at the right height, you can end up overshooting a jump and dying. The platforming in the game is very automatic, so sections where you have to be precise and actually time jumps are a bit jarring, especially when you don’t know what’s coming up.
The second annoying bit comes near the end in the Church level. You have to run across a platforming area while avoiding missiles. The missiles seem to be random, with some hitting the platform you’re about to land on while you’re running on a wall and don’t have a way to stop. To make matters worse, this is the longest platforming section in the entire game.
You can die and respawn instantly to retry, but not if you’re playing on hard. Despite this being an arcade style game, it doesn’t have a one credit challenge or anything like that. Instead, when you play on Hard difficulty, the game removes all mid-level checkpoints. Meaning if you die at any point, you die in real life- I mean- you go back to the start of the level. These are arcade levels for modern audiences, so they’re around 20 minutes each. You can die at the end and lose some progress.
The hard mode is a neat addition, but I think they could have gone further with it. It says there are no checkpoints, but you still have the chapter checkpoints, which are a lot more plentiful than you might think. There is a hard checkpoint before bosses and in the midway point of most levels, with some having more. This makes the experience a lot less punishing, which is good for some, but if the game threatens me with “no checkpoints”, I’d expect something a little more intense. I would have also liked to see a more arcadey one credit challenge where you clear the game in three lives. Maybe not, since the game takes two hours to complete, and it wasn’t designed for that.
Presentation
The game has a fun art style that looks like a comic book combined with the thick outline look of the mid-2000s. The characters all have exaggerated proportions and sharp angles, making them look distinct. Despite it looking digital, the backgrounds still have some more traditional touches to them, with pencil scratches and brush strokes. Each level goes for a subdued color palette, giving each stage its own atmosphere. The opening levels have that Breaking Bad Mexico piss filter, the nightclub stages are fiery red, and so on. The more muted, monochromatic palettes also let the action shine, making enemies and interactables more obvious, and letting you see everything clearly. It’s very well made.
The animation is good, but it relies very heavily on tweening/puppeting, which makes some things look a bit weightless and strange.
The music is alright, but it doesn’t work too well with the game. Most stages have one looping track going throughout, which doesn’t change much. The tracks themselves aren’t very conducive to combat, with most of them being mid-tempo tunes that just sort of exist there and blend with the background. You don’t get the kind of intensity you’d expect from this kind of hard-boiled, gritty setting.
Speaking of the setting, this game’s story is pretty dark, but you wouldn’t be able to tell if you played the Steam release. For some reason, the PC port of the game removes some bits from the cutscenes to tone the game down, which is baffling to me. The story takes inspiration from grindhouse movies, which are violent and explicit, and the original cutscenes have some details that are very in line with this tone, but the PC port cuts them up and sanitizes them. This not only removes a lot of the original intent, it also makes the story feel kind of weird and the cutscenes themselves hard to follow.
I noticed this in the cutscene after one of the bosses. I remember when I played this on my Xbox360 back when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, that he sent the guy off into an implied meat grinder off screen. That scene was missing from the PC port, and it made me question my own memory. I looked it up and found out that no, I did not misremember. I can remember an irrelevant cutscene in a game I played over a decade prior, but I can’t remember what I did last week. Priorities.
There is a way to restore the original cutscenes, which involves rolling the game back to its beta version, but I don’t think that’s worth it. It makes the game itself worse, since the beta version lacks a lot of attacks, like grapple attacks, and I think the game is better with these additions. If you want the story, I suggest playing the game and watching the cutscenes on YouTube. It’s good if you want some context as to why the guys you’re after are such bastards, and why you shouldn’t feel bad about jamming a chainsaw into them.
Shank 2
Wait, what? Shank two? Is Roger really going to review an entire game in the review for another game?
No. Remember back in the combat section where I said that the pounce is held back by a few rules, and that if those rules weren’t there it would be the most broken thing imaginable?
Shank 2 is the sequel to Shank. You can tell by the two after the name. I finished the first one on both difficulties and got the costumes, and then I was excited to see what fresh new things Shank II had in store. I booted it up and was delighted to see the shiny new visuals, the higher framerate, the dismemberment effects. It was great.
Then I pounced on an enemy, as my training taught me, and killed him. Then I pounced on another and realized it was really quick, made me fly even further than the pounce in the first game and it could pretty much take anyone down. Then I mashed the button and suddenly flew onto a big guy, which you couldn’t do in the first one. Then I pressed the button again, and jumped on him while he was on the ground. Oh no!
That’s my review of Shank 2. The pounce is so strong it makes this game practically unplayable. Just mash that one button and fly around like a sugar glider- wait I already did the sugar glider analogy. You fly around and nothing can stop you. It’s not fun. A massive disappointment. I wanted more Shank, but what got Shanked was my wallet.
Sure, I only spent $2 on this one, but still. That’s two dollars too many. Big flush, don’t bother with this one.
Conclusion
Shank isn’t a perfect game, but it’s pretty good. The combat is fun and fluent. Flying from one enemy to the next is a blast, and you have a good arsenal of moves to play around with. It’s fairly challenging, with long levels and enemies that really want you dead. It’s over all a lot of fun.
The game also displays a good understanding of beat-em-up design. It mixes its enemies up a lot, throwing ranged enemies in with melee enemies and big guys, making crowd control a good challenge. You always have an enemy threatening you from somewhere on the screen, and they have different ways to open you up, making you vary your approaches.
It does have a few things that hold the beat-em-up aspect from being perfect. Enemies don’t have any attacks on wake up, so you don’t have to worry about approaching downed enemies. If they did attack while getting up, it would make you think twice about standing on them and mashing until they’re back on their feet. As it is now, you can just mash on them and, once they’re knocked down, they don’t do much. Old beat-em-ups had enemies with quick attacks, standing attacks or even invulnerable attacks that would prevent you from camping them like this.
A few minor things that keeps the game from being stellar are the somewhat annoying platforming sequences, and the fact that the machete pounce is a bit too strong, which means you can invalidate a lot of the enemies with it. The bosses are pretty stinky, too. Those are the worst aspect, in my opinion.
Even with all that, I still recommend Shank. I thought it was a ton of fun, and I enjoyed the vast majority of my time with it. I played it through a few times, and whenever I opened the game to get a screenshot or some detailed notes, I found myself finishing the level and playing for fun.
If you want a cool arcade-style beat-em-up with flashy combat, give Shank a try.
Note: This game is very short, only takes around 2 hours to beat. If you don’t like short games, avoid. Avoid Shank 2, please. That one I don’t recommend.
For a more traditional beat-em-up, check out my review of Final Vendetta. It’s neat.
If you want to read about a bad one, Scott Pilgrim vs The World is the one for you.
