Shank Review

Rewind twenty-seven years. It is 1983. Tokyo Disneyland has its grand opening and Taito releases the hit classic, Elevator Action. Everything is coming up Japan. Yes, Elevator Action. In an apartment building, you traveled up and down elevators, shooting undisguised spies. Simple as it was, it was a recipe for greatness, and I and a million more like me were sold from gunshot one.

Fast-forward. 1994. A revolution and two-and-a-half console generations later, Elevator Action returns with a sequel–Elevator Action Returns. Though obscured from clear sight by waves of dreck in a now-flooded industry, the game was a triumph of two-dimensional action, featuring more elaborate, varied levels than its predecessor, but more significantly, animation beautiful enough to feel like you were pulling the strings of a full-fledged, animated crime drama starring Mullet O’Connelly as the studmuffin, Cutie McBustybuns as the hot tottie, Arnold “It’s a Ferret” Schwarzenegger as the lug whose famous face is gonna move a few copies. It was another recipe for greatness. I played the game for my first time and promptly said, out loud, “This is all I really want in a game.” There’s something irreplaceable about 2D gaming, where every instant of every action clicks into individual frames of animation with snap-crackle-pop precision. Elevator Action Returns had this, and it had beauty, and it had atmosphere, and it had fun. Best of all, you could play it with a friend, or, if you will, partner.

Fast-forward. 2001. Capcom releases Devil May Cry to great fanfare, declaring it the birth of the Stylish Puppet-Bobbling genre. Featuring the ability to switch mid-action between a multitude of firearms and melee weapons, as well as a combat system which emphasized spatial and positional relationships in a way scarcely seen stripped of the tedium and inaccessibility of the Fighting game genre, Devil May Cry, too, was a recipe for greatness. You could juggle demons in mid-air with your bullets. You could yourself stay afloat in the air, hovering on the kickback of your own pistols. You could air-combo into a ground combo and call it a Combination Combo. You could Punch and Shoot a lizard-man in the same breath, and then turn into the devil. The week Devil May Cry came out, I spent a day with it, greeted the moon that autumn evening with widened eyes and, with trembling, slightly parted lips, uttered, once again, that fateful declaration: “This is all I really want.”

By and by, I would discover that neither Elevator Action Returns nor Devil May Cry were all I really wanted; they were much of what I wanted blended together with other, erroneous elements. Elevator Action Returns was an arcade game at heart, and brought with it the annoyances of the arcade: unbalanced difficulty, unnecessary distractions. Devil May Cry was too bogged down by its own place in time; as a 3D action game backed by lots of money, and as a would-be heir to Resident Evil’s prestige (it was originally going to be a Resident Evil!), it couldn’t just be a puppet-juggling action game with load-bearing bullet physics; it had to be an “action-adventure”, complete with inane scavenger hunts, tedious platforming, and godawful story sequences exceeding four minutes each. This was decidedly not all I really wanted. What I really wanted was the beauty and unambiguous  snap and click of a 2D game, mashed together with the sophisticated combat mechanics of a Devil May Cry-like. I wanted a 2D Devil May Cry. It was the twenty-first century and we had hi-definition. We had 2D throwbacks by the barrel. But why so few modern 2D games? “If games only knew then what they know now,” I would say. “Or was it vice-versa?” I would then say.

One final fast-forward, if it pleases you, to around three weeks ago. I caught word of Shank, a downloadable game with a straightforward premise to match its straightforward title. Those who inquire, “What do you do in Shank?” are in for a rude awakening. “You shank people in Shank. Welcome to How Life Should Be.” Straightforward, that is. Indeed, you shank people in Shank, but more to the point, you carry a multitude of firearms and melee weapons which can be toggled mid-action. Enemies can be juggled in the air by your bullets. You can stab this man, shoot that man, and stick a grenade in the gawking craw of that man over there. It is in beautiful, hand-drawn 2D. It is all I’ve ever wanted.

Granted the game will seem a little shallow by today’s standards. The story is succinct and little more than a decoration to tie one massacre to the next and not leave you feeling like a sociopath, though it is well executed and beautiful to watch, implementing an unlikely combination of brutal, Desperado-style plot development and an ultra cartoony aesthetic reminiscent of Clone High or Daria. Platforming elements exist, but are brainless and sparse (which, by the way, um, thank you creators). As is now expected from all games and other forms of entertainment, there is indeed a cover system, but only in the sense that your preemptive violence protects you from harm, and also in that each stage inevitably ends of “covered” in blood. Ahaha. But is Shank missing anything that matters? Each level is a series of encounters with antagonistic posses. Each posse is a pack of lab rats with which to experiment. Like Devil May Cry before it, in Shank, you don’t just fight your fights–you choreograph them. Each fight is an opportunity to be creative. Being a downloadable title, it’s naturally not quite as jam-packed with moves as a Devil May Cry, but you’ve got enough variety to feel like you’re constantly encouraged to improvise, and the game successfully avoids falling repetitive, unlike most 2D brawlers.

I’ve been waiting a long time for a title like this, and I’ll bet I’m not the only one. It’s moderately priced at $14.99, but in a world not so long ago, this would’ve been selling out for fifty bucks a pop at Walmart. I love this.

Elevator Action

Elevator Action Returns

Devil May Cry

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