The original Shank was a somewhat divisive game. Nearly every outlet agreed that the original was a fantastically good looking game, but the main problems with the title were the repetition, extremely tough boss battles (especially on the higher difficulties), and the lack of online co-op. Here at Game Rant, Riley Little thought the game was better than average stating that his only major problem with it was the lack of replayability. Overall, the 2D kill ’em up did quite well for developer Klei Entertainment.
So well in fact that today Klei Entertainment- along with their publisher Electronic Arts- has announced that Shank will be getting a sequel aptly titled Shank 2.
Very little information has been released at this time, but at moment a few different modes have been teased on the official blog and a teaser trailer has also been released. Interestingly, the game may not be a pure sequel either as EA.com’s Editor-in-Chief Andy Katkin made some comments at EA’s liveblog to explain why the game is being considered as a new IP by EA.
The announcement of Shank 2 comes from the Electronic Arts Vegas Game Show where Jamie Cheng, founder and CEO of Klei Entertainment and co-creator of Shank, also issued a few statements to elucidate some details regarding the upcoming title.
“Shank 2 isn’t just a reboot of Shank. It’s an entirely new game.”
In a further interview with Joystiq, Cheng went into more detail regarding why some of the changes to the game were necessary.
“Creatively, Shank still has a lot to give. We took the feedback from the community and ran with it, putting our own flavor on every change. For Shank 2, we literally took apart the game and put it back together to push the envelope in combat mechanics, visuals, and 2D animation in games.”
The teaser trailer is embedded below for your amusement (via Machinima).
“What we did was rip the game apart and reconstruct it to allow us to have more responsive controls and better graphics. We tore our combat system apart … and created new controls to be able to use the enemies’ weapons against themselves.”
