Never in my life have I played a game with a s***-eating grin for three to four hours straight. Action game Shank (PS3 version reviewed, by the by) takes the best parts of God of War and Devil May Cry, outfits it on a 2D structure, and paints a Genndy Tartatovsky artstyle along with a 70s exploitation flick motif that Robert Rodriguez inspires from. From the “El Mariachi” riffing background music to the frenetic action encompassing it, Shank’s a guilty pleasure from start to finish.

Part of the winning touch is  its familiarity to the action game template. Getting accustomed to Shank’s controls is beyond easy, provided you’ve had your fair share of God of Wars and Devil May Cries. From stringing light to heavy attacks, and even whipping out a pistol to juggle some poor schmuck in the air after an uppercut (or Shank-a-cut as I like to call it), it’s definitely masher-friendly. Blocking and dodging too is flexible, even if I personally wish to have it on the R1 rather than the L1 (since I don’t grab enemies that much via R1).

The Pounce command is also unique to the game and is added to help with the impending chaos of blood and animated carcasses-to-be. Pressing the R2 lets Shank do a stylized leap onto an enemy, which then leaves him or her at the avenger’s mercy. Pouncing onto a foe, for some odd reason, also keeps most enemies away from you, leaving you to either maul the person you’re on top or using whatever gun you have to keep other enemies at bay. Simply put, it’s hard to put down the controller after letting loose a blood-flowing shotgun-slash-machete-slash-shank combo on a grouped-up bunch of unfortunate thugs of varying ethnicity.

Make no mistake; this game is not for kids. Shank is as gruesome as they come. It’s not Mortal Kombat-levels of absurdity, but with different types razor flesh-cutting sound bites accompanying every blood-letting stab and chainsawing action you inflict is detailed in its beautiful graphics. One moment you and your opponents are fighting in the sunset where the action is represented as silhouettes, the next moment you’re seeing your foes blow up into guts thanks to some guy shooting rockets from above a cathedral. I always did love a bit of mood and stylized vista shots with my ultraviolence.

With a slick presentation, every cutscene shown gives us a hint of a cool story of revenge riddled with action one-liners. The dialogue is ripe-full of cheese, but that’s purely intentional. My personal favorite’s the one where one of the bosses comments on Shank’s “resurrection”. “I should call you….Lazarus,” the boss said. To which Shank replies,  “I should call you….f***ed.”

If that doesn’t induce testosterone to your family jewels, I don’t know what does.

On top of that, developers Klei Entertainment added in multi-player co-op mode. And no, it’s not retreading the single-player mode with another Shank-like guy; you and your partner will be fighting in all-new made-for-multi-player battles with a larger swarm of foes and new bosses. You’ll need to have each other’s back to quell the carnage to a manageable size; you even have access to special tag-team moves to deal more damage to any poor fool in the way.

It’s way too easy to tack on anything that sounds like “this game gives you more bang for your buck” that’s reserved for every downloadable game review out on the internet, so I’ll roll with this instead: Shank is mindless good fun, moreso with a friend and an extra controller.

Verdict: 9.5/10