Today, I’m going to talk a bit about strategy in Shank 2’s new Survival Mode. In Survival Mode, you team up with a friend (local or online), earn cash, buy upgrades, defend your base, and survive for as long as you can.

Trust me, you really have to pay attention and choose your strategy in this mode — let’s just say that to this day, I have to be on my game in order to complete the entire 30 waves. But before you begin, you select one of three different maps, each with their own play styles. Then, select your costume:

There are 16 different costumes you can unlock in Shank 2, and each one gives you stat modifiers. The costumes are either for Shank or Corina, and both Shank and Corina have different attacks, speed, advantages and disadvantages. Pick wisely — above, I’ve chosen the Hobo (with a shotgun), and Chops the healer. This allows one player to heal the other who does damage with the pickups (but is too broke to buy stuff). Communicate with your partner to choose a strategy!

Once you’re in the game, my suggestion is to pay attention to the bombers, and try to get them before they set us up the bomb. Also, try to increase your combo count as that contributes directly to your cash. Note that high powered weapons such as the shotgun isn’t as good for combos, but are far better at delaying and killing the bombers.

Now flush with cash, you can buy reinforcements such as tequila to heal yourself, a minigun to cause major spread damage, or turrets to play tower defense with. A friendly reminder: don’t be too frugal with your spending! Many a time I’ve gotten too confident and suddenly died with thousands in the bank. Finally, use the environment to your advantage — each map has a feature you can use to aid you, and they’re crucial to your success.

Alright folks! That should get you started. We’ve poured a ton of love into this game and we hope the little surprises we threw in really delight you. We’re big believers that a developer shouldn’t make a sequel unless it meaningfully improves the experience, and I can proudly say that Shank 2 is our best game yet.

If you’ve got any questions or want further tips, come say hello on Twitter or Facebook! I’m always lurking around and happy to help.

Let’s start with the art. As you may know, our entire art team consists of professional animators and painters from the 2D animation industry, and again Jeff Agala directed the visuals. The goal here was to blow away our previous fidelity and set a new bar for ourselves. To do that, we doubled the resolution of all the source character art to push the graphic novel style, adding a huge amount of extra detail to the environment and even doubling the amount of animation in the game.

We’ve also worked hard on making environments are far more interactive — collapsing ceilings, crumbling floors, fiery environments, barrels and other large objects that you can pick up and hurl.

And then there are the actual controls. Shank has always been about the smooth combat system. And not just any combat system, but one where you use all your weapons strung together — chainsaw your dude, stick him with knives, throw him in the air, shoot him a bunch of times, then stick a grenade down his throat, all in an amazing animated style.

So thinking about how to top that became a huge priority for us. In Shank 2, players not only get to carry their own weapons with new combos, grapples, grenades, and more, but we also get to use the enemies’ weapons… while the enemies are still holding them.

See the above image? That’s Shank taking the guy’s own shovel and barreling it into his chest. Once the dude is finished, Shank can pick up the shovel and use it, again with a whole new move set.

But probably the most important improvement is in responsiveness. This is probably where the most work came in. Literally, we threw away the old combat implementation and rewrote the entire thing from ground up. We built new tools to be able to more accurately map the hit regions, and paid huge attention to each frame. I can confidently say that Shank 2 is far more responsive. One particular improvement that I’m super happy with is that we now have 360 degree shooting — no longer is Shank locked to specific angles in firing his guns — he can point them in any direction, and we’ve been able to make it happen while keeping the artistry in the animation. That was quite a trick!

And finally, I’d like to touch on the brand new Survival Mode. This is our new mode where players fend off wave after harder wave of enemies, bombers, and bosses together with a friend.

What we learned from the Shank community is that, not only did they want to play together, they wanted to keep playing together. That’s why, instead of doing another co-op story as we did previously, we created an awesome Survival Mode because, as fans ourselves, we wanted a way to play Shank with our friends over and over. Now, instead of blowing through the game in one sitting, we get to have a challenging, replayable mode where cooperation and skill is absolutely key to survival. It’s a blast.

Over the next few months we’ll divulge more details about this new co-op mode, including the different maps, strategies in lasting longer, the different characters that you can use, and the in-game purchases that help you survive. And yes, this mode is online-enabled! Just the other day we had a smooooooth test session between Vancouver and San Francisco over the PSN Developer Network.

Hope you enjoyed my little overview of Shank 2! I’ll see you soon. P.S. Mandatory plugs: Here’s our Facebook page, Shank blog, and our Twitter. Pick one or more!

Over the last few days, we’ve been announcing the Shank Costumes over at the official Shank blog, and divulging how to unlock them on our Twitter account.

Jeff asked if I could divulge one unlock criteria especially for PlayStation.Blog readers, so obviously I complied. The costume I chose was one that’s close to impossible to stumble across.

So, today’s special is costume number 8 — the ANY-S costume!

Unlock Criteria

After completing the single-player campaign, input a slight modification to the classic Konami code: up+up+down+down+left+right+left+right+circle+x.

As you can guess, these outfits are odes to our own geeky fantasies. Naming them was a fun little exercise. Did you know that “Droid” is trademarked? I didn’t.

And with that, I’m off! Enjoy the launch trailer and let me know if you have any questions! As usual, I’ll lurk in these forums as well as the official Facebook page.

Recently, I decided to have a little fun with the game and record some of the combos we came up with using the standard-issued weapons. Below is the result: a vignette of Shank wailing on a poor dude. Keeping your enemies tied up in combos, grappling enemies to deal additional damage, and using moves such as the pounce-shotgun tactic to keep enemies at bay become increasingly important in Shank as enemies become progressively smarter — especially in Hard Mode.

If you look really hard, you’ll notice a couple moments are briefly pixelated (pixel-censorship gives me the chuckles) due to this being a public video and the ratings boards saying “tsk tsk.” Don’t worry, the actual game is in all its uncensored glory.

Also: lots of people have been asking us about the score of Shank — we’ve released the first track on our Facebook page, and we asked people to help hit our goal of 1500 fans before releasing the whole soundtrack to our fans. We did that in three hours (thanks!) and the soundtrack is now being remastered for everyone to enjoy.

Come check out our Shank Facebook page! I’m usually lurking around there a few times a day to answer questions. Note that you have to sign in to Facebook to see the page, because it’s age-gated.

When Shank was shown at PAX 2009, there were two questions that I couldn’t answer which came up over and over again. The first was, “What platform is it coming out on?” The second “is there going to be co-op?”

I answered the first question, with my own question. I stuffed our dev kit into a ghetto cardboard box, labeled with a large question-mark and strung a handful of controllers (including Atari and Dreamcast ones) from underneath it for added effect. At the time, nobody had played Shank, and I didn’t have platform approval yet. Thankfully, the gaming community and our fans spoke up, and I got my wish — we were able to negotiate a deal to bring the game to the PlayStation Network.

The second, co-op question – proved to be much trickier.

On one hand, we felt strongly about the classic, couch-play beat-em-up genre; very much like Double Dragon – which is an awesome experience and one of our main influences – but, on the other hand, our single player campaign was something special and truly unique. Every camera is hand-crafted, ever scene and enemy is carefully placed, achieving our vision of the “cinematic brawler.” Moving or shifting one piece of the single-player puzzle, could easily spell disaster.

Having two players in our orchestrated brawler tossed a huge wrench into our development plan. It’s challenging to keep both players on screen, so we can’t be sure how wide the camera will go. We also need enough enemies to keep both players busy, but the added chaos – while fun – introduces a different experience altogether. To make matters worse, building bosses that required two players, served no guarantee that the other player would be around to help. What we definitely didn’t want was to have a lame-o, tacked-on feature that just wasn’t very fun for the second player.

So we bit the bullet.

We said, “we’re going to make a whole bonus co-op campaign, and in each separate campaign, we’re going to play to their strengths.” The solution was to design the single player experience to be far more cinematic, allowing you to really enjoy and savor each action packed moment. We then kept the co-op rooted to the good ol’ fashioned beat-em-up formula that encourages players to help each other, especially during our though boss battles – which we went back and designed specific boss battles that can only be won with a second player at hand. As a finishing touch, we used the co-op campaign to delve even deeper into each character and foe that will eventually mess Shank over, leading up to the events in his story.

At the end, it presented a long list of challenges and obstacles, but it proved to be well worth it when trying to achieve our unique vision that is Shank and it’s co-op experience.