I’ll admit to being a little surprised at the popularity Vietnam is seeing all of a sudden. It’s not like the drive for World War 2-based titles is starting to die down, but at the same time, there have been several titles released somewhat recently that all focus on the infamous brutal war that caused such a ruckus oh so long ago. In fact, just the last couple months alone has seen the release of two action-oriented titles focused solely on the Vietnam conflict, with a sufficient degree of similarity as to arouse my interest in checking out both titles while I sit around waiting for my copy of “Evil Genus” to show up. The first title I got my grubby hands on was the much-hyped ShellShock: Nam ’67 by Eidos, which promised an incredibly gritty and surprisingly gory representation of how things really were in Vietnam, so I grabbed my M60 and hopped on the first chopper I could find to go see how this game really stacked up.

ShellShock is actually a straight-up run-&-gun action title in the same general melody of the Medal of Honor series, in that there is a high degree of running action as well as, shockingly enough, the occasional shooting, but thanks to a limitation on hitpoints and a crack-shot Victor-Charlie’s, a certain level of tactics and strategy are required to survive. These tactics of course effectively boil down to “aim for the head instead of the crotch”, “run behind a rock like a coward every time an enemy machinegun nest notices you”, and “try not to shoot your team mates in the ass, no matter how many times they dance around in front of you out in the open”. Everything else pretty much just boils down to the aforementioned “running and shooting things” approach. The game’s storyline basically throws you in the shoes of a fresh soldier who’s just been shipped off to some base in Vietnam to help reinforce the local platoons, and ends up being eventually recruited for a number of special assignments as part of a special forces unit, but, as stated above, the game’s main focus is on showing you the true horrors of the Vietnam conflict. “Horrors”, such as noticing your squad mates are actually true men of the super-soldier variety, completely and totally invulnerable to all forms of damage. “Horrors” such as getting chewed up by enemy fire, only to duck behind cover for a few seconds as your health meter recharges back to full strength, leaving you fresh and ready to kill yourself some more VC. “Horrors” like having an exploding booby-trap go off in your face after you fail horribly at disarming it, yet being able to brush off the damage and march on with little more than a pair of singed eyelashes. No doubt about it, this is a true man’s war!

After starting up the game following its sizeable 2GB install, I was offered the option to create a new profile, and choose which soldier I wanted to be (there’s a choice of three – the game wasn’t clear on if there’s any actual technical difference on which is selected, however). Then, following a simple run through the game’s configuration screen to set up my key bindings and assorted other options, I selected a new campaign, deliberately settling it on “Easy” difficulty because I’m a pansy who wanted to get around at least more than one corner before getting his head blown off. After a brief intro movie showing the general situation and my place in the conflict, I was tossed into the first mission, tasked with mighty job of taking a hill held by the VC forces. And so, I was dropped into the field armed with a crappy SMG and told to follow my trigger-happy leader around, a leader whom, barely a minute into the field, promptly calls an artillery strike into the middle of a pitched battle between VC and friendly forces, resulting in heavy casualties for both. What a great start to the war.

Each mission basically starts off with a quick pre-rendered cutscene (which usually ends up not being directly related to the mission at hand), followed by a quick verbal briefing in the field and an order to charge forward and go kill yourself some Charlie. These missions can involve anything from running in and destroying strategic objectives to running in, rescuing hostages, then destroying strategic objectives. To be frank, the tasks the game gave me rarely deviated from the “go here and blow this up” routine, with the only actual missions of intrigue being an “Alamo” kind of situation in the final level, as well as an attempted stealth mission about half way through the game (which I just got fed up with and started shooting everything regardless – thankfully, it wasn’t a “forced” stealth mission with an instant failure penalty on detection). After experience with games like Vietcong in the past, I was hoping I’d see some more interesting mission types pulled off with this title, but in the end everything just felt really, really generic. Sure, lots of shooty-shooty action is good, but we live in an enlightened era (a debatable point) where most gamers tend to prefer a little more thought behind their missions – if I wanted endless killing and destruction as the game’s only focus, I’d be playing Serious Sam.

Sadly, the environments aren’t all that better. I guess you can only go so far with a Vietnam setting, but most of the maps were very constricted and linear, and didn’t offer much of a “battlefield in the wild jungle” feeling at all. The same generic rocks, trees, bushes and puffs of fog litter the landscape, there’s a rather restricted degree of visibility before everything vanishes into a distant fog (something I didn’t notice very much because the levels were usually so cramped), and there’s only one real route to take through each mission, with any attempt to deviate from this course resulting in failure over the annoying cries of “You going AWOL, soldier?” and “GET YOUR ASS BACK HERE!” Rigidly linear mission design isn’t always a bad thing, as the likes of the Medal of Honor series and Call of Duty have demonstrated, but those games had the edge of giving the impression that a much larger battlefield was actually available to move around in – the games just used some rather firm tactics to keep the player on course. There’s none of that in ShellShock, and each mission is just a series of canyons, tunnels, and even occasional buildings that all lead in a singular direction. Pick a wrong turn and you just ended up at a dead end. It kind of ruined the immersion a little, especially because the scripted sequences (such as thick artillery strikes landing or a spontaneous VC ambush, en-masse) never felt very intense or exciting. Perhaps with some better special effects and more open-ended mission design I might’ve found myself drawn into the experience more often.

In between most missions, the game offers you the chance to stop off at the local base to chat with other soldiers, try out whatever new weapons are available, and even consult with the local black-market dealer for certain “special” resources not otherwise available (“chits” are the game’s form of monetary incentive, earned by picking up certain special objects from the corpses of enemies, such as flags, books, or bonus intelligence). At first, the ability to save up my cash and buy stuff seemed like a great idea, but the novelty wore off once I realized that there were only two things really worth getting: a rocket pistol (a neat little toy that basically explodes anything you point it at), and ammunition to shoot out of it. The only other items of interest available through “Deuce”, the aforementioned smart-ass dealer were drugs to help your soldier aim better or run better. There were also several erotic postcards you could buy for later viewing in the game’s main menu, and, interestingly, an R&R pass to wander out of the base for “some boom-boom with one of Mama-san’s girls”, but aside from a slightly amusing scene where you follow a seductive Vietnamese mistress into a building and perform what I assume is the act of “getting it on” (the game doesn’t actually offer anything beyond a display of the building shaking madly while some messy sound effects play), the whole thing didn’t seem to have any effect on gameplay whatsoever. Thanks to a lack of any new noteworthy items introduced throughout the game beyond the rocket pistol, I rapidly ended up with a huge stockpile of chits that never really got used.

My main beef with ShellShock is just that it seems like the development was focused so much on showing the horrors of the Vietnam war that everything else slipped by the wayside. Mission briefings are little more than pre-mission verbal comments offered by your C.O., with no kind of map presentation, extra background information, or any of the other details you’d expect from that kind of operation presented, often leaving me very much in the dark about what the hell I was getting into, exactly, until I was already there. A lot of the soldiers around headquarters that you can chat with end up just saying the same thing from mission to mission. And once the shooting actually starts the disbelief factor raises even more. I already mentioned a few of these curious quirks earlier, but one of the most surprising decisions I noted immediately was that my soldier basically had infinite health. So long as I wasn’t banged up too much, any damage I took would heal itself after a few seconds behind cover. It’s ridiculous, the game actually plays more like Halo after awhile, because your soldier is almost totally impervious to any kind of permanent harm so long as your self-recharging “shields” aren’t breached, and even if they are, a health kit is almost always conveniently located around the next corner to fix you back up. Just stand out in the open shooting everything in sight, duck back behind cover every time you get grazed, then repeat the process after a few seconds. What the hell?

It got even worse once I noticed my squad members were totally invulnerable. Okay, I know we all hate escort missions, and it was probably either have this done, or get an annoying “mission failed” screen every time someone critical got himself exploded because he decided to dance in front of my grenade launcher, but when I unloaded an entire M60 clip into my L.T.’s face one time out of boredom, with only a slightly irked “stop that!” for feedback, what little was left of my immersion into the game was crushed. If a team mate is shot enough, he’ll be knocked down for several seconds until he struggles back to his feet, but that’s it. Couldn’t there have been a better way to go about doing this? The AI really doesn’t make things any better, as my squad mates had no qualms with running in front of my gunfire all the time, getting in my way, laying down “cover fire” that usually failed to hit anything (except me, most of the time), and utterly failing to back me up in a decent manner. Actually, there never seemed to be any kind of real teamwork going on between myself and the AI squaddies whatsoever, as evidenced by the fact that I was commonly forced to assume point while my team mates endlessly loitered around somewhere behind, waiting for me to trigger the next wave or major event (sometimes they’d even magically appear in front of me, making me wonder how they had snuck past in such a linear environment). The annoyance incurred by this came to a peak during one of the final battles in the game, where I actually had to tackle a “boss” all by my lonesome (complete with an insane number of hitpoints and the mysterious ability to taunt me after I literally blew his head clean off) while my team mates, who had followed me through everything up to that point decided to just hang back and shoot the breeze while I single-handedly tackled the boss and the chunk of the VC army supporting him. Oh, and here’s another random irritation: the game relies on a console-ish checkpoint system with no capability for manual saving, and also doesn’t actually store your checkpoint data or game progress until you actually go to close out and click “Yes” to the “Save data?” prompt. That means that if the game crashes suddenly, you’ve effectively lost your progress, and it also means that you’re forced to occasionally do big segments of a level over again if you get stuck somewhere. Great design.

At least the brutality part of the game is done well. Locational damage is in and done well, so legs, arms, and even heads can be blown clean off with sufficient force. A surprisingly excellent ragdoll physics implementation means that corpses realistically bend and react to the terrain based on how they’re killed, without the crazy over-the-top exaggerated death animations most other games tend to suffer from (hilarious though they may be). I found myself wishing for a little more detail in the damage I was doing to enemies though, as I kept being reminded of the grisly carnage you could put someone through in the aging Soldier of Fortune II with a level of detail not seen in ShellShock. I want to disembowel people, dammit! That said, there are still many horrific sights to take in, with one mission in particular offering an experience I probably won’t forget any time soon. Tasked with taking back control of an abandoned fort that the VC have settled into, I marched up to a display of decapitated skulls on pikes at the main gate, with the words “Welcome to Hell” scrawled on the walls in what looked like blood. Inside, the entire fort was a gruesome display of blood, bodies, and torture chambers with a startling level of detail that made it clear the developers had put a lot of effort into making sure this level disturbed the hell out of you. But even though these sights were damn shocking and temporarily suspended my disbelief, the game’s previously mentioned immersion flaws quickly popped back up to break my experience once again. Maybe I was expecting too much, but I was surprised when my inept team members had barely more than a single passing comment of shock and dismay at the carnage they were being forced to witness as we advanced to clear the fort out. There really is a huge gap of active dialogue in the game that once again makes it feel like just some action title rather than a true war sim, and it is problems like this and the other glaring issue I’ve already mentioned that stack up to ruin what had the potential to be a truly immersive, shocking, and memorable gaming experience. I’m not even going to give thorough mention to how short the campaign is – while the missions themselves do take quite a bit of time to go through for the first run, there aren’t very many of them.

Even the game’s handling suffers from some problems. Upon getting into the first mission, I had to spend several minutes fiddling with the controls and mouse sensitivity settings until I found something satisfactory – and even then, things felt a little clunky. There’s something really odd about the way the game handles aiming that makes it difficult to handle with precision, and there are all kinds of movement and animation quirks that made it a little more difficult to play than it should have been. Grabbing a machinegun and going prone, for example, is my favorite way to lay the smack down on distant targets, but for some reason my soldier kept resetting his gun from a “deployed” to an “idle” position every time I moved the crosshair an inch or two, causing an irritating delay whenever I wanted to fire – seeing my soldier twitch his gun into an active/inactive state so constantly was also pretty jarring too. The game’s FOV (Field of Vision) settings also take some getting used to, especially because the FOV changes when you enter a building or tunnel, a process that made me slightly queasy the first time it happened (and I’m not the kind of gamer to suffer from motion sickness). Another thing I hated was the way the game handles picking up items and weapons. To grab something, you walk over a corpse until a list of viable items appears at the bottom of the screen, then hit Use. Hitting Use repeatedly will select the next item in the list until the desired item is found, which can then be retrieved by the left mouse button (by default). This works okay, but for some reason the game kept sticking my character and perspective to the item I had selected prior to pick-up, meaning that if I wanted to grab something but suddenly started getting shot at, I’d be unable to actually look up and see who was shooting at me until I got far enough away from the item I was “stuck” to for the viewpoint to fix itself again. Gah! It wasn’t too long before I got used to the game’s weird curveballs in this aspect, but I certainly wasn’t impressed.