Game: Shellshock 2 Blood Trails
Platform: PC
Publisher: Eidos
Developer: Rebellion
ESRB: Mature
Genre: First-person Horror
Players: 1
What's Hot: Intense depictions of gore, unique fusion of plot elements, does a good job of making you feel unsettled.
What's Not: Mundane quick time events, rigid animations, and brainless enemies spoil the immersion.
Review by: Tony Mitera
On its face Shellshock 2 has a great premise: take a standard Vietnam War shooter and mix it up by adding zombies and a secret government project. While the game does a good job at attempting to embrace both aspects that come from those two plot camps, the flaws and unpolished edges lash out at you as often as the branches of the jungle undergrowth. While it does justice to its fusion of ideas to some extent it simply isn’t worth the effort to root out everything the game has to offer.
You play the role of Nate Walker, who gets flown in to Vietnam just in time to find that his brother is the only known survivor of an area affected by the government project known as White Knight. No one of course really knows what the project is, but given that Nate’s brother Cal now screams like a banshee and has a penchant for human flesh it is a little obvious that it isn’t one that has the goodwill of man in mind. Minutes after seeing your brother chained to a bed in such a state the Viet Cong attack, freeing your deranged brother in the confusion. Stretching brotherly love to the extreme, Nate sets off after Cal in the hopes of tracking him down and figuring out just what happened to him in the jungles of Vietnam.
The game often has you switching gears, starting off at first as a rather mundane shooter as you fend off VC soldiers but soon introducing the bloodthirsty zombies that often lunge at you from dark corners. One issue is that though one of them has an excuse both types of enemies are equally brainless, with graduate degrees in the Doom school of avoiding cover for the sake of rushing at you. At times you become involved in three way conflicts and are fighting off both zombies and enemy soldiers, which can lend for some interesting firefights.
Gore is depicted often, and you will happen upon a still conscious soldier with his legs torn off or a dead soldier in a much gristlier state of dismemberment. While alive however both soldiers and zombies don’t exactly have fluid animations, and in the case of the latter getting shots off on them can be made difficult because you have to accommodate for their jerky motions. The jungle environment is represented well as are the dark and moody areas such as the interior of a run-down mansion at night or a VC tunnel system, though often the design of the levels themselves have an apparent lack of imagination to the point that any further linearity would classify the game as an on-rails shooter.
While it’s not all bad it is hard to find any aspect of the game that is particularly praiseworthy. Though the premise is solid the execution of it is flawed, and right about the time Nate wants it all to be over with you’ll find yourself in enthusiastic agreement. With no multiplayer whatsoever the game is reliant upon its single player experience, and with as many flaws as it has and as marginalized as the combat experience is the game makes it incredibly hard to justify itself. Its premise is a great idea, but in actual gameplay
Shellshock 2 never rises above simply being a mundane shooter that has very few redeeming qualities and a laundry list of flaws.
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