So it looks like everybody got bored of the wars in the Gulf, doesn’t it’ In the space of a few short months, we’ve gone from a sea of titles focusing on taking down Middle Eastern dictators, to the announcement of no less than five games based on the Vietnam war. Eidos’ ShellShock: Nam ‘67 is the first to come up for review, promising all of the atmosphere and gore you could feasibly ask for.
With the war in Vietnam being documented so thoroughly, the developers had a rich source of reference material to work through, and nothing shows this more than the introductory movie in ShellShock, which tells you how and why the war started and gives you an idea of the massive scale of the battle. I learned a thing or two, but I admittedly was never that hot when it came to history, so this only added to the atmosphere for me.
In-game, your viewpoint is strictly third-person, although a tap on the left thumbstick allows you to ‘bead’ down and look through the gunsights. The standard stealth positions come into play also. L1 takes you prone, triangle makes you crouch and R1 allows you to make a dash for cover. Everything works as well as it should, with the ability to carry only two weapons at a time (generally a gun of some sort and a few grenades) adding to the pressure as you’re staring down the barrels of some Vietnamese heavy machine gun emplacements. As an 18 rated title, ShellShock: Nam ‘67 really isn’t one for the kids, with limbs flying off, soldiers being decapitated as they stray into a string of bullets and flesh vapourising from the bodies of warriors who stand too close to grenade explosions. Some of the scenes that occur in the between-mission cutscenes and movies are pretty horrific, but in the grand scheme of things, help to explain just how bloody and gruesome the Vietnam war was.
But, above all the controversy, how the game plays is what (as always) we’re judging here. Soldier movement is fairly contradictory and frustrating as your character seems to be unable to walk up the gentlest of inclines, but manages to walk through deep swamp, holding his gun above his head with no problems whatsoever. Graphically, ShellShock is fairly average, with some nice touches in places and some lacklustre textures and serious slowdown in others. However, there are a few incredibly niggly bugs that remove some of the sheen from ShellShock’s polish, such as the non-player character’s AI. In more than one mission, you can be walking through the deep jungle, taking out enemies as you go until the area is clear. Then, nothing happens. Your team stands stock still and you can wander around at will for minutes at a time until you stumble upon more opposing forces ‘ only then do your colleagues run to catch up and join the fight. Are you headed in the right direction’ Who knows’ If the game does, it rarely lets on.
In another early mission, you’re instructed to search haystacks in a supposedly friendly Vietnamese village, to see if the inhabitants are storing weapons for the opposition. A cache of weapons is found under one haystack, with two others being barren. The game doesn’t do anything more than tell you to keep searching, even though no more haystacks can be found anywhere. Upon quitting this level a few times from pure boredom as there was seemingly nothing more to try ‘ my cruel streak kicked in and I lobbed a grenade towards the villagers who were being held as hostages whilst my team searched the area. All of the hostages perished, but as soon as I threw that grenade, a stack of armed opposition popped out of the scenery to ambush my squad. Had I known to do that sooner, I wouldn’t have wasted the best part of thirty minutes searching for another damned haystack.
And this is what turns ShellShock: Nam ‘67 into somewhat of a missed opportunity. There is fun to be had and the atmosphere can be incredibly tense at times, but there are a more than fair amount of bugs that occur at the most unfortunate times to make you step back and realise that this really is only a game after all. Not a terrible game by any means, but a bit more time in the testing tank would have surely turned it into a masterpiece to stand alongside the Conflict series.
