ShellShock: Nam '67 Review

And just about as I was getting to enjoy a few of the missions; like the fort mission where the designers managed to successfully incorporate interesting close-quarter combat in claustrophobic dungeons with larger indoor settings; and a few of the special forces missions, the game came to an abrupt end - only eleven missions in all if I'm not much mistaken. And just like in any console game, the only other thing left to do besides complete the objectives, was to pick up tokens, which you can then sell at the base camp to buy more drugs and hookers. Not much of an incentive to play the game again, is it?

What I liked most about ShellShock 'Nam 67 is the superb soundtrack that features popular music from the era. The voice acting, on the other hand, was often dodgy. The actors wouldn't get the emotions right and their tone would hardly fit the scene. Also, the cries of the VC soldiers in something that is supposed to sound like broken English made me feel like I was trying to order a Big Mac in a Chinese restaurant rather than fighting VC in the Vietnamese jungles.

The only redeeming factor about the dated looking visuals is that the game runs smoothly on lower end rigs and with all the visual details turned on. Ironically, it's very hard to try to make a gritty game when the technology doesn't really allow you to show anything but a bunch of crude polys with some red textures slapped over them. At times, the misty jungles and the rich undergrowth would create the right kind of mood, but generally speaking, the animation of the character models looked pretty week and the poly count of each of the scenes would leave a lot to be desired. ShellShock is a distinctly DirectX 8 game that uses very little advantages of the next installment of MS's API.

In short, ShellShock 'Nam 67 is not an entirely bad game; I still had some fun with it. Sadly, that wasn't nearly enough to justify the short single-player mode, no multiplayer and mediocre game play overall. The game does have some grittiness to it, but it seems to be geared more towards teenagers who would feel better about themselves playing a mature game, than it is towards mature gamers who are looking to get a little depth to go with the arcade action. I don't feel particularly good about saying this (mainly because people put a lot of effort into this project), but I fail to see how ShellShock 'Nam 67 is ever going to survive in this ruthless and competitive market. It sounds harsh, but isn't that the moral of this story? War is hell, but so is this market - it simply doesn't take any prisoners.