You'll sometimes have to destroy some specific piece of equipment or hold an area through a few waves of Viet Cong, and there's one brief on-rails section during which you'll man a gun mounted on a chopper.
A couple of mission briefings suggest that you employ stealth, but the game has no real stealth mechanic other than walking very slowly and hoping nobody sees you. Most of the missions require nothing more than moving through the level and killing whatever gets in your way. They'll occasionally utilize cover or toss a grenade, and the sheer number of them sometimes makes for an enjoyably chaotic, if not overly difficult, battle.
Most of the time, they're either standing in place or running straight for you, usually while screaming one of their three or four annoying catchphrases. What the Viet Cong lack in smarts, they make up for in numbers. Even with its checkpoint save system, most of the game's 13 missions won't take more than 30 minutes to complete. But your squad also provides constant cover, making it easy to fall back and heal, which often robs the game of much challenge. The presence of teammates makes many of the firefights feel like an actual battle between two groups of soldiers. Your health bar regenerates over time, so healing is simply a matter of finding a safe place to stand around for 5 or 10 seconds.įor the majority of the game's missions, you're accompanied by a squad of indestructible computer-controlled grunts (though they'll sometimes die-usually horribly-as part of a cutscene). In fact, ShellShock has one of the least realistic damage models of any recent military shooter. And that's pretty much where the realism ends. Your character-controlled throughout the game from a third-person perspective-can carry only a few weapons at a time: one pistol, one large gun, and some grenades. ShellShock's promise of "brutal realism" also turns out to be somewhat hollow.
Which has exactly zero effect on gameplay. The only character growth occurs during a short cutscene in which your character, as promised, is promoted from a fresh rookie to a Special Forces operative. This is a classic example of disingenuous marketing-speak. "Develop from a fresh rookie to a hard-edged Special Forces operative," it reads, the implication being that there's some sort of skill- or character-advancement system present in the game. The box lists "character growth" as one of the game's key features. The brutal realities of Nam: a head on a stake and a scary message written in blood. ShellShock attempts to differentiate itself from the pack by threatening to provide a disturbing level of realism, or, as the official Web site puts it, "the shocking realities and tragedies of what actually happened out in the jungle." Unfortunately, what this means in practical terms is that ShellShock is a run-of-the-mill shooter with periodic interruptions for bad language and really violent cutscenes. ShellShock: Nam '67 is the second Vietnam War-themed shooter to be released in as many weeks, and another three will arrive in stores over the next month. It looks like the Vietnam War is quickly becoming the new World War II.
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