Many games these days pride themselves on having senseless violence as their main theme, getting good sales volumes and publicity in the process; The Grand Theft Auto series, Manhunt and State of Emergency to name but a few such games. So why isn’t Shellshock: Nam ’67 rocketing to the top of the charts as we speak? The key to success is in presentation, and ‘Nam seems to have stumbled at the first punji stick…

Now, down to the missions themselves. The game is a third-person shooter, and although there’s none of that team-control malarkey, you are technically supplied with some grunts for company (or occasionally some fancy-pants Special Forces blokes). Most of the missions are fairly simple, your standard Go blow this up, then kill these guys, then make some racist comments about the indigenous Vietnamese people-type stuff. The missions are quite long, and the objectives often change mid-mission, which is good, because it adds a little variety to the rather simple mission structure. The levels are a little hit and miss though, many being pretty samey, and not really feeling as if they had anything to do with the Vietnam conflict, and then contrasts with a stunning final level last-stand at your home base, which has been totally devastated by VC attacks, and you fight to prevent it being overrun, very much like the finale of the movie Platoon

Controlling your grunt is fairly simple - the essential controls are in the right place, but things such as proning and zooming in are a little mismatched, which doesn’t come in handy when you’re surrounded (and you often will be), zooming in instead of getting your ass on the ground, leading to some frantic, and frequently frustrating deaths. That is, if the game didn’t keep pausing itself to tell me that I didn’t have a controller installed, when I blatantly did, always at the most crucial of moments!

The AI is a bit of a letdown, being less predictable than the sexual performance of a horny geriatric, for both your grunts and the enemy VC. At times, the enemies will give you a bit of a challenge, firstly surrounding you, then ducking behind cover and shooting at you alternately, making you duck and twist like a madman to avoid getting shot. At other times, they’ll just shout random phrases straight out of the Vietcong generic anti-American generator (such as “you gonna dieee GI”, or “you go home in black bag GI”), and then run blindly en-masse into your sights, dropping like flies around an army men game.

As I mentioned earlier, despite having teammates, it’s not a team game. At times, you’ll find yourself hiding behind the rest of the team as they shoot relentlessly into the enemy, or will stand behind you, shooting you in the back as you try to take on the entire Vietcong army. Mix these around, and you get a sometimes very good playing experience, but mostly frustrating and definitely un-Vietnam one, since your troops hardly act like soldiers at all. The game might have been passable if it had a Conflict Vietnam-style split screen co-op mode, but as a solo experience, it’s just not good enough.

The game’s graphics do help the situation a bit however, and coming from the same stable as the long-awaited Killzone you can see the quality. The game runs pretty steadily, even with all the heavy-duty ‘Namage on the go. The PS2 manages to keep a fairly long draw distance, with some nice (intentional) fog effects too. The characters all look fairly nice, and the movement animations are quite smooth -your character moves like a GI, and, as mentioned earlier, the cut-scenes look pretty too.