Windows

Shellshock: Nam '67

Ondanks het gebrek aan vernieuwing en enkele vervelende bugs, kan Shellshock de hardcore fans misschien nog wel bekoren.

The sheer guts and determination that the soldiers who found themselves on a Tour of Duty over in 'Nam, together with jabs at the title's competitors, is the inspiration for the promotion of Shellshock, No Honour. No Medal - Just Survive. With an attitude like that, and the fact that the game has been given a BBFC rated 18 certificate, it would seem on the surface that the developers have really tried to get as realistic a representation of the conditions and the horrific experiences that the US Armed Forces had to face into Shellshock: Nam '67.

ShellShock: Nam '67 ging ons met de gruwel en het realisme van een oorlog confronteren. Dat het daar helemaal niet in slaagt, is dan ook enigszins een teleurstelling - net als het overgrote deel van het game. Kortom: een gemiddelde shooter met gemiddelde gameplay die ons weinig kan boeien.

Overall, ShellShock: Nam '67 is a very mixed bag. Is it worth your precious $50' Yes and no. If you're looking for a quick fix game that packs a lot of action, gore, and challenge, by all means, buy this game. If you're searching for the perfect war game that encompasses all of Vietnam's tragic history and all of the pain and tears associated with it, this game could be worth a rental, but definitely not a purchase. For everything ShellShock does right, namely engineering a pure action game with some cool features like the base camp, it manages to do two things wrong, such as instituting a controller-hurling range of difficulty, and essentially, lacking overall innovation. ShellShock is very much like the Vietnam War itself; painful, harsh, difficult to overcome, and leaving a bad taste in your mouth.

ShellShock: Nam ’67 is shocking on several levels. The cutscenes are shockingly brutal, the language is shockingly harsh, and the gameplay is shockingly bad. While the media would have you believe there is some epic war experience waiting for you in Nam ’67, it simply boils down to an action shooter that requires very little thought or skill.

Shellshock really has nothing much to offer. In addition to being lackluster the game is also short-lived, clocking in at a little less than six hours. The gameplay is just so brainless that soon all you notice are the disgustingly violent cut scenes, making the game feel more like a snuff film than a shooter. Do yourself a favor and ignore this one. You have better things to spend your money on.

Shellshock is as painfully straightforward as can be. Somewhere between conception and launch, something went wrong. The horror of war is just a gimmicky excuse to saturate the game with a lot of blood and guts and does nothing to or for play. If anything, the tastelessly delivered scenes without any real moral implications or perceivable consequence to their having transpired detract from the experience as a whole. Since it's then not particularly horrific, it's just a game and not the much vaunted "experience" it was intended to be. Since it's then just a game, we have to recognize its many faults and few horrific positives. These faults make playing through Shellshock more tiresome and frustrating then thrilling or terrifying. And these positives do little to change that.

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.

I enjoyed the first couple of missions of Shellshock: Nam ’67, but then the game went sour. It just doesn’t deliver on its promises. Character growth? Unnerving realism? I don’t think so. And when you take away the sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, figuratively and literally, the true gameplay is revealed as repetitive and uninspired. There has to be a better way than this to spend a tour of duty in Vietnam.

At one point, a member of your squad ties a prostitute to an upright mattress, beats her mercilessly with his fists, and then takes a giant Rambo knife to her breasts before finally slitting her throat. This is the one way that ShellShock lives up to its hype--it certainly raises the bar on vile, pointless cutscenes. However, anyone interested in more than stubbornly average gameplay should look elsewhere.

Shellshock is a mess. It's no more controversial than a hundred other games you'll have seen before, all of which play better than this. Look beyond the undeserved 18-certificate, and you'll find little more than a below-par action-shooter that's about as much fun to play as pulling a VC bayonet out of your gonads. It smells of something hot and strong, and it ain't napalm...

Shellshock aurait mérité une meilleure réalisation et deux fois plus de contenu. Il pourra intéresser les amateurs d'atmosphère violente réussie et ceux qui cherchent un jeu sur le Vietnam qui ne soit pas multijoueur.

Shellshock se voulait choquant, voire éducatif. On peut lui reconnaître d'éviter de glorifier les GI en n'oubliant pas de montrer quelques cas de soldats peu héroïques, voire psychotiques mais en dehors de ça... Le soft de Guerilla est loin d'être traumatisant, simplement il montre des têtes trop polygonnées dépourvues de corps, un peu facile. Le titre manque cruellement d'envergure dans son ambiance qui se montre trop plate et mal mise en scène, rien de dérangeant à signaler ici, ni de malsain ou quoi que se soit. Avec sa réalisation plus que moyenne, il ne reste à Shellshock que son gameplay simpliste qui fait de lui un shooter assez anodin mais nerveux pour amateurs en manque. On, lui préférera Vietcong, de loin. Ceux qui attendaient le Platoon ou le Full Metal Jacket du jeu vidéo peuvent retourner sur leurs platines DVD.

Jeder Anti-Kriegsfilm ist meiner Meinung nach zu großen Teilen immer noch ein Kriegsfilm. Doch bei Filmen bin ich nicht so sehr eingebunden wie bei Spielen, denn ich schaue nur zu, statt selbst aktiv zu werden. Es mag ja verständlich sein, die Gräuel eines Krieges zeigen zu wollen, ich will sie aber nicht selbst durchführen müssen. Und wenn mich Shellshock dazu zwingt, am Boden kauernde Bauern oder leicht bekleidete Prostituierte zu erschießen, finde ich das abstoßend.

In the end, ShellShock: Nam '67 proves that shock-value can only carry a game so far. All in all, it's easily one of the better third-person action games on the PlayStation 2 console, but it falls short in more areas than it succeeds in. If you're a hardcore war buff, and you can't wait to get behind the scope of an M-14 assault rifle, then go ahead and pick it up. For the rest of you, it's worth checking out just to see what all the hype was about, but I'd suggest a rental before you lay down your cash.

In the end, Shellshock: Nam '67 has a bit of style but not much new gameplay behind it. It looks good and it's a serviceable shooter (you do get to shoot things, after all), but the game play just isn't that exciting, especially when you consider that it has no multiplayer and the single-player is so linear.

ShellShock: Nam ’67 isn’t really a terrible game by accounts – the action still has a bit of a tactical curve, and it can still be pretty fun if you play it more like a general shooter than trying to make a realistic title out of it – but ultimately, it fails in my eyes as an innovative title that people will find themselves wanting to pick up in the face of Doom 3 and the impending Half-Life 2. As far as Vietnam shooters go, I guess there isn’t all that much better available (we’ll see once I check out Conflict: Vietnam), but I really can’t see any exceptional reason to blow your hard-earned cash on this game. It just doesn’t have that special flash to get you in and keep you craving for more even after you’ve beaten it, and a lack of multiplayer support drives the nail in the coffin. It sounded great on paper and Eidos certainly put enough effort behind the hype machine to get me excited about this game, but all I ended up with was a series of disappointments.

Хочется сильных впечатлений? Запустите Vietcong, а лучше — возьмите в видеопрокате вышеупомянутые киноленты. Позарез необходим шок? Посмотрите документальный фильм с кадрами исторической хроники. ShellShock не в состоянии предложить вам ни то, ни другое.

I said that the game crossed a line with me, and here it is: it portrays the killing of specific, theoretically real (in that they're virtual stand-ins for the actual soldiers that fought in the war) people as nothing more than a gruesome shooting gallery. For me, it didn't matter that the game's design was perfectly acceptable, or even that the game's morality was interestingly muddied, with American troops being portrayed as every bit as vicious and bloodthirsty as the enemies they faced. I found the whole idea of trying to use this conflict as a setting for a mindless action game reprehensible. At some point everyone has to decide when enough is enough. And now I have.