ShellShock 2: Blood Trails

The game is being sold cheap everywhere for a reason - its terrible.

While it is somewhat smooth, you could never call the controls decent. Too many FPS games like COD, Timesplitters, Red Faction are far smoother and accurate. Shellshock is missing something. Yes settings allow you to teak the sensitivity etc, but it just doesn't fix it.

While graphics are better than Doom, we have since moved into the 21st Century. I could easily find PS2 titles with better graphics.

Poor gameplay, poor AI, poor graphics, poor setting - it is an epic fail.

Shellshock 2 is a mediocore game but a game that can be quite fun and has a slight scare element to it. Although there are better FPS out there, this was a fill in gap and it was better than i thought it would be. Personally i give this 7/10 and i will play it again. It's one of those games which you buy between releases and its cheep now so worth the money. I like it and its in my collection. If you do buy this don't expect high quality and you might find you'll like it. This could have been an excellent game if the team spent more time on it but i was brave enough to buy it despite official reviews and glad i did.

Cheers.

So, first things first. I have not played the first Shellshock game, but was willing, ready and able to give this a go. What a mistake. This has to be one of the most inept, poorly executed and downright unenjoyable war games I have ever played. And I have played nearly all of them. So what's wrong with the game then? Where do I start? Almost everything is wrong with this game right from the laughably inept controls, poor level design, stupid artificial intelligence and woeful graphics. Of course the warning signs were all there: a sequel to an already weak original (according to reviews in most magazines) almost no marketing, and an inferior (or at least highly inconsistent) developer. Add in a Vietnam Wars setting and the fact that it's yet another first person shooter and you've got a world of pain. The Vietnam War has never worked as a video game setting and I personally can't see that it ever will - at least not playing as the Americans anyway. Getting killed by an unseen peasant army and/or malaria in an impenetrable jungle is hardly the equivalent of running around France shooting Nazis, morally or logistically.

Realising all the intrinsic problems of its setting, the developer Rebellion has added a secret ingredient: zombies - akin to Call of Duty 5: World at War. Now although zombies are turning into the biggest cliche since bald space marines we have to admit adding a horror element to this particular game is an excellent idea - in theory at least. Unfortunately there's no real way to prove this, given the execution here is so abominably poor. I honestly don't know which is worse: this or Spark Unlimited's "Legendary" and Turning Point: Fall Of Liberty.

All three suffer from the same basic problems though with wretchedly inaccurate controls, terrible graphics and level design as brain dead as the artificial intelligence. I can understand how the obviously low budget would limit the graphics, but there's no excuse for the rest. Because the game knows it's rubbish at rendering jungles as much as possible is actually set in different locales. This adds what would have been a welcome air of unpredictability in another, better, game but here it's just a master class in bad set pieces. The multiple sieges are probably the worst as the endless stream of enemies run like doomed clockwork soldiers to their predestined firing spots. Incredibly for a first person shooter in this day and age there is no multiplayer mode, although given the quality of the rest of the game it was probably a mercy killing. As you'll probably by now be expecting the game is also riddled with bugs, with glitchy graphics and AI. Please avoid it all costs. I just hope Rebellion sort themselves, and their budgets out for Sega's Aliens Vs. Predator and Battlefront III.