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| images c/o MobyGames |
This is the story of the humble beginnings of Guerilla Games, the little Dutch studio that gave the world Horizon: Zero Dawn. This is the story of Shellshock: Nam '67, an incompetent, but bizarrely vicious little Vietnam War shooter from the early 2000s.
The franchise, such as it is, is probably better known by its sequel, Shellshock 2: Blood Trails, an interesting, if middling horror effort from Rebellion (long known for being hit-or-miss.) Nam '67 in contrast didn't make much of a blip. I remember reading about it in the magazines; most commentary on it centered around its frank (by some accounts tasteless) depiction of the conflict, as well as its use of period music, mostly the kind of grody, distorted rock n' roll that would lay the foundation for heavy metal. As a game, it seemed to be almost forgettable. Well, this week I dusted it off and played it and found out that they were half-right.
Shellshock: Nam '67 is one of a very small collection of Vietnam War-themed shooters. World War II gets all the attention, of course; the Vietnam conflict, in contrast, is generally something that Hollywood and the game industry prefers to ignore. Prior to Vietcong (from the Mafia folk) and the Call of Duty clone Men of Valor (brought to you by Medal of Honor: Allied Assault devs 2015, inc.) was NAM, a dubious budget game using the Build engine. Other than some Battlefield games and the original Call of Duty: Black Ops, the Vietnam conflict has largely been skipped over by the industry. Hell Let Loose: Vietnam might turn that around, but I doubt it.
And maybe Shellshock illustrates why; when I was playing it, I got the sense that Guerilla wanted to convey a sense of the Hell on Earth that was the Vietnam War, but they were a bunch of young Dutch guys in the early 2000s, fed on a diet of Hollywood movies like Apocalypse Now and Rambo; the resulting game is confused, mildly offensive (a touch beyond early 3D-era Grand Theft Auto, if you need a measurement) and weirdly violent. These days devs are (allegedly) made to study real-life gore, the better to model it in game; compared to what you might find in Mortal Kombat, the gore in Shellshock is quaint, low-poly, with low-res textures. (The entire game looks profoundly low-rent: for a game released in 2004, it looks more like a much older game, somewhere between 1998 and 2002.) But it's frequent: enemies' heads explode frequently (so does yours, sometimes) and NPCs caught in explosions will be reduced to gibs, Quake II style. (Which is very jarring when you're used to war games not reducing NPCs to chunky salsa.)
In between missions, you'll be able to do stuff like buy drugs and porn (you can look up the pinups you bought in the main menu), or get an R&R ticket so you can bang one of the Vietnamese hookers working out of a hut near the base. You're treated to a cast of characters, each with their own quirks: the guy named "Psycho" is a creepy skinheaded weirdo who never shuts up about how much violence he can't wait to commit, frequently murders prisoners, is disliked by the prostitutes, and has one of the most unintentionally hilarious death scenes I've ever seen; Monty is an ARVN soldier who is probably the most skilled warfighter in the whole game, but he also has a taste for torture that puts Psycho to shame. There are a bunch of other characters but they're all mostly the same; there actually isn't a lot of characterization to be had in this game outside of the grainy cutscenes. As for your own character, you actually get the choice of one of three different models, which appear to be of different ethnicities, but otherwise have no bearing on gameplay. (For what it's worth, Shellshock 2, if it is indeed set in the same 'verse, confirms the protagonist to have been the white guy.)
Shellshock has the dubious distinction of being a third-person shooter, and similar to Resident Evil 4 (which also came out that year) is one of the earliest over-the-shoulder games, at when you're "drawing a bead," the game's equivalent of iron-sights. Ultimately, this does little except make seeing things to your left a pain; I wish you could swap shoulders, but alas, nobody had thought of that yet. Otherwise, it's pretty much a straightforward shooter. Its health system works a lot like the first Halo: taking damage fills a bar that lowers over time; fill it to the top, and you start taking physical damage that does not regenerate. Medkits lay around to help, but if you're playing on easy like I did (I usually do that with older games I'm not familiar with) you won't need them much.
I'm just gonna be honest with you: Shellshock is not a good game. Despite the presence of big-name voice actors like Steve Blum and Jennifer Hale, it's a fucking mess. NPC pathing often breaks; sometimes I had to go back and retrieve my (invincible) buddies because they got stuck, or I'll catch a group of enemies all bunched together and can just mow them down. Enemy AI in general is not particularly bright; melee enemies will walk straight at you, which is particularly disturbing in a late-game mission where all the residents of a local whorehouse are Viet Cong agents who slowly march at you with machetes in hand. I don't know if they were intended to be that slow and methodical, but the whole thing felt vaguely racist to me. For that matter, you're perfectly capable of committing your own war crimes, such as shooting injured VC laying in an infirmary, and the game makes zero commentary about it. It's only bad when Psycho does it, I guess.
Mission design is also mildly infuriating, largely due to how uncommunicative the game is with you. You're often given objectives with no clear direction, forcing you to wander around the level until you find what you were looking for. The game also reuses the same maps for different locations a couple times, which just screams "budget game." Stealth is just about non-existent, despite being considered important on a couple of missions. Fortunately it doesn't matter: you can just mow everyone down Rambo-style. Just don't step on the booby traps, which are usually helpfully marked. Defusing them usually requires performing a mini-game.
The PC version has some pretty terrible controls, but the worst is anything to do with picking things up as well as defusing booby traps, neither of which are explained adequately. Picking stuff requires hitting the use button, then hitting it again to cycle through the various things on the ground, Then you use the shoot button (in my case, the left mouse button like almost everyone else) to actually pick it up. Defusing requires using the arrow keys (or whatever you replaced them with) to navigate a little mini-game. It's clear that this game was meant for PlayStation 2 and Xbox, not that they'd be much more fun on those platforms.
You've got your choice of weapons to take with you, but most of them are frustratingly inaccurate. Sometimes I was given the nightscope sniper rifle, but this was borderline unusable because using it led to the game crashing and forcing me to restart the entire level, checkpoints be damned. The best weapon, I found, was the M60, a mean machine with surprisingly high accuracy that mowed down NVA and VC like nobody's business and was easy to keep topped up due to the semi-universal nature of ammo.
I don't think I liked Shellshock. It's ugly, weird and off-putting, with frankly shitty gameplay even by early-00s shooter standards and a sense of being vaguely immoral, a game that tries to convey the horrors of war but treats the subject with all the subtlety and sensitivity of a napalm strike. But I appreciate what it was trying to do; I don't think there's another game quite like it. That's probably for the best, though.
-june❤
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