Shellshock: Nam '67 Critic Reviews

The graphics, sound and gameplay are extremely well polished; the AI is also good with your platoon mates actually helping rather than hindering.

All the fun of tagging the enemy is tied together with an admirable level of hyper-reality that manages to convince you that the game is taking a realistic stance, while so obviously being no more genuine an experience than if you had read the story in a comic. Everything is heightened, almost to the point of self-parody.

A fabulous representation of the Vietnam War. The atmosphere is excellent, being gritty and realistic, and not having to look after squad members is a nice break from other squad-based games.

After overcoming the games tricky controls you are quickly pulled into the action and the games story.

The line "Smokey, this is not 'Nam. This is bowling. There are rules" has never been so fully embodied by a video game.

A decent game, although it is not quite a memorable one.

A slightly uneasy mix of big dumb shooter and a raw, harsher-than-normal treatment where nobody comes out well. It's the big dumb shooter that wins.

With lackluster sound, generic, objective-based (and painfully straightforward) gameplay, and graphics being the only saving grace (and only half the time at that), it’s difficult to recommend Shellshock as anything more than a rental for fans of the genre.

You cannot kill your fellow US soldiers...why? We’re not saying that it’s a good move to blast your support into oblivion, but it would be a consequence to taking a gung-ho, guns blaring approach.

On the plus side, what's there is competently done and is flecked with powerful moments of brutality. On the downside, these spots of overt anguish aren't dealt with particularly well and lead to a reduction of the overall effect.

The combat is very well implemented, taking place all round, over large distances and constantly second-guessing the player as to which direction to turn next.

The actual gameplay is quite solid, if a bit easy. Nonetheless, it’s hard to recommend the game for a $49.99 purchase when there is so little replay value.

The enjoyment dies out after about two or three more missions though, and the game becomes repetitive all the way up until the end.

I found that it was quite easy to die incredibly quickly – ok, full marks for realism there – but also you could absorb colossal damage and just crawl away to recover or pick up a health pack.

Tries to place its players into a real-life war when the experience is less about the true occurrences of the way the war was and more about a game that, even as a game, ShellShock isn't that terribly amazing.

The cutscenes are shockingly brutal, the language is shockingly harsh, and the gameplay is shockingly bad.

Not a terrible game by any means, but a bit more time in the testing tank would have surely turned it into a masterpiece to stand alongside the Conflict series.

Where Shellshock succeeds is when it resolutely refuses to pull punches in its general content, and when it hits the spot it's briefly thrilling. But for those occasional flourishes it's simply weighed down by being an average shooter, albeit one that's boosted by contentious context and some well-realised attempts at atmosphere building.

With sluggish movement and imprecise aiming, the game does not meet shooter standards, and to make things worse, the terrain is limited and may give you a tough time in finding the way around blocked objects.

The best strength of ShellShock: Vietnam ’67 was supposed to be its realism. Unfortunately, realism is the one thing it doesn’t have.