Despite an occasionally creepy atmosphere, Shellshock 2 falls flat on its face.
I'll give the game this, it's atmospheric. The atmosphere may not compete with games like Bioshock or Dead Space, but it's there, and it works to an extent. Certain things in the background can be interesting to watch. Random voices pop out here and there. Shellshock 2 has some attempts at jump scares. I'm not saying that it's scary, but it makes an attempt. Instead of just making you fight zombie after zombie, it makes an attempt to have some sort of an atmosphere to go along with it. The atmosphere is interesting, and certainly doesn't drag the overall game down. Unfortunately, just about everything else does.
Before even diving into the gameplay, let's mention the visuals. Shellshock 2 is ugly. Character models are embarrassing and environments are plain. The colors are plain. Expect level after level to be filled with dull browns and grays. It all starts to look the same; ugly. Above all, the game is dark. Not dark in tone, it's just dark. I had to turn the brightness almost all the way up to play it. Even with your trusty flashlight, Shellshock 2 is filled with black. If it's to make the game scarier, it fails. The only thing the darkness does is make Shellshock 2 feel cheap. Your deaths will most likely be because you were attacked by multiple infected soldiers that, surprise, you couldn't see. This game has little redeeming qualities when it comes to the looks department. It's easy for me to forgive a game for its graphics. Shellshock 2 has nothing to redeem itself.
The controls are stiff. Aiming is a pain. It's awkward and rarely works the way you want it. You're encouraged to get headshots, but thanks to wonky controls, they're not incredibly easy to accomplish. Grenade tossing is equally awkward. Instead of being simple, like Call of Duty, the developer decided to make it more complex than it should be. Don't expect to hold it out and release. The tap of the right bumper throws a grenade, and how far it goes seems to be up to the game. One thing that really annoyed me is how useless it is to sprint. Yes, a sprint button is offered, but don't expect for it to work. Your character is out of shape. No matter what weapon you are holding, don't expect to sprint for more than about 5 seconds. It's pointless to sprint. Your character takes more time regaining stamina from his last 5 second marathon than actually running it. The controls aren't necessarily broken, they just don't really work.
I have a strong hatred of infinite respawns. I still curse Infinity Ward for making them so famous. Surprise! Shellshock 2 is chock full of them. When playing on hard, it seems you should be more concerned with activating spawn points than killing the enemies. With so many enemies, it's hard to tell when it's going to be an infinite respawn area. Sometimes it's just, well, a lot of enemies. This leads to confusion and makes the game more difficult. Should you sprint past the enemies or try to kill them all?
Mission variety is nonexistent. Don't expect to disarm bombs, blow through enemies in a truck, or do anything besides going from point A to point B. Your mission is simple, kill enemies and make it to the end. I'm a fan of variety. Shellshock 2 has none. The missions all begin to run together when you realize you just have to fight off wave after wave of enemies and make it to the end. The only attempts made to add any variety is the inclusion of 3 boss fights. The boss fights are all the same. Heck, even the enemy is the same every time. You're in a room, and you have to blast at some dude with two machetes until he's dead. The second encounter with him is incredibly cheap, thanks to him having the arm-span of Mr.Fantastic. How cheap.
That's another thing. Shellshock 2 never seems legitimately difficult. Your deaths will be from infinite respawns, darkness, and soldiers with perfect aim. I forgot to mention that the game has regular Vietnamese soldiers. They don't miss much, and it feels cheap. Deaths that seem fair are hard to come by. It begins to make me think that Veteran on Call of Duty is fair. Yeah, it's that cheap.
So it's shallow, ugly, cheap, and guess what? It's also glitchy. I ran across numerous annoying glitches. In one mission, the infected Vietnamese were all attacking a wall. Sure, I got some easy headshots, but I'd like the enemies to come after me. Visual glitches are present to. When the infected soldiers are feeding on corpses, the "corpse" will be standing up until I reach a certain point, where it's instantly laying down. It's hard to explain what I mean, but trust me, it's an odd glitch. I ran across glitch after glitch. Apparently all of the other issues weren't enough.
Guess what else? Shellshock 2 has no replayability. Besides maybe beating it twice to get the full 1000 GS, there's nothing to do. It's not like beating the game twice is all that time consuming. Shellshock 2 is short. A playthrough on hard takes about 4-5 hours, while one on easy will last about 2. You'll likely spend no more than 7 hours playing this game. There's no multiplayer, and even if there was, nobody would be playing it. It's in the bargain bin for a reason. There's nothing to do in the game after it's over.
Shellshock 2 may have an interesting atmosphere, but that doesn't make up for every other issue that the game is plagued with. It's a mess from start to finish. Unless you're searching for some gamerscore, there's absolutely no reason why you should play it. There are plenty of better shooters out there, Pick those up instead.