Even dung can be meaningful in nature...Shellshock 2 isn't.
And what came out of Shellshock 2? Well, except for the fact something this brutally unsuccessful had to discourage all the investors in the world from supporting any following game from the Vietnam setting (and there already are just about as many of such games as there are pieces of crocuses) and so hurting the green hell genre, it definitely mostly was a nausea that the players were left with after meeting this game.
Even the pirates had to feel toxicated and probably regretted they ever downloaded the product. Even all the people that bought the game for a special prize had to feel miserably after realising that Uwe Boll's Tunnel Rats has much better entertainment value to it. And I can't even begin to imagine the madness that had to take over the 1% of people who bought the game for its full prize without knowing how much mental harm they are about to receive.
More than anything you should not give a whirl to Shellshock 2 expecting even the most primitive message. The first Shellshock game brought the message that the war is indeed terrible. Conflict: Vietnam brought the message that friends come in handy especially at war. And Vietcong series brought the message that your enemy is also just a human with exactly the same desire to win.
So, what does Shellshock 2 tell us about Vietnam? Actually nothing at all, because in this game the actual Vietnam feels like a cheap coulisse and so the game's plot could've easily been set to, say, Paraguay or maybe some botanical garden in Beverly Hills, and nothing would've changed.
The Vietnam soldiers also don't look alike and the first one you confront looks like an angry poultry butcher in a dirty shirt from a nearby Cambodian restaurant. Even Vietcong, despite being partisans, had their uniforms and ranks. The only thing you'll learn about the US army boys is the fact that every second one of them has a blackjack card glued to their helmet and that they all enjoy dying and screaming **** mere moments before doing so.
So at the end of the day, Shellshock 2 doesn't try to accomplish anything. Your soldiers are just pieces of some average meat ready to be written off and your commander dies very soon. And so I found myself completely alone, just like a stob in a bamboo fence. After a few pathetic shootouts within couple ricy and feeble villages and after some kind of a lame stealth attempt, things started to get gravely hotter, but not in the sense of difficulty. That actually dropped to the lowest bearable level.
You see, the game then turns into a boring zombie morhoon and doesn't demand from you anything but to remain lock n' load. The victory is frankly decided just by the amount of bullets in your pockets so that you can waste them on all the slow zombies around the place, and the fact there are several really tricky zombies that even try to run after you, changes big nothing about that.
In one abandoned cottage in the middle of the jungle in the middle of the night I found one of the first zombie encounters quite interesting, but after the neverending battle in the basement of this cottage with one particularly tough zombie with a brown snack bag on his head and a pair of choppers in his palms, I expected the developers to give me a break from them for a while. But no! The zombies never cease, quite the opposite actually. And during the second half of the game you won't be fighting anything else than them.
The story goes as follows: There's a drug called whiteknight, which turns people into zombies with blood over their mouths and with quite a yen for your brain. Honestly I beat this game for entirely educational purposes only, just to see if it really is as bad as everyone claims. Heh, it was even worse. That one point is for the abused music and that half of a point is for the forest hogling that sacrificed its life in my favour by running into an exploding trap, thus flying couple meters away instead of me.
Rather than wasting your time with Shellshock 2, I'd highly recommend downloading the excellent Half-Life 1 mod known as "Heart of Evil", which has everything that Shellshock 2 doesn't and which looks like the best Coppola's war movie compared to these faeces. And it's for free.
+ Lynyrd Skynyrd - Free Bird
- Everything else...