Shellshock 2: Blood Trails Review

Page 2 of 2. Page 1

The zombies are a bit easier, since most of them are relatively docile, lumbering towards you and then leaping into canned pounce animations until you sink half a dozen M-16 rounds into their midriff or a single skull-shattering shot to the head. The main variations are zombies who leg it at you instead, which exhausts your ammo reserves quicker because aiming's so fiddly. If soldiers or zombies make it up close, you're sometimes called upon for a sequence of quick-time button presses to break their hold and incapacitate them. You'll be indifferent to the event and the result, but that's an improvement in the main.

The levels offer up a few set-pieces, but most are cack-handed sieges involving turret guns, which quickly run out of ammo and are no easier to aim. Stumbling through an overgrown mansion full of zombies about a third of the way into the game is vaguely compelling as you ration bullets for heads and then face off with a sort of super-zombie bearing a chainsaw, but for the most part the impact is absorbed by the shocking visuals and scripted routines. The defence of a creaky old church is typical of this: soldiers pour in through the roof and either jump down to engage or take up one of a few positions in the rafters to fire at you, and keep coming and following the same pattern until the game decides you've killed enough to use one of the NPC GIs to open a nearby door.

Every so often you're terrorised by the sight of a GI crawling halfway out of a hole, shouting at you in desperation, before they're dragged fiercely away into the dark where you have to follow, but like the poo-stick and swinging log traps that demand a quick stab of a button to evade, they're the sort of mediocrity that you'd frown about in a better game. They practically inflate the score here.

The weapons are almost all terrible, sadly.

There is almost nothing to commend whatsoever. The audio is dreadful - plywood door-slam gunshots, cicada helicopters, dead silence just when the game needs audio, forgettable voice acting... Everything is low-rent. Indeed, sometimes the game just defaults. At one point, scrambling through caves on the fifth level, I walked out of an animal-mouth doorway into a room with rubble on the left, another animal head in front of me, and a blocked-off stone staircase to my right. Ten minutes later I walked into the exact same area and had to double-check to make sure I hadn't been spun round and gone back to the previous room. I hadn't. In between, I'd been assailed by the noise of zombies, only to realise I was safe: they were all stuck in walking animations grinding against the side of the hill I was standing on, so I picked them off one by one.