Best Of

Shellshock 2 is a survival horror shooter that has just enough freedom of movement to not be called a shooter-on-rails. Barely. You play a protagonist named Walker who speaks like he's Seen Some Shit (TM), but never really says much beyond "I have to find my brother" and "nothing really matters lol." The game takes place in Vietnam-era Vietnam (or possibly Cambodia), where a LOL MOST MYSTERIOUS zombie outbreak has occurred, possibly because rogue scientist/sekrit medicine/military-funded-project or something that isn't really discussed beyond showing you a french doctor in a hat that you don't care about. Your 'brother' was patient/zombie zero, and somehow you magically see through his eyes sometimes (not discussed). The protagonist apparently cares for his brother. We're never SHOWN this, or any other emotion - it was enough for the writers to tell you what the main character was feeling, apparently. "Show, don't tell" is, as always, lost in shooters. Lord. It comes as no surprise that this extremely formulaic storyline is complete bunk, lacking in such paltry, mortal things as 'motive' (Vietcong are happy to fight your or the zombies), or 'character development' (one of the bad guys, a VC with a scarred face, springs fully-formed into the narrative, wants your brother for a never-determined reason, and is killed off a few seasons - er, levels - later for no reason. Level design is effectively one long hallway with a couple turns and some cars or plants or doors here or there. Combat is painfully imbalanced - except on some 'bosses' (which are used again and again - more on that in a minute), a headshot is an instant kill from any weapon. On Hardmode, it's the only way to go. Thankfully, the VC haven't invented 'cover' and like to reload in the open, and zombies walk at a glacial pace toward you. Good job, AI. Bugs are fairly nonexistent, except for a major one that showed up in early levels - if you moved the mouse too fast, it simply stopped responding (this is a well known, reproduced bug that made the game almost unplayable for a bit). The thing is... if you pay attention to the early levels, you come to realize - this game SHOULD have been REALLY GOOD. The first/second level are really, really solid - it's as if a bunch of suits got ahold of the creative types and said 'welp, that's some good content you've got for the first hour. Now extend it for the last few. Here's zero dollars to make any more content.' Ambient sounds are used so well in the first level - babies crying and women screaming while you sneak through an apartment building, police sirens in the distance for a second, piano riffs to accompany frightening events, your heart pounding in your ears, the sounds of someone butchering someone else as their screams cut to an end choppers flying overhead - and all used very sporadically, at appropriate times and properly heighten the tension. Compare and contrast to later levels, where chopper sounds are heard for no reason, babies are crying in the middle of a quarantine zone where there's not a single non-infected person (babies wat?), inhuman zombie screams originating from empty corners of the room you're standing in, heart pounding in your ears for five minutes straight when nothing interesting is happening... ...I guess the audio director burned too bright and spontaneously combusted by level 3, and the rest of the team were left to figure out what to do next. It's an absolute travesty. The audio was so close to perfectly used. And take the weird narrative at the beginning - juxtaposition between a harsh, stereotypical asshole sergeant, and the smooth, quiet, distant voice of the narrator. This is pretty damn good cinematography, but we never see it again throughout the game. Oh, and the gas scene? You watch an actress get eaten alive by a zombie, then get poisoned with some sort of gas... and suddenly she's there as a ghost, haunting you as you make your way through some nondescript cave, being very foreboding and creepy. AWESOME! Why couldn't we do that sort of shit all game? Guys, come on! You were SO CLEVER in the beginning! Alas, Shellshock 2 eventually falters into the stereotypical tone-deaf shooter we're all used to. It's too bad. This could have really been something. 3.5/10, only because the beginning showed real promise - the rest of the game isn't worth your time. Some of my notes, interspersed with photos: "Quick-time uses letter names instead of arrows, which is surprisingly jarring. Almost like it wasn't tested. Come to think of it, every quick-time event has really unrealistic 'standoffs' thrown in... kind of like someone was told to go back, pause the animation, and jam a QT event in." *This was probably about the best quicktime event there was. This VC busts around the door, murders a GI in front of you, then leaps at you with a machete. When you hold him off, you hold him back by the neck... later in the game, you hold off zombies by holding onto their hands. They could easily bite you, but they don't, they just sit patiently while you have a blast with quicktime events.*
*I actually failed this three times... when you're playing a WASD controlled game, you tend to think of the buttons as 'forward, left, back, and right,' not 'W, A, S and D.' I eventually figured out it was easier just to switch to typical home-row qwerty typing during QT events. I don't think these were ever tested.*
*This game is quite violent. They doubled down on the amount of red... at the expense of any actual frightening content.*
*Like... really violent. This guy is alive. I'm not even sure stuff like this is necessary. In some games, gore is important, or a tool for the atmosphere. I feel like it doesn't help this game at all.*
*One of the more clever ideas. Dodge vietcong traps, or trigger them and quicktime out of the way.*
*Easily the highlight of the game. This whole level happened while you were tripping balls on gas, and you were haunted by the ghost of an over-sexualized actress whose death you just witnessed. Whoa. Too bad the innovation stopped here.*
"AI is absolutely awful. 'stand there and take bullets' seems to be the order of the day." "Firefights weren't polished at all. Call of Duty 2 made firefights seem like a goddamn frantic tornado - extra explosions, gunfire in the distance, screams, events where you got shellshocked, crazy shit flying by you all the time... firefights in this game are just WYSIWYG - six guys on each side shooting. This is a scripted event in a warzone! Come on! What is this, a nerfgun fight?" *One of the firefight locales. Also pictured: lol AI.*
"ZOMBIE HAUNTED HOUSE TROPE. OF COURSE." *If you can spend the entire night here...*
"Game balance is bullshit. Every zombie dies to a headshot. Every VC dies to a headshot. But this grunting asshole machete-zombie-'boss' took 50 or 60 shotgun rounds to the head. Are you kidding?" *Google him. Zombie machete boss. This thing is pure bullshit - the devs just increased the numbers for 'hard mode' - no mechanic changes, nothing, just bigger numbers. Also, they reused this 'boss' two more times throughout the game for no reason. No explanation what he is, but he's floating out in various zombietowns, always dressed the same. A sure sign of an unfinished idea jammed into a game to meet quotas.*
"The horror bit is more like a ride in Disneyland - scripted and unsurprising." "Calling Cal 'brother' seems to be cheap character creation. It's literally all we know about Cal. Are we supposed to give anything resembling a shit about him? Hell, the protagonist doesn't even have enough substance for me to feel sorry for him, how is his brother supposed to do it?" "Oh, so when I have a gun, I instagib zombies... but when I have a machete, it takes a solid minute of hacking away. Well balanced." Oh, and also, I laughed out loud when this character showed up. Sex on a battlefield - how on-the-nose can you get? Are we going to start yelling 'HOOAH' next? Must everything be depthless and stereotyped? But she ended up being an important part of what was probably the most interesting part of the game - the tripping-balls bit. *Oh, hi, I'm only here to make a pass at the main character and titillate the audience for some cheap reviews. OH NO I'M NOT, I ACTUALLY HAUNT THE SHIT OUT OF YOU WHILE YOU'RE TRIPPING BALLS.*
I wish they'd made this game work well. I really do. It almost makes me MORE mad that this game could have been great.

The first thing that you must know about Shattered Horizon is that it's multiplayer only. The second thing that you must know is that it was made at the time by a company who specialized in computer benchmarking software - suggesting that they were really, really quite good with graphics. The third thing that you must know is that I put in precisely ten hours over the last four months, so... my notes are rather scattered. Shattered horizon is a very typical, very cookie-cutter shoot-em-up with a single major gimmick - it takes place entirely within space. Not in spaceships or on space stations or on a moon with low gravity - in space. Zero gravity. I'm sure this major gimmick was used by some marketer somewhere to say the game 'turns shooters on their head.' Fucking marketing. As I mentioned, the game was made by a benchmarking company. Originally, when I was younger and dumber (though some would argue I'm still as dumb), I was under the impression that the game was made to showcase how much the company knew about graphics to pump its benchmarking software. However, now that I have multiple friends working on major blockbuster shooters, I have a better idea of just how much work this damn thing must of been to build. Too bad it lacked imagination. I really believe that if you'd handed this game off to, say, the guys who made Unreal or (heaven forbid) Valve, you'd have a real historical game on your hands. Unfortunately, beyond its single zero-g gimmick, the game is really quite boring. I don't need yet another team-based capture-the-flag or team deathmatch shooter - I am particularly not in need of a game that is trying to ride SO HEAVILY on its gimmick that it actually LACKS things that games of its time had. Environments? Dull and boring. In SH, you are floating on rocks in space. Seldom are rocks the object of anyone's interest (barring the odd geologist in the room). Instead, rocks are more often used in a literary sense as a foil to other humans or objects, e.g. "Dumb as a," or "Solid as a." The only entertainment that the adjectives 'dumb' and 'solid' conjure in my mind is professional wrestling. When you're not on a rock, you're on some man-made shit that is usually a piece of metal, generally white, very flat, often painted with a stripe or two. There might be a blinking light, or an antenna. This shit is generally in the center of the map, and often contains whatever objective you're trying to stand near. At times, two of these manmade shits (sometimes three!) will exist on the map. To be fair, the rocks are quite pretty, for rocks. Really good bump mapping. On the rocks. As your only landmarks in the entire map are "Rocks" and "Shit," it becomes very difficult to navigate. Memorizing the precise shape and orientation of each piece of rock and shit is rather more dull than a catholic wedding without the booze (though not QUITE as bad as cataloging drying paint), and since there are of course other (very small) players to watch for, one tends to spend most of one's time squinting at the monitor rather than painstakingly drawing a map of what looks to be chunks of fruit in jello. And let's talk about watching for other players, because this really gets at the heart of why the design of this game is garbage. You're not watching for danger in a 360 degree field, as in other shooters. In fact, since it's possible (and likely) that your feet won't touch any 'ground' a good majority of the time, you're watching for danger in a 360-degree-by-360-degree field. This means you're often wildly swinging the camera around, lost because you don't recognize the unique markings on that one damn rock when you're sideways, ultimately turning the game into one great big point-and-click adventure. Why is this bad design? Couple reasons: 1. Your field of view is a god damned unrealistic flat rectangle of pixels, due to 2009 gaming technology... but you have a 360-by-360 field to watch. 2. Everything else in that field of view is a rock that bears significant resemblance to every other rock in the game, so you have almost no way of orienting yourself at any time. 3. Your astronaut is extremely fragile, meaning whoever shoots first will probably get the kill... so your best bet is to reduce your chances of being seen. These three reasons are why Shattered Horizon games are boring as hell. Thrilling space action? Heart-pumping, gut-wrenching, vomit-inducing wild shoot-em-up in space? No. Hide in a corner on a rock to reduce your field of view to 70 degrees and wait for some other idiot to drift out far enough away from the rocks that they can be picked up against the boring-ass black backdrop so you can shoot first? Yep. I'm sure I'll have HOURS of fun doing that. I've transitioned into another gripe - the idea of 'stealth' in Shattered Horizon. If, while spacewalking, you actively fire your thrusters, you have a great deal of control and speed - but you light up the surroundings and are easier to spot. While this sounds clever on principle, let's remember that the people who play twitch shooters tend to be quite adept at picking out human-shaped objects in camouflage even WITHOUT big bright lights, so this really does nothing but make it harder for new players (who will tend toward movement and won't spot the experts as fast) to climb the skill curve. Coupled with no death recap, no killcam, no nothing but a jarring camera switch to your astronaut dead and flailing through space, it's no wonder this game had the turnover it did. It's frustrating to die, and hard for newcomers to learn. ...and from a balance perspective, the only real 'stealth' you have in the game is not being in your opponent's very small flat rectangle of a view. The whole thruster-stealth thing was not thought through. The design is no good - but what about some of the features? Bots, maybe? Thank God for bots - at least this wasn't another iteration of Lead and Gold! Unfortunately, the bots are a major source of bugs. It was always a crapshoot whether I'd be thrown into a match with no bots, a 3v1 (or 4v0, that was fun), or invulnerable bots (that last one is my favorite... unholy, mindless enemy astronauts, out of ammunition or whatever (they weren't shooting, who knows), camping the objective... staring... staring into your soul as you unloaded clip after clip into them. Too bad they didn't include a votemap to reset shit (although which map would you vote for anyway? The one with the rocks, or the one with the rocks?) The bots aren't the only buggy thing in this game - so are the graphics. _The graphics._ In a game built by a benchmarking company. To be fair, I'm playing with a card and an API from seven years into the future (as far as the developers are concerned), so I'm not really holding this against the game. It was pretty interesting, though, to watch my camera zoom in to infinity, invert vertically, and zoom back out again in a loop after looking through my gun's ironsights. More interesting than the random blackscreening, anyway. Storyline? Two three-letter acronym factions both want X objective, go secure it. lol this is a war or rebellion or something? Fuck if I know. Physics? You'd think for a game set in zero-G that physics would be a major concern... but nope. Space drag. SPACE DRAG. What is this, 1995? We have a TERM FOR THIS PHENOMENON IN VIDEO GAMES NOW. FIX IT, AND LET ME ACCELERATE INDEFINITELY. Surely there must be something good in this game? There was. The grenades are actually really neat to use. The Ice grenade in particular. Too bad there's like seven different flavors. Liiiiiiittle bit cumbersome to switch between them all in the heat of battle. Man, even the cool shit was badly done. 1/10, would not play again.