Shellshock: Nam ’67 for the Playstation 2 and Xbox was a title that made its debut almost simultaneously alongside other Vietnam War era titles like Conflict: Vietnam and Vietcong: Purple Haze. However, with the notable exception of Battlefield: Vietnam, almost all the Vietnam War games weren’t all that great and Shellshock wasn’t any real exception. Still, it had its moments and was, at the very least, playable.

It’s been almost five years since gamers had the opportunity to enter the bloody, booby trap infested jungles of Southeast Asia, and the prospect of a sequel to Shellshock running on next-generation hardware was admittedly pretty appealing. After all, we have seen practically every other war featured on the new consoles in glorious HD; it was about time that Vietnam got some attention again. However, perhaps it is this glimmer of hope and anticipation that makes Shellshock 2: Blood Trails that much more disappointing.

Shellshock 2: Blood Trails is a bad game. No, I will go as far as to say it is a horrible game; perhaps one of the worst I have played since Soldier of Fortune: Payback ruined the Soldier of Fortune series for me.

I suppose the first department where Shellshock 2 goes wrong is in its story. The original Shellshock had you playing as an American GI in Vietnam who eventually ends up working with Special Forces behind enemy lines. In the sequel, you also play as an American GI. Only this time you end up in the middle of nowhere, searching for your brother who has been infected with the same super secret, experimental virus that is turning its test subjects into rabid zombies.

Yes, you read that last sentence correctly.

The developers decided to take a franchise based on a realistic recreation of the Vietnam War and added zombies. While radically changing the game’s premise may seem like an absurd idea, admittedly games like Return to Castle Wolfenstein have melded the supernatural with quasi-military realism successfully. All could be forgiven, perhaps, if Shellshock 2’s story was interesting, but it’s like a bad B-grade movie complete with retarded characters and predictable plot turns.

The game play also has also changed, departing from its third person roots to venture into the realms of the first-person shooter genre. Unfortunately, this change does not work in Shellshock 2’s favor either. Everything about the game play is either painfully generic or so incompetently executed that playing through the game is becomes an exercise in endurance.

The levels are incredibly linear and force you to battle your way through waves of spawning enemies and scripted events. Armed with a handgun and a rifle, you wade your way from objective to objective, shooting enemies until the game determines you can continue on your way. That’s pretty much it. Shellshock 2 does try to mix things up by throwing waves of zombies your way near the end of the game, but far from being genuinely frightening, they are just about as interesting as any of the other bland enemies you gun down. It gets old quickly.

The developer’s effort to make Shellshock 2 a hybrid of the shooter and horror genre is evident. It tries to entertain a menacing, disturbing sort of atmosphere that will keep gamers on the edge of their seats, but unlike other games which use horror effectively like F.E.A.R or Condemned, it really doesn’t work here. Shellshock 2 does have a few genuinely creepy moments like when a soldier silences a wounded comrade by slitting his throat, but in ultimately the horror aspect amounts to little more than window dressing, a handful of cheap thrills and eerie, scripted events.

The controls are so terrible that it makes you realize that gamers have been taking the fluidity and precision offered by games like Call of Duty 4 for granted all this time. No matter how you adjust the control’s sensitivity, there is a noticeable lag whenever you try to aim, making shooting with any degree of accuracy next to impossible. You do have the option of using your weapon’s iron sights for increased precision, but again, using them becomes difficult when the controls rarely respond when you want them to.

And then there is the issue of AI. Your team mates are useless. They stand around and do nothing. The enemy AI is just as bad. Sometimes they spawn in the open, sometimes they spawn behind cover. When you get too close, then they’ll charge at you every time, allowing you to easily shoot them in the face. The only reason why you will find yourself dying in this game is because they spawn in the most obscure locations, often times right behind you regardless if you just finished kill everyone there. They also have perfect accuracy. The combination is a frustrating one. It is not uncommon at all to find yourself being shot to death and never knowing where it’s coming from.

And then there are the quick time events. If there’s one thing I can not stand about video games, it is quick time events. Shellshock 2 has them in spades, Every now and then something will happen and you will need to quickly jam on a series of buttons in order to survive. The quick time events are, as usual, entirely superfluous and annoying.

Fortunately, you won’t have to suffer through Shellshock 2 for very long. It clocks in at a brief six to eight hours and has no multiplayer.

The graphics in Shellshock 2 are a clear representation of the limited budget that the developers probably had to work with. The graphics look absolutely awful. Textures are bland, the guns you use are equally unattractive, and the character models are incredibly redundant. Shellshock 2 does have some gruesome gore when you shoot enemies in the face, but it is largely overshadowed by all the other lackluster effects that plague the game’s presentation. For instance, when you throw a grenade, the subsequent detonation looks more like a smoke bomb than an actual explosion.

Shellshock 2’s voice acting is decent. You have a cast of meat-head grunts, Vietcong, and R. Lee Emery sound-a-likes, and while none of them particularly stand out, they do manage to get the job done. The other sound effects, however, are unimpressive. Gun fire sounds more like pop guns than real firearms, and quite a few sound effects are blatantly recycled. For example, while walking through a zombie infested mansion, you will hear the same exact zombie moan. Over and over and over and over.

Shellshock 2 is like a low-budget direct-to-DVD sequel to a Hollywood film. It may have had a promising beginning, but something went horribly wrong along the way. There is so much lacking in Shellshock 2’s presentation and gameplay that it’s hard to believe that someone thought publishing this game was actually a good idea. It is a glaringly generic game that is derivative and inferior to first person shooters that came out years ago. It looks terrible, it sounds awful, and the brief six hours of game play that it does offer are incredibly straight forward and tedious.

Maybe if this game came out five years ago when no other noteworthy game was coming out Shellshock 2 might be worth a rental. But with heavy hitters like Killzone 2 coming out soon, even at its budget price there is absolutely no reason to waste your time or money on this garbage.

Verdict: Pass it
Final Score: 3/10

According to MCV, Japanese RPG developer Square Enix announced this morning that 45 percent of Eidos’ shareholders support their bid to acquire the British gaming development studio.

Square Enix confirms that Pioneer Investment Management, who controls 10 percent of Eidos, has joined Time Warner and other shareholders who are in favor of the acquisition. Time Warner, who owns 20 percent of Eidos, was previously considered to be one of the contenders to buy out the creators of critically acclaimed games like “Tomb Raider” and “Hitman”. However, Time Warner announced that they would instead be supporting Square Enix’s bid to buy Eidos for $120.0 million.

Earlier this week, Square Enix announced their intent to buy Eidos, causing many to speculate that the Japanese developer may be attempting to use Eidos’ portfolio of Intellectual Properties to strengthen their market presence. In August of 2008, Square Enix made a failed attempt to acquire a majority of shares in Japanese game developer Tecmo.

Over the last several months, Eidos has suffered a number of setbacks. The latest installment in the Tomb Raider franchise, Tomb Raider Underworld, sold below Eidos’ expectations, leading to the laying off of thirty employees across various departments.

With the support of 45 percent of Eidos’ shareholders, there is a very strong chance of Square Enix’s bid to be voted through. What this means for the future of both game development studios is still largely unknown. Eidos is still publishing Shellshock 2: Blood Trails later in February, but Square-Enix has recently announced that the highly anticipated release of Dragon Quest IX has been pushed back in Japan from March to July.

Eidos’ board will meet in March to vote on the possible acquisition.

Gaijin Entertainment’s next-gen title, (available on PC, Xbox 360, and Playstation 3) X-Blades, is a rather formulaic, hack-and-slash button masher, but despite that, really isn’t as horrible of a game as one might expect from a title that seems to be desperately trying to sell itself by plastering a skimpily dressed anime girl on the cover. It definitely does very little to advance the genre -it even falls falls grossly short of meeting the expectations set by better action titles that precede it like Ninja Gaiden, Heavenly Sword, or Devil May Cry- but regardless, there is enough going for X-Blades to save it from total condemnation.

The story to X-Blades is almost non-existent, and you’ll be hard pressed to find a reason to care about what’s happening to the story’s protagonist, a treasure hunter named Ayumi who apparently has taken the Lara Croft mentality of “the less clothes you wear the better treasure hunter you’ll be” to the extreme because she runs around wearing practically nothing. There’s some talk about a dark, ancient evil, an equally ancient race of creatures, the end of the world, etc. etc, but like I said before, there’s really absolutely no motivation for you to care about the paper-thin narrative X-Blades half-heartedly attempts to entertain. It’s pure window dressing and while X-Blades does have an alternate ending depending on which branch of magic (light or dark) you adhere to, like I mentioned before, you probably won’t care all that much.

The game itself is pure hack-and-slash. You’ll enter a level and be forced to take on wave after wave after wave of enemies until a little red bar on the bottom of your screen is depleted. Then, with absolutely no fanfare, the level will abruptly end and your stats for the stage will be displayed. Periodically you’ll square off against a boss (who most of the time you’ll only be able to damage with a single attack) but for the most part, get used to pressing the attack button over and over and over.

To vary the combat from the rather mundane and repetitive button mashing (on a side note, Ayumi dual wields gunblades which I haven’t really seen since Final Fantasy VIII so kudos to that) Ayumi can learn or upgrade different spells and attacks using the souls she has reaped from her enemies. Sort of like Devil May Cry. And Ninja Gaiden. Well, no, just kidding. Exactly like them. As you take damage or kill your enemies, you progressively accrue rage which you can then use different abilities. For instance, Earthquake is an area of effect spell which helps clear out some room when you get overwhelmed, and Fireball is the only spell that will defeat certain ice elemental enemies. Some of the different skills you learn are actually pretty flashy and well animated, but again, it’s nothing we haven’t seen before.

The game varies from being super easy to being annoyingly cheap. There are times when you can breeze through a level by sitting in a corner and mashing buttons, and then there’s others (particularly during boss fights) where you’ll find yourself being consistently demolished without really knowing what to do. These movements of these extremes in difficulty though are rare though, and on a medium setting, X-Blades presents a decent challenge that casual gamers will be able to surmount in 10-12 hours of game play. Hardcore action junkies more akin to the Devil May Cry 3 or Ninja Gaiden school of hack-and-slash will want to turn the difficulty up to hard right away, and even then, veterans of the genre will probably find it too easy. You do have the option of running through the levels again for the sake of gaining more souls to unlock Ayumi’s entire arsenal of magic and abilities, but only perfectionists will feel the motivation to do so.

While the gameplay itself may feel somewhat derivative and archaic when compared to other titles in the genre, it does control pretty well. The action is fast paced, and it is simple to pull off special moves and use spells as they can be mapped to the face buttons (or keys for PC users) on the controller. The camera is usually pretty consistent and does a good job of keeping track of the action, but the lock on system is what really mars the experience. There’s really no way to designate what you want to lock on to specifically, and as a result, you’ll often find the lock on bouncing from one target to the next as you move around. Normally this isn’t that big of a problem since enemies die quickly, but against bosses, it’s annoying to find yourself accidentally attacking some random monster when you want to target something else.

Though X-Blades may play like a game that would feel more at home on a last-generation console, graphically it is pretty respectable. Cut scenes utilize cel-shaded models that look sharp and fit X-Blades anime-styled presentation, and the environments are exceptionally detailed and look great. Additionally, the game runs at a very fluid pace even when the screen is bogged down with special effects and enemies. X-Blade’s soundtrack isn’t too shabby either, but the voice acting (and writing) is pretty subpar. It won’t be the worst voice acting you’ve ever heard in a video game, but it definitely has its share of lines that will make you wince.

Perhaps my biggest gripe about X-Blades is just how little it brings to the table. It doesn’t strive to reinvent the wheel, and that would be fine if it managed to execute the fundamental gameplay elements of the genre correctly. But it really doesn’t. In every sense of the word X-Blades is a mediocre, mindless, hack-and-slash that is glaringly inferior in every sense of the word imaginable to games like Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden. In order to succeed in this genre, a game needs to bring something unique about itself to distinguish itself from the masses. Devil May Cry brought style and Ninja Gaiden brought difficulty.

X-Blades tries to hide its obvious shortcomings by starring a scantly clad anime chick. That’s really it’s only selling point and I’m almost sure the developers know this all too well. There’s nothing remarkable about the game itself, so it tries to sell itself using sex appeal. It’s almost insulting really, and tragically, more than a few copies will probably be sold exclusively because Ayumi wears a dental-floss thong throughout the game. While games like Fear Effect and Tomb Raider have played the sex appeal card in the past, at the very least there was actually a strong game standing behind it. X-Blades has no such luxuries.

Aside from functioning almost exclusively as eye candy, Ayumi has the misfortune of being one of the most annoying, unlikeable protagonists ever. If games like Mirror’s Edge, Half-Life 2, or Beyond Good and Evil have done anything to advance the viability of females being strong protagonists who can fight evil without it being necessary to strip down to their underwear, X-Blades is a game that sets that notion back several steps.

It is entirely possible that I’m underselling X-Blades, but I can’t help but play this game and think that this is the sort of uninspired mediocrity that prevents games from evolving. It’s entertainment in its most shallow form, but at the very least, it never makes any pretentions of being something it isn’t. It’s a mindless, repetitive hack-and-slash game that stars an annoying anime-looking chick in a metal bikini and thong who uses gunblades. That’s X-Blades in a nutshell. If that sounds like the kind of game you want to spend ten hours (and sixty bucks) playing, then you probably won’t be disappointed.

For anyone else, you’re much better off saving your money. Sixty bucks is ridiculous for a game like X-Blades. Wait a few months if you simply must play it -I guarantee you it’ll be in the bargain bins before long.

Final Verdict: Pass It
Final Score: 5.5/10