Antoine_de_Smith
My intention in rating this game three stars is to damn with faint praise.
Naughty Dog have always been an archetypal "American" studio in the worst possible sense. An organ of "tech" culture rather than pop-art. Novelty and toys giving way to, not putting themselves at the service of or being taken over by artists, but instead tech guys starting to make a tech guys idea of "OHRT". Serious "OHRT" time now guys, like the oscars (remember which movies were winning Oscars in the 2000s, or god forbid, now?), like HBO! What if there was a video game with a scene as deep as THIS?
Yes, I have absolutely no respect for Neil Druckmann. He is an imbecile. He is an aspirational HBO viewer. A reactionary in the worst and truest sense possible. The Last of Us came with the dawn of New Prestige Television. That was vomitive, and this game is vomitive. What it stands for. What it aspires to be. The Last of Us as a narrative, as a depiction of a world, is almost brutally pointless. Like all darlings of the Obama Era the complete complacency and ignorance alongside triumphant arrogance make for surreal viewing in retrospect. How did this happen? How is this STILL HAPPENING? It's just the high production value Action Game Product shell of the time carrying a hollowed out ripoff of a pop-prestigious science fiction film 'Children of Men' with no meaningful changes on the part of its new "creators". This game is a Mad Libs act.
And the game itself is just functional. Overproduced. There's stuff to look at, hit, shoot, "STEALTH" around, whatever. It's stuff you can do elsewhere. Stuff you have done elsewhere.
If you believe that "video games" are one unified class of experience, all iterations of each other, and you like a good well produced "video game", and occasionally you'll challenge yourself with some "themes", good for you, like vegetables after your burgers, then sure, you'll love this. You've probably played it after paying for it three times. You probably have something that's got a triforce on it hanging on your wall too. I hate you. I don't consider you human.
Naughty Dog have always been an archetypal "American" studio in the worst possible sense. An organ of "tech" culture rather than pop-art. Novelty and toys giving way to, not putting themselves at the service of or being taken over by artists, but instead tech guys starting to make a tech guys idea of "OHRT". Serious "OHRT" time now guys, like the oscars (remember which movies were winning Oscars in the 2000s, or god forbid, now?), like HBO! What if there was a video game with a scene as deep as THIS?
Yes, I have absolutely no respect for Neil Druckmann. He is an imbecile. He is an aspirational HBO viewer. A reactionary in the worst and truest sense possible. The Last of Us came with the dawn of New Prestige Television. That was vomitive, and this game is vomitive. What it stands for. What it aspires to be. The Last of Us as a narrative, as a depiction of a world, is almost brutally pointless. Like all darlings of the Obama Era the complete complacency and ignorance alongside triumphant arrogance make for surreal viewing in retrospect. How did this happen? How is this STILL HAPPENING? It's just the high production value Action Game Product shell of the time carrying a hollowed out ripoff of a pop-prestigious science fiction film 'Children of Men' with no meaningful changes on the part of its new "creators". This game is a Mad Libs act.
And the game itself is just functional. Overproduced. There's stuff to look at, hit, shoot, "STEALTH" around, whatever. It's stuff you can do elsewhere. Stuff you have done elsewhere.
If you believe that "video games" are one unified class of experience, all iterations of each other, and you like a good well produced "video game", and occasionally you'll challenge yourself with some "themes", good for you, like vegetables after your burgers, then sure, you'll love this. You've probably played it after paying for it three times. You probably have something that's got a triforce on it hanging on your wall too. I hate you. I don't consider you human.
I'm very fond of this one.
I personally miss when games had a start, middle, and end. Exciting production values. A few key ideas they really wanted to show me and no room for much else. This game is very short, but it's a lot of things.
First of all, it's BRITISH. And NOT MADE BY THE SHELLSHOCK: NAM 67' devs. Many of the reviews are confused on that point. This game came from nowhere despite having a "2" and a subtitle. Those are just tools to psychologically stun gamers into a purchase-trance.
Someone at Rebellion Derby loves shoving zombies into any premise they currently have. They put zombies into Judge Dredd. They put zombies into WW2 sniping. And they put zombies into Viet-Fuckin'-Nam!
Specifically, the zombies from 28 Days and Weeks Later. This game is obviously and undeniably a result of key figures at Rebellion: Derby seeing those movies and thinking "we got this vietnam project, put em' in Vietnam, flippin' mental yeah?". And yes, it's fucking awesome.
This game sells on a very simple premise. Zombies attacking American GIs in Vietnam. You're either sold or you're not. And if that premise sells to you, you shouldn't be disappointed.
The game is criticised by others here as an "FPS". But that's myopic and silly. It's 2024. If you want a refined "fps" experience divorced from context, you have them. Plenty compete for your attention. Searching through linear narrative/premise games from 2009 for pure "FPS" is deranged. You go for linear narrative/premise games because the premise grabs you, and you hope the game front delivers on or facilitates that premise in an entertaining fashion.
And this game does. It is not an innovative or bleeding edge example of "FPS" form. But it is perfectly good enough to convey an experience of 28 Days Later zombies breaking out in Vietnam. Your movement is a bit stiff and simple, perhaps just enough to facilitate slight claustrophobia and not let you get too comfortable in moving around. Gun handling is very simple, and the guns are cool and well rendered. I'm playing a Vietnam game to see a few specific ones, and I see them and I like them. Not quite Rising Storm 2, but I'm happy.
The scenarios you play through, these are the substance of the game. This game is fast. There's always stuff happening. Characters running around and stuff exploding, or you're thrown into a spooky place and need to power through, you should never be bored by this game. Things move fast and they only have so much to show you. They probably didn't have the time or money to render anything superfluous to the core vision. Which in retrospect is great. This game is abandonware, it only costs time, and that time is dense with detail the creators obviously thought was their good stuff.
Not much to say. It's a console-ready shooter from 2009 that rides or dies on its premise. And that premise might last you 2.5 or 3 hours for one go. Personally I like shooting guns in video games, but really like when that can be integrated into something that's of interest to me, or at least novel. And really think, the "better" games from this era, are you going back to play them? Was Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare really doing anything that interesting, or was it just the sleekest at the time bleeding edge implementation of fast paced "FPS" action intended to be appreciated more in a vacuum of multiplayer than integrated into a complete experience?
For what it's worth, I somewhat regularly go back to Shellshock 2. I don't go back to any other "FPS" of its era. Perhaps that says something about where the real value in such "FPS" games might actually lie.
I personally miss when games had a start, middle, and end. Exciting production values. A few key ideas they really wanted to show me and no room for much else. This game is very short, but it's a lot of things.
First of all, it's BRITISH. And NOT MADE BY THE SHELLSHOCK: NAM 67' devs. Many of the reviews are confused on that point. This game came from nowhere despite having a "2" and a subtitle. Those are just tools to psychologically stun gamers into a purchase-trance.
Someone at Rebellion Derby loves shoving zombies into any premise they currently have. They put zombies into Judge Dredd. They put zombies into WW2 sniping. And they put zombies into Viet-Fuckin'-Nam!
Specifically, the zombies from 28 Days and Weeks Later. This game is obviously and undeniably a result of key figures at Rebellion: Derby seeing those movies and thinking "we got this vietnam project, put em' in Vietnam, flippin' mental yeah?". And yes, it's fucking awesome.
This game sells on a very simple premise. Zombies attacking American GIs in Vietnam. You're either sold or you're not. And if that premise sells to you, you shouldn't be disappointed.
The game is criticised by others here as an "FPS". But that's myopic and silly. It's 2024. If you want a refined "fps" experience divorced from context, you have them. Plenty compete for your attention. Searching through linear narrative/premise games from 2009 for pure "FPS" is deranged. You go for linear narrative/premise games because the premise grabs you, and you hope the game front delivers on or facilitates that premise in an entertaining fashion.
And this game does. It is not an innovative or bleeding edge example of "FPS" form. But it is perfectly good enough to convey an experience of 28 Days Later zombies breaking out in Vietnam. Your movement is a bit stiff and simple, perhaps just enough to facilitate slight claustrophobia and not let you get too comfortable in moving around. Gun handling is very simple, and the guns are cool and well rendered. I'm playing a Vietnam game to see a few specific ones, and I see them and I like them. Not quite Rising Storm 2, but I'm happy.
The scenarios you play through, these are the substance of the game. This game is fast. There's always stuff happening. Characters running around and stuff exploding, or you're thrown into a spooky place and need to power through, you should never be bored by this game. Things move fast and they only have so much to show you. They probably didn't have the time or money to render anything superfluous to the core vision. Which in retrospect is great. This game is abandonware, it only costs time, and that time is dense with detail the creators obviously thought was their good stuff.
Not much to say. It's a console-ready shooter from 2009 that rides or dies on its premise. And that premise might last you 2.5 or 3 hours for one go. Personally I like shooting guns in video games, but really like when that can be integrated into something that's of interest to me, or at least novel. And really think, the "better" games from this era, are you going back to play them? Was Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare really doing anything that interesting, or was it just the sleekest at the time bleeding edge implementation of fast paced "FPS" action intended to be appreciated more in a vacuum of multiplayer than integrated into a complete experience?
For what it's worth, I somewhat regularly go back to Shellshock 2. I don't go back to any other "FPS" of its era. Perhaps that says something about where the real value in such "FPS" games might actually lie.
It is what it is.
This game's pile of negative reviews are entertainingly simple. What did you people expect?
It's an RPGmaker game revolving around a few key images and a premise. Those images are of a haunted, schizotypal girl in a striking anime Japanese school girl uniform carrying a 22 rifle and wearing a chest rig full of ammunition, surrounded by bodies. She is a beautiful anime girl school shooter.
These images don't really form a literary narrative, there's a mood and an idea here. That's the whole game. If you look into the game thinking you'll anything different to or deeper than than the first image you saw you won't find it. Only iteration, through a brief monologue, a trashed home to explore, and finally a school to be attacked.
The game itself is like a drawing. Specifically it's like the (very striking) drawings which are the game's key-art pieces as viewed outside of the game (like the poster style crop used on this game's page). The game's scenario, or brief series of scenarios, are detail rich pieces of artifice which are on one level alternate attempts to convey the same things as the images. Detachment. Pop-realist detail. Brutality. Rage and tragedy.
The "game" section of this "game" can be played as such. It keeps score, rather morbidly. But it can also be simply scrutinised and taken in, like looking at an image. Admire its relatively grounded and complete depiction of a complete Japanese Middle school in the RPGmaker engine. Note that students outside are in sports uniforms, there are multiple buildings to enter, events implied to be in progress right before you arrive. The game's world tells a story, and that story is completely mundane. There is no evidence of some conspiracy to torture (and so justify) the protagonist, no greater background details beyond what we know before we begin. This is a completely ordinary depiction of an ordinary school. You are the extraordinary element. And your only potential interactions with this school are very extreme, but in their own way also extremely mundane.
You are playing as a teenage girl with guns. In typical Japanese fashion, your control scheme brings to mind a person manipulating an object, with multiple inputs required to do anything effectively. This creates a strange sense of distance between you and doing damage to people. There is no seamless feedback you are the weapon fluidity here. A gun is a hard metal object which has to be correctly manipulated to send more hard metal flying. And the protagonist herself, hunting humans is a difficult, demanding task. She (you) has to consider her movements carefully. Moving quickly is tiring and destabilising. Aiming precisely is slow and locks you down. This fiddly and never quite comfortable approach to representing a person handling a gun opens you up to jarringly plausible possible experiences. Sprinting desperately to keep up with someone can leave you open to being knocked sprawling by an adult stepping around a corner, ending the rampage on the spot.
You can violently explore the school for five minutes before the police arrive and force an ending upon you. No matter what you do your experience will be short and bad for all involved. And then the game returns you to the protagonist's demented home to start again. Different weapons can be collected and used, each feels remarkably different in its implementation and handling. And perks can be paid for which will empower you on future rampages, allowing you to attempt to kill more people. It's all ultimately the same experience. Which you can poke, mess around in, and explore the limits of to your own personal satisfaction.
I see no reason to be upset with this game. It is a depiction and exploration of a taboo subject, and an invitation to explore for yourself. I personally find the "key-art" beautiful, and am fascinated with the "game" as an attempt at evoking through novel virtual interactive scenario construction what this artist could already do brilliantly through static visual art.
If this game were made by a white person and he called it a virtual multimedia installation he would be hailed as a challenging genius. And that is an accurate description of what has happened here. This particular artist just lacks a prestigious body willing to support him. But for whatever it's worth, he has me.
Morimiya Middle School Shooting is a striking person of art and I sincerely recommend you look at it if you believe video games can be a tool for artists rather than merely "games" on a screen.
This game's pile of negative reviews are entertainingly simple. What did you people expect?
It's an RPGmaker game revolving around a few key images and a premise. Those images are of a haunted, schizotypal girl in a striking anime Japanese school girl uniform carrying a 22 rifle and wearing a chest rig full of ammunition, surrounded by bodies. She is a beautiful anime girl school shooter.
These images don't really form a literary narrative, there's a mood and an idea here. That's the whole game. If you look into the game thinking you'll anything different to or deeper than than the first image you saw you won't find it. Only iteration, through a brief monologue, a trashed home to explore, and finally a school to be attacked.
The game itself is like a drawing. Specifically it's like the (very striking) drawings which are the game's key-art pieces as viewed outside of the game (like the poster style crop used on this game's page). The game's scenario, or brief series of scenarios, are detail rich pieces of artifice which are on one level alternate attempts to convey the same things as the images. Detachment. Pop-realist detail. Brutality. Rage and tragedy.
The "game" section of this "game" can be played as such. It keeps score, rather morbidly. But it can also be simply scrutinised and taken in, like looking at an image. Admire its relatively grounded and complete depiction of a complete Japanese Middle school in the RPGmaker engine. Note that students outside are in sports uniforms, there are multiple buildings to enter, events implied to be in progress right before you arrive. The game's world tells a story, and that story is completely mundane. There is no evidence of some conspiracy to torture (and so justify) the protagonist, no greater background details beyond what we know before we begin. This is a completely ordinary depiction of an ordinary school. You are the extraordinary element. And your only potential interactions with this school are very extreme, but in their own way also extremely mundane.
You are playing as a teenage girl with guns. In typical Japanese fashion, your control scheme brings to mind a person manipulating an object, with multiple inputs required to do anything effectively. This creates a strange sense of distance between you and doing damage to people. There is no seamless feedback you are the weapon fluidity here. A gun is a hard metal object which has to be correctly manipulated to send more hard metal flying. And the protagonist herself, hunting humans is a difficult, demanding task. She (you) has to consider her movements carefully. Moving quickly is tiring and destabilising. Aiming precisely is slow and locks you down. This fiddly and never quite comfortable approach to representing a person handling a gun opens you up to jarringly plausible possible experiences. Sprinting desperately to keep up with someone can leave you open to being knocked sprawling by an adult stepping around a corner, ending the rampage on the spot.
You can violently explore the school for five minutes before the police arrive and force an ending upon you. No matter what you do your experience will be short and bad for all involved. And then the game returns you to the protagonist's demented home to start again. Different weapons can be collected and used, each feels remarkably different in its implementation and handling. And perks can be paid for which will empower you on future rampages, allowing you to attempt to kill more people. It's all ultimately the same experience. Which you can poke, mess around in, and explore the limits of to your own personal satisfaction.
I see no reason to be upset with this game. It is a depiction and exploration of a taboo subject, and an invitation to explore for yourself. I personally find the "key-art" beautiful, and am fascinated with the "game" as an attempt at evoking through novel virtual interactive scenario construction what this artist could already do brilliantly through static visual art.
If this game were made by a white person and he called it a virtual multimedia installation he would be hailed as a challenging genius. And that is an accurate description of what has happened here. This particular artist just lacks a prestigious body willing to support him. But for whatever it's worth, he has me.
Morimiya Middle School Shooting is a striking person of art and I sincerely recommend you look at it if you believe video games can be a tool for artists rather than merely "games" on a screen.
2003
Very interesting Czech game. A perhaps more than incidental detail considering this game's narrative content and perspective on the events portrayed.
Vietcong is a rare piece of pop-media that actually believes in the American cause wholeheartedly and enthusiastically and portrays the war as less of a morally compromising hell and more of a very serious problem to be dealt with by exceptional men.
This game's depiction of fighting the Vietnam War is not clean. By the standards of the time I would even call it on the bleeding edge of dirty. Bodies are bloodied where shot, screams of pain are vivid and realistic, bodies are mauled and torn apart by explosions, and death comes fast and mercilessly for you. Not quite the John Wayne experience of the war as waged, but morally, this is still your John Wayne's Vietnam War. The local villagers are being terrorised by communist thugs, and you're mostly just a guy with a rifle, with at most a few other guys on hand.
The game's credits sequence contains the words "Dedicated to all victims of the Vietnam War or Communism" (emphasis mine) . The moral framing is deliberate and to some extent informs the entire game. What you're doing, how it plays out. Czechs in the early 2000s making a video game are perhaps particularly brilliant candidates to make a new piece of pop media to shed new and unique light on this still troublesome and confusing piece of history.
The game is in my opinion easily the most interesting and worth exploring depiction of the war in a video game, but I would go further and say it's uniquely interesting among anything made about the Vietnam War. Post-Communist Czechs rooting for the Americans, but with a relatively unromanticised view of war and human nature in general (some of your teammates will scream very politically incorrect things at slain enemies).
There is no great statement about communism or human nature in this game. It's an action story. An action story in which American special forces are great people and the communists are the mean dirty indians in the hill who need to get blown up by John Wayne. Awesome.
And what an action story. This is a pretty great action game. First person shooting that feels like more than that. First person gun handling and operating. The guns are well realised and lethal, and your maneuvers and interactions with your squad feel substantial without being overwhelming. The game isn't quite SWAT4, but it does a very good job of making allied soldiers present and useful. Unique in an "FPS" game, you are a team, the team has a pointman, and that ISN'T YOU. Talk to your Vietnamese team member, Nhut, and he'll find the path ahead and walk it ahead of you. He spots traps, he calls out enemies without engaging like a moron (no hud arrows, he stops, raises a hand, and tells you they're there). Your other teammates can do various simpler functions which are useful, and beyond that will shoot, kill, and move, enough for me to consider them a respectable element of the game.
This game is lean and mean, no science fiction floating hud dots. You get a call of duty compass with directional marks, which I consider fair compensation for the slight unwieldiness of natural senses as simulated by a video game. The game is abstract and polygonal to the point that at many points you'll feel like you're in a jagged green room rather than a jungle, but this I find lends a pleasing structure and tactile physicality to the proceedings. You are not a weightless shadow in a world of detailed holograms. You are a block man in a world of blocky and jagged substance. You touch stuff with your player model and there's physical contact. I find this nice. And it creates an odd viscerality. The serious tone and setting and extreme violence and relatively precise, lethal, and well realised gun handling, paired with 2003 not quite realism polygon men. This is a balance games didn't have for long. And one that no retro revivalist movement has found value in yet. So the game is still a unique experience just worth seeing for this class of "FPS" experience on offer.
Now as for its "campaign", I played this game, to completion, on its infamous 'Vietnam' difficulty. Quicksaves are tightly limited each level in addition to fixed checkpoints, enemies are very fast to react and will often kill in one or two hits, healing quickly depletes your maximum replenishable life until the end of your current mission chain, this game on Vietnam handles more like Escape From Tarkov in the blocky jungle than anything else that comes to mind. The limited saves and shrinking life bar create a sense of lasting deprivation and loss as missions go on. This is far meaner and in some ways stranger than STALKER on Master.
At times this is off-set by squad presence, shorter missions, and more forgiving scenario layouts, other times exacerbated by sequences of events which feel absurd in their cruelty and the way more travails reveal themselves when you think you're out.
This game sends you on some errands, and it sends you on some absolute ordeals. I do not consider this a "balance" problem, or any kind of failure. I found it fascinating. The game takes place over time. Levels or "missions" are bookended by returns to base, in which you as the protagonist can look at notes written about past missions and the state of the war, and you can visit a Hitman 2 style armoury which will fill with weapons over the course of the game. What you grab here is what you will be carrying next time you head off. This can be a very important decision at a few key points.
This rhythm of tension and uncertainty punctuated by the peace of the base (which itself is subject to a couple of surprises) made for a very pleasing and surprising rhythm. I really didn't know what this game was going to do to me next. And the severity of Vietnam difficulty only amplified this effect. I'm not going to forget my experience with this game.
Playing this game, or any game on a very high "difficulty" demands some level of original meta-gaming. Learning and pushing the game's systems and possibilities further. In the case of this game, that largely meant doing things which felt more interesting and more 'Vietnam'. I spent a lot of time crawling, trying to think about where enemies would be. Nailing difficult shots. I also spent time worrying about where to optimally drop my limited quicksaves, and at a couple of key points I had to work out what absurd inhuman action would allow me to beat a particularly bizarre and effective enemy AI placement. Vietnam difficulty gave and take, but even when it perhaps undermined the flow of the Vietnam War action movie experience, it created a rather novel "FPS" puzzle for me to solve.
This game is a masterpiece of no particular thing, but a very pleasing and competent enough execution of several things which are of personal interest to me. The Vietnam War interests me, and I got that. I got the guns, the uniforms, the jungle, some of the combat dynamics, the aesthetics, the memes, it's what you expect, executed well to the standards of a hardcore 2003 PC shooter.
This game has not "aged". If these particular things interest you, it's still a recommendation. Frankly I don't think it's been done better since. And I've looked.
Vietcong is a rare piece of pop-media that actually believes in the American cause wholeheartedly and enthusiastically and portrays the war as less of a morally compromising hell and more of a very serious problem to be dealt with by exceptional men.
This game's depiction of fighting the Vietnam War is not clean. By the standards of the time I would even call it on the bleeding edge of dirty. Bodies are bloodied where shot, screams of pain are vivid and realistic, bodies are mauled and torn apart by explosions, and death comes fast and mercilessly for you. Not quite the John Wayne experience of the war as waged, but morally, this is still your John Wayne's Vietnam War. The local villagers are being terrorised by communist thugs, and you're mostly just a guy with a rifle, with at most a few other guys on hand.
The game's credits sequence contains the words "Dedicated to all victims of the Vietnam War or Communism" (emphasis mine) . The moral framing is deliberate and to some extent informs the entire game. What you're doing, how it plays out. Czechs in the early 2000s making a video game are perhaps particularly brilliant candidates to make a new piece of pop media to shed new and unique light on this still troublesome and confusing piece of history.
The game is in my opinion easily the most interesting and worth exploring depiction of the war in a video game, but I would go further and say it's uniquely interesting among anything made about the Vietnam War. Post-Communist Czechs rooting for the Americans, but with a relatively unromanticised view of war and human nature in general (some of your teammates will scream very politically incorrect things at slain enemies).
There is no great statement about communism or human nature in this game. It's an action story. An action story in which American special forces are great people and the communists are the mean dirty indians in the hill who need to get blown up by John Wayne. Awesome.
And what an action story. This is a pretty great action game. First person shooting that feels like more than that. First person gun handling and operating. The guns are well realised and lethal, and your maneuvers and interactions with your squad feel substantial without being overwhelming. The game isn't quite SWAT4, but it does a very good job of making allied soldiers present and useful. Unique in an "FPS" game, you are a team, the team has a pointman, and that ISN'T YOU. Talk to your Vietnamese team member, Nhut, and he'll find the path ahead and walk it ahead of you. He spots traps, he calls out enemies without engaging like a moron (no hud arrows, he stops, raises a hand, and tells you they're there). Your other teammates can do various simpler functions which are useful, and beyond that will shoot, kill, and move, enough for me to consider them a respectable element of the game.
This game is lean and mean, no science fiction floating hud dots. You get a call of duty compass with directional marks, which I consider fair compensation for the slight unwieldiness of natural senses as simulated by a video game. The game is abstract and polygonal to the point that at many points you'll feel like you're in a jagged green room rather than a jungle, but this I find lends a pleasing structure and tactile physicality to the proceedings. You are not a weightless shadow in a world of detailed holograms. You are a block man in a world of blocky and jagged substance. You touch stuff with your player model and there's physical contact. I find this nice. And it creates an odd viscerality. The serious tone and setting and extreme violence and relatively precise, lethal, and well realised gun handling, paired with 2003 not quite realism polygon men. This is a balance games didn't have for long. And one that no retro revivalist movement has found value in yet. So the game is still a unique experience just worth seeing for this class of "FPS" experience on offer.
Now as for its "campaign", I played this game, to completion, on its infamous 'Vietnam' difficulty. Quicksaves are tightly limited each level in addition to fixed checkpoints, enemies are very fast to react and will often kill in one or two hits, healing quickly depletes your maximum replenishable life until the end of your current mission chain, this game on Vietnam handles more like Escape From Tarkov in the blocky jungle than anything else that comes to mind. The limited saves and shrinking life bar create a sense of lasting deprivation and loss as missions go on. This is far meaner and in some ways stranger than STALKER on Master.
At times this is off-set by squad presence, shorter missions, and more forgiving scenario layouts, other times exacerbated by sequences of events which feel absurd in their cruelty and the way more travails reveal themselves when you think you're out.
This game sends you on some errands, and it sends you on some absolute ordeals. I do not consider this a "balance" problem, or any kind of failure. I found it fascinating. The game takes place over time. Levels or "missions" are bookended by returns to base, in which you as the protagonist can look at notes written about past missions and the state of the war, and you can visit a Hitman 2 style armoury which will fill with weapons over the course of the game. What you grab here is what you will be carrying next time you head off. This can be a very important decision at a few key points.
This rhythm of tension and uncertainty punctuated by the peace of the base (which itself is subject to a couple of surprises) made for a very pleasing and surprising rhythm. I really didn't know what this game was going to do to me next. And the severity of Vietnam difficulty only amplified this effect. I'm not going to forget my experience with this game.
Playing this game, or any game on a very high "difficulty" demands some level of original meta-gaming. Learning and pushing the game's systems and possibilities further. In the case of this game, that largely meant doing things which felt more interesting and more 'Vietnam'. I spent a lot of time crawling, trying to think about where enemies would be. Nailing difficult shots. I also spent time worrying about where to optimally drop my limited quicksaves, and at a couple of key points I had to work out what absurd inhuman action would allow me to beat a particularly bizarre and effective enemy AI placement. Vietnam difficulty gave and take, but even when it perhaps undermined the flow of the Vietnam War action movie experience, it created a rather novel "FPS" puzzle for me to solve.
This game is a masterpiece of no particular thing, but a very pleasing and competent enough execution of several things which are of personal interest to me. The Vietnam War interests me, and I got that. I got the guns, the uniforms, the jungle, some of the combat dynamics, the aesthetics, the memes, it's what you expect, executed well to the standards of a hardcore 2003 PC shooter.
This game has not "aged". If these particular things interest you, it's still a recommendation. Frankly I don't think it's been done better since. And I've looked.