As anyone who has seen Stanley Kubrick’s harrowing Full Metal Jacket and Oliver Stone’s gritty Platoon will know, Vietnam circa late 1960s was not a great place to be for a variety of reasons. You can argue the political rights and wrongs until you are blue in the face and it’s highly likely that your parents can recall wearing tie-dye t-shirts and holding placards up with peace symbols on them at the time, but it happened and as a result makes ideal videogame fodder.

Shellshock 2, UK-based developer Rebellion’s first bayonet stab at a next-generation game, takes this setting and puts a different skew on it, moving it away from the gritty realism of war and towards a harrowing horror experience. Having lost a secret cargo of a drug called White Knight over dense jungle, the team sent into find it never make it back to base. One eventually turns up and starts exhibiting rather curious behaviour, which is particularly unfortunate for young army chap Nate Walker as it happens to be his brother Cal. Suddenly, Cal escapes his quarantine unit and runs off to start a killing spree, at which point sibling instincts kick in and Nate dashes off in pursuit.

It’d be easy to pause at this moment and imagine that Shellshock 2 would probably play out much like you’d expect your average war shooter to, yet it’s a pleasant surprise to find that it actually does try to do something a little different in terms of atmosphere and story. As you set off after your brother you become aware that there are other things happening behind the scenes that are rather suspicious, and throughout it remains an interesting, well-thought out tale. Possessed infected soldiers fly at you from all angles, you meet and lose friends and comrades and throughout you begin to realise that whatever happens, there can be no happy way out of the situation.

The game itself is solid enough too, presenting a good challenge for fans of the genre. At hand you have a decent selection of weaponry (the rocket launcher is brilliant fun and sends enemies flying), whilst the levels are varied and have you running and gunning in prisoner of war camps, dense jungle and deserted villages amongst others. It really sells the claustrophobic, one-man-against-all-odds tone nicely, and it provides enough variety to keep your interest peaked along the way.

Of course, it’s not a perfect game with the odd texture being a little rough around the edges here and there, whilst on occasion it feels slightly linear. Then again, linearity is not such a bad thing when it weaves around and interesting plot and so you can quite easily forgive and forget. It’s a solid, interesting shooter that frequently makes the player aware of his character’s plight but never takes liberties by stacking the odds unfairly against him. Enemy placement, checkpointing and ammo pickups are well judged and help smooth progress even further.

It all ends up being a rather enjoyable experience to play through, with the audio side of things holding its end up and, awesomely, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s epic Freebird backing the credits. As you continue your descent into Nate’s personal nightmare you go through some particularly brutal, utterly bleak situations that really leave their mark on you, and with this all married together with the above it makes for an entertaining first-person shooting game.

It’s not the greatest FPS ever, of course, but then it never had any pretensions that it was going to be. As a slice of entertainment that tries to put a different slant on the war shooter genre, though, Shellshock 2 provides a solid, enjoyable game, which at the end of the day is more than enough for the majority of gamers.