Uwe Boll has surpassed himself this time. Not only he did a crappy film that was simply a budget rip-off of Platoon, but took the unexpected decision to invert the usual game-movie direction his filmography is known for and produce a game based on his own movie. Usually movie tie-in video games are bad. Like, really bad, doing no justice to the source material. In this case the movie is so bad the game would probably be equally crappy, doing it justice, don't you think? WRONG. The game is even worse. This is probably the worst game I have played in my whole life.
Replay Studios created this game shortly after releasing the heavily flawed but IMO still interesting Velvet Assassin. A few months later the studio filed for insolvency and closed. I'm no longer surprised by this after having played their latest creation, and maybe it was the best for mankind.
You play as an american soldier who's in Vietnam trying to kill lots of commie bastards. Nothing new here, except you are supposed to be what they called a tunnel rat, one of the soldiers in charge of traversing the tunnels excavated by those commie bastards. Well, at least that's what I suppose, because you simply start in the middle of a battlefield after "something" has happened and, as the main character explains, everyone around you has killed everyone else. Makes sense. Then you start moving and your only way to escape from those commie bastards is through some ridiculously long tunnels. So if you're not a tunnel rat, you're probably the least lucky soldier history has ever seen. Damn commie bastards.
Soon you will find some standard weapons to start killing commie bastards, like a revolver or an AK47... well, they look standard, but they must be all cheap rip-offs, because they are absolute crap and have no accuracy. You may have the whole reticle onto a commie bastard, shoot and see the bullet hit one meter away. And if you are thinking about using the iron sights, think twice: with the exception of the sniper rifle, accuracy doesn't get any better, and on top of that you have to deal with an enormous weapon obscuring half of your view. As a result, burst fire weapons are the only really useful ones, giving you more chances to hit your target. Though I should also point out that the shotgun seems to be a secret weapon created by some commie bastard, as it does the same damage in point-blank range and from a hundred meters. Oh, and you can use a flamethrower to fry some commie bastards. Except it gets stuck everytime you use it and the fire never stops coming from the place you fired from. And also most of the time the game bugs and you can't attack with any weapon after using it a few times. No, you can't even melee any commie bastard or pick up other weapons. Don't be surprised, this doesn't happen only with that weapon, grenades also bug all the time, not allowing you to even select them.
Speaking of grenades, you find plenty of them set as booby traps by those commie bastards. Sometimes you can evade them, but most of the time you have to disable them through a dull minigame in which you must stop a marker onto a green zone. Yes, the minigame is also bugged, as sometimes you stop the marker onto the green zone and the trap still hurts you. Or you may even do nothing and the minigame will automatically fail as it starts. Some of these traps also point out that those commie bastards have real magicians among them, with devices that are somehow floating in midair in the middle of the jungle. Although most of these traps are found in those dull, same looking tunnels this game is filled with. Occassionally you find a small room with a bunch of commie bastards, a couple of beds and maybe a portrait of that big bastard commie of Ho Chi Minh. But that's it, most of the game is spent looking at the floor searching for booby traps while you traverse a brown corridor. A water trap happens every once in a while, triggering an extremely dramatic music for something you always survive in mere seconds by simply keeping going on through the same tunnel.
You may also get outside for a while in most levels, but things don't fare much better here. The jungle looks terrible, with blocky components and low res textures that all look the same. Water is even worse, as it's simply a plain texture with no transparency or effect of any kind. You even make the same "solid ground" noise when you walk through it. The only difference is that the commie bastards get buried under that texture when they die, making almost impossible to find the ammo they drop. You may also see some sections of terrain that are completely dark though they are in plain sight and sunlight should clearly reach them. Or empty space between two wall sections. Or you may find an invisible wall in the middle of a prairie. Or the scenery will turn invisible after you climb down a ladder. Who knows what those commie bastards are capable of. Moreover, it looks like those commie bastards like to fight in a floating section of terrain under a square sky with compression artifacts. There is no background of any kind and in some levels you can even get to higher ground and see the terrain limits where the emptiness begins. Heck, you can even jump onto some obstacles and get into that empty space, letting you traverse the whole level that way. At least this way you spend less time with the game and the commie bastards.
Not that this game can be defined as lengthy. This is a single player only game with 8 completely linear levels of commie bastard killing that last between 10 and 25 minutes, topping it with a truly awful ending. And it costs 20 €. That's the definition of outright theft in my dictionary. Oh, wait, there are optional objectives and commie bastards' documents (sort of a collectible) in order to give you a reason to replay levels. Except they forgot to tell you at the end of each level if you found all of them. You are simply told how many documents or optional objectives you found, with no clue at any point of how many were actually available through the whole level. Those commie bastards, always hiding everything.
Maybe we should now talk about your enemies. Commie bastard clones are at the order of the day, with two flavors: male and female. Don't worry, they are all equally incompetent. Usually they will just stand near to where you found them simply shooting at you until you kill them. Or maybe next to some kind of cover, but with their head always popping out. Or at the exit of a tunnel just doing nothing while you shoot them in their commie bastard legs from a distance. You can throw a grenade at them and they won't even care. That's why your character hates those commie bastards so much and likes to cut off their ears as trophies (even from the beheaded ones). Yeah, I know, it's gross, and your character aknowledges that, but he continues doing it anyway. Because those commies are real bastards, I guess. You can also collect dog tags from other american soldiers you find, and both collectables only serve to raise your max health. In fact, you probably have already maxed it out before finishing the second level, so yeah, ultra important component of the gameplay.
But your character not only has to deal with commie bastards. He also has to deal with his inner demons: he has some kind of trauma caused by going hunting with his father instead of paying more attention to his girlfriend. Or something like that. I don't really know what the hell they were trying to tell through all that laughable dialogue and overplayed voice acting. Only thing I know for sure is how despicable he is, how much he likes to say "commie bastards" and how much my mental health has been damaged by this abomination of a game. FRIGGIN COMMIE BASTARDS.