Another Uwe Boll Abomination!
Story
The whole story within Tunnel Rats is told using the main character's voice as narrative, and ugly-painted pictures as a way of presentation. It's just like games such as Mirror's Edge and InFamous, except the pictures seem dead and don't compliment the plot at all. The voice-acting from the main character in the game is really nothing special, and he says words like f**k and s**t in just about every sentence. You'll get use to it, but it's really dumb and not needed. The story itself is utter crap, and it just makes the game seem even more like a waste of time. I could go on and on about how useless the story is in Tunnet Rats, but I'd rather not. Besides, Uwe Boll has always focused more on action in the past anyways.
Gameplay
Tunnel Rats is an FPS that takes place in Vietnam, therefore, the game is a mix of action-oriented and stealth gameplay. Throughout the whole expierence, the player will be on a fixed, linear path and be placed in closed spaces, even when your in the outdoors. The game feels always very squished in terms of space, and its very easy to get stuck inbetween objects or find things such as ammo hard to reach. At the beginning of the game, all of your allied soldiers are dead and you happen to be the only survivor around. You have to conserve ammo, and survive while trying to excape North Vietnam. It's a very typical situation that we've all seen done before, but that's just a very minor complaint compared to other problems in the game. An example one of these problems is the fact that traps from the Vietnamese are lying around everywhere. You'll be facing many cheap deaths in the game due to these traps, and since the game follows a checkpoint saving method, this leads to ALOT of trial and error. Unarming these traps is tedious and boring, and since most of them are in awkward spots, there will definitely be times when you think your safe, then you walk a few steps and you find yourself dead in a spike pit. It's extremely annoying, and it seems like the developers did this just to piss off the player.
As a U.S. soldier, you will be facing Vietnamese soldiers that use guerilla tactics. This means you will have to use stealth to sneak up on soldiers and kill them. At first, you will be using just a knife in the game, and as the game progresses, you will start using a pistol and a variety of machine guns and rifles. If your wondering how the stealth plays out, it's very much like a game from the 90's. You crouch down in areas of darkness or tall grass, and try to get behind the enemy and take him out. If you played Velvet Assassin, this game is just as tedious. Thankfully though, its possible to just kill all enemies in sight with your machine gun, because if your using an AK-47, bullets are pretty easy to find. Gunplay in Tunnel Rats is pretty unpredictable and feels very unrealistic. Its takes many bullets, even from a machine gun, to kill just one enemy soldier. If you think that's bad, the hit detection is some of the worst I've ever seen too. If an enemy is standing still, bullets can easily go right through him, as if he's a ghost. If an enemy is moving, well, its pretty much impossible to even cause damage to him. Throughout the game, i found myself wasting most of my ammunition simply due to hit detection problems, and it is really a pain to put up with this non-stop.
Other major problems I faced in the game was a lack of a medium or normal difficulty setting. Easy and Hard were the only settings to choose from, and neither of these felt suitable for me. Its pure laziness for a developer to include two levels of difficulty, and exclude the one used by most players. I don't know what they were thinking, but it just makes the game seem even more low-budget than it already was. The overall gameplay in Tunnel Rats is pretty awful, and I found myself happy once the game was over. It's tedious, annoying, and feels like you've accomplished nothing once it's all over.
Presentation
Tunnel Rats: 1968, really does feel like it came out in 1968. The textures look blurry, character models look almost as bad as they were in Vietcong, all objects are lacking detail and substance, and guns simply makes the screen white everytime they flash. Yep, when you fire an AK-47 in this game, you'll have a hard time seeing where the enemy is because your monitor will be constantly flashing. I almost felt blind when I played this game in dark lighting because it seems like the game is trying to give you a seizure on purpose. This isn't even the worst part about the presentation though. The shadows in this game are. Why? Because they are non-existent! You may think the game has this graphical-feature at first, but then you'll notice that objects simply have a dark glowing light around them to represent shadows. The only shadows present in the game, are scripted and could've been painted on for all I care. It's pretty sad that a graphical feature as important as shadows aren't present in a game released in 2009. There really isn't any excuse for this.
The sound in the game is also awful, along with the music. As I mentioned earlier, the voice-acting is full of not-needed swear words, so overall, the sound is really disappointing in Tunnel Rats. The game could've got atleast more of a jungle-like atmosphere with more sounds, but I guess Uwe Boll didn't think that would help much anyways. Overall, the presentation in Tunnel Rats is outdated and easily forgettable. You can tell the developers tried to get a cinematic feel in the game, and make it seem like a movie, but it just ended up being one big failure.
Verdict
This game is one big atrocious mess. It's playable, but not in one way fun or exciting. It's just really drab and simply adds onto the amount of crap Uwe Boll has made in the past years. Avoid this game at all costs and don't ever support the developers of this game, actually, pretend this game and review never even existed.
1/5 Stars *cough*It's a piece of **** *cough*
-Anthony (Dcpc10) Be Sure to visit the Pre-Launch Blog for our upcoming site TheBigPenguin.com at:
http://theblogpenguin.wordpress.com/