Out of the blue comes news from Eidos that we’ll be getting a sequel to Shellshock: Nam’ 67, the craptacular third person Vietnam shooter, in the form of Shellshock 2: Blood Trails. Evidently word got to the good people at Eidos and Rebellion, the new development team putting out Shellshock 2, that the first game was a dissapointing piece of crap and so they’ve made the new one have absolutely nothing to do with it. The original was supposed to be a gritty, down to earth war game. The sequel is a horror driven FPS featuring crazed soldiers and “brutal and twisted” gameplay that will be released by the end of the year on the 360, PC and PS3.

The story will revolve around a top secret consignment known as “Whiteknight” accidentally dropping into the Vietnam jungle. In accordance with how the US does things, elite troops are sent in to get it back but never return. That is until one month later when one of them appears out of nowhere deranged and insane. Whatever got to him starts to infect the rest of the military base and you’ve gotta put a stop to it or the US will lose the war… wait, the US did lose the war. Ummmm… you’ve gotta put a stop to it or die! The producers are giving the game a bit of a survival horror slant, saying that “Shellshock 2 is very different to any first person shooter you’ve seen before; at times it feels more like you’re in a horror movie than a game.”

I gotta say I never really saw the horror zombie genre and the Vietnam War genre coming together in videogames and the strange political commentary going on in the video feels a little out of place. One wonders how many “metaphors” they’re going to be trying to cram into this game and how much “serious” action is going to take place. The appearance of a solider flat out shooting someone in the head followed by a zombie attack in the trailer is an odd contradiction of two very different styles of games. Then again so is playing “Freebird” over the whole thing.