The Hell In Vietnam

This week has been dedicated to shooter games, and the next in line for today is “The Hell In Vietnam”, where the player takes the role of a lieutenant from the American army and has to go through eight missions, full of adventures and plenty of objectives to achieve. To my knowledge, this is the first detailed review for this game on the web, so enjoy your reading.

The game story follows the memories of the fictional character of Col. Thomas "Deadeye" Coburn, from 1982, who remembers the training in Recondo, where the troopers were sent to acquire various points and to gain access to certain areas.

The war not just like the ones the soldiers were used to, the enemy was faceless, and without identity. The entire territory of the Vietnam was acting like the enemy against the American soldiers, and they learned some “rules of that world” while they were fighting for survival. It amuses me how Col. Coburn complains about the enemy who was nowhere and everywhere at the same time and that it was a hostile environment… Well, “Jack-of-all-trades”, you weren’t exactly fighting for your country, you were invading a foreign territory… What did you expect? Flowers and kisses from some Vietnamese girls? This shows exactly how ignorant and ridiculous was the way of thinking of the soldiers – but they are not exactly to be blamed – they were following orders.

Among the game’s features, the gamer will take part in a bloody conflict, the levels being organized into 8 missions, and there are presented detailed models of weapons from the US Army from 1967, with realistic uniforms, and good audio effects.

Game Trailer

The levels start with the first mission, “Baptism of Fire”, where you will have to clear out the path and shoot some “gooks” as the soldiers call the Vietnamese soldiers. Next, you will spend a “Day In The Country” side, in a village where there are soldiers but also villagers with machine guns who are waiting in the corners where you would least expect. This is where the mission gets interesting as you will have to place some explosives into key points in order to move on.

In the “Highway Patrol” you will have to place explosives again on the road to destroy a military vehicles convoy. After you destroy some big guns as well, you will go “Down by the River” with a military boat, and you will take charge of a big machine-gun turret, in order to bring down any military vehicle of the enemy showing up on the both sides of the river.

In the “Battle of the Hue” and also in “Buddha’s Smile” you will delve even deeper into the land of the enemy, and the artillery choices will vary and new items will be added, like the sniper rifle and the rocket launcher. You will notice however, that even if the game has just been released and it uses a new engine without having to “borrow” others like Unreal Engine, the graphics are not exactly state of the art – moreover they look like in the games of a few years ago. But this is not entirely a bad thing, as the game will run very smoothly on any decent or below standard computer configuration for Windows XP, so Vista-ready computers will definitely be able to run it very well.

In the “Fields of Destruction” you even get the chance to operate one of those machine guns attached to a helicopter of the US Army Forces, and you will gun down walking enemies or military vehicles in motion. On “The Journey Home” you will find yourself alone against a handful of “gooks”, an you will shoot left, right, up and down for every inch of the path towards the helicopter that comes to rescue you – if you don’t start feeling like Rambo by now, then you didn’t really understand the message of the game. With a bit of luck and some extra dodging you will make it safely to the place where you will be picked up.

The sound in the game tends to be very realistic and the music does seem to express the state of the action when you reach the battle grounds. The gun sounds have been really well implemented and I don’t recommend playing the game with headphones at max volume.

Digitainment mark: 5 out of 10 (outdated graphics!)
Producer/Developer: City-Interactive
Demo and other goodies from the official website page

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