Vietnam Black Ops

Vietnam: Black Ops is a game developed by Rise Software in 2003 and published by ValuSoft. In the year that games like Rise Of Nations, Max Payne 2, Halo(on pc) and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City were released.

What you probably already expect from reading by which company it has been published is that it makes no chance against any of those titles, which in fact is true. The games mentioned before, of which I even left out Call Of Duty, are true classics which are still played until this day, some of which most gamers say that they’re the best games they’ve played in their entire life.

Vietnam Black Ops is a standard first person shooter, you’ll enter a level and have to shoot your way to the exit, nothing more, nothing less. The game doesn’t contain any puzzles or anything else to break away from its repetition. There’s also no multiplayer, so after playing through all the missions (9 according to the box), you probably won’t get back to it.

As you begin the game , you start out as a POW(or Prisoner Of War, in case you didn’t know). There is some fighting outside and the wall of your prison gets blown up, in the chaos you’ll have to find a gun and from that point onward you’re pretty much only trying to escape. So I wouldn’t expect a deep story or anything, you don’t even get to know anything about your own character.

Let’s talk about the graphics, as you might already think, they’re bad. There are very little round objects even tree stumps and fallen trees are have edges, just like in ValuSoft’s other game CIA Operative(review seen on this website). All enemies look the same, they’re all wearing black clothes and a traditional Vietnamese hat. You do get to play in different environments like jungles, ruins and tunnels, stopping the game from getting extremely tedious. Furthermore, the enemies have only got a few death-animations. The only few things that are pretty decent are the artwork(which is something ValuSoft often does alright) and the guns, which are done pretty good actually, even though they’re hanging in an impossible way in front of your character. The effects in the game are, on the other hand, done rather poorly, like smoke looks like it was some stock animation and is placed in the weirdest spots, like in a wall. The other effects all feel like they were rushed or just simple stock animation.

The enemy AI is stupid as well, when they see you they just stand still and fire, pretty much functioning as gun fodder. They pretty much only move when you run into another room and they’re unable to hit, which they don’t really do anyway. This bad AI, makes the game incredibly easy. Now, of course you could select a harder difficulty but that only means that with every hit your health drops a little bit more and when you get in parts where you’re getting shot at by an enemy sniper, this could lead to frustration.

Another thing I’d like to mention are the controls, this is a point where some big mistakes have been made. I’d also advice you to remap the keys anyhow, since they aren’t the same as most shooters and people usually like to play with the WSAD-keys instead of the arrow-buttons. Another problem is that the menu screen is awkward and at times badly coded, for example the “Quit” button is broken, you can’t exit the game like you’re supposed to, instead you have to Ctrl-Alt-Del yourself out. And to navigate through the menu you have to select a button with your mouse by hovering over it and then press Enter, which is rather inconvenient. But what sucks most is that your mouse buttons aren’t being used in the standard settings, you have to go to the menu and bind them to certain actions. Why you wouldn’t want the left mouse button as your standard firing button is beyond me, but the developers somehow thought that Ctrl was a better firing button. And another thing is that the game doesn’t save any of your settings, my resolution and keyboard settings got reset every time I started the game.

The sound in this game is pretty good, even though there is no background music in the game. The sound effects of guns and other things sound pretty realistic. The only music in this game, are the menu screen song, which is surprisingly good and the game over screen, which is just those trumpets playing.

A thing that really bothered me was the fact that the game lagged a lot in some of the weirdest spots, like a waterfall and what made it even worse was that I had to time my jumps on platforms(which you’ll encounter in various levels if you have the patience). And the fact that I had 32 times as much RAM than needed, didn’t help. And checking the other requirements of this game made me realize that it certainly wasn’t my computer causing the problem, so it must be bad coding or a glitch of some sort.

All in all, you could say that this game is bad, but if you’re looking for a simple shooter, just to break away from your favorite ones. I guess you could buy this game, since ValuSoft’s games are sold at extremely low prices(most below $5), even though you’d probably only play for a couple of hours and then get tired of it and throw it in your cupboard, in which it’ll collect dust.