This is my rifle, this is my gun, this is for fighting, this is for, erm, fighting as well...

Hmm. Lots of lounging about, looking at tattered grumble mags and smoking, interspersed with ferocious bouts of activity and being bellowed at, after which you go home half-crazy and there's no hero's welcome. Still, that's enough about working on OPS2. A-ha-ha-HA.

Sorry. But to play Shellshock you need a certain sense of humour. This is a game where killing sleeping villagers isn't just condoned, it's often a direct order - where a peasant farmer with a machete constitutes enough threat to warrant blowing away his entire village with an RPG. It's unashamedly 'adult', in the sense that it's stuffed with dismembered corpses, suicide bombers, torture, hookers and more potty-talk than Full Metal Jacker's Gunnery Sergeant Harman with a gut wound. Off-days at the barracks are a chance to make boom-boom with the local mama-sans, and teammates routinely blow away 'suspected' collaborators. Hell, until recently, they were going to use severed scalps and fingers as a form of currency.

This isn't to say that it necessarily plays like an adult game. It's just an much a whizz-bang duckshoot as any Medal Of Honor, with hordes of VC pouring directly into the stream of lead every time you stroke the trigger. Unlike, say, in the real war, Charlie isn't too smart here. Once you've flanked them, heavy-machine gunners forget you exist, and a group sitting round a campfire'll barely bat an eyelid as you wipe them out with a sniper rifle.

It's forgiving stuff, with a health dynamic that works almost like a shield - retreat after taking a few hits and you'll soon be as good as new. It feels odd, like a massively speeded up version of The Getaway's rest 'n generate dynamic - but it works, somehow. Similarly, there's no blubbing over gutshot buddies - though they'll drop like a sack of meat if they stroll past a machine gun nest, two minutes rest sees them up and returning fire. Oddly, this often means there's no reason not to use them as cover, or lob a grenade into the middle as they scrap it out with Charles at point-blank range. Deal with it or don't - the game'd be practically unplayable if you had to restart every time a team member copped it. Besides, these squad-based moments are Shellshock at its best; things getting deafening with VC on all sides and lead flying like rain. Your boys might not take orders but they give good suppressing fire - it's up to you to handle the sprint/drop prone combo that's essential for taking out machine gun nests. In fact, the controls are another of Shellshock's triumphs. The logical layout makes diving prone when a gunner opens up just as instinctive as flicking to grenades when there's a bunker in sight. It's only possible to carry one rifle-sized weapon at once, adding to the tension - there's nothing worse than being caught out with an empty grenade launcher and a combat knife. If there's a tiny niggle here, it's that clicking R3 - easy to do accidentally - switches your gun to 'three-round burst', conserving ammo but making it difficult to actually kill anything. Still, you can always use the custom setup.

Of course, none of this would mean anything without atmosphere - and Shellshock delivers atmosphere like a drugged-up collaboration of Kubrick, Coppola and Stone. Charlie don't surf, but every other 'Nam cliché's packed in bodybag-tight, from the laid-back DJ spinning bluegrass at the base to the casual brutalisation of prisoners by your unit's token nutter. Chatting to the boys at the camp or capping pot-bellied pigs for a laugh - it's all there. Tunes come courtesy of Percy Sledge, Roy Orbison and The Monkees - even the intro screen's stuffed with disturbingly real photos of combat. The sole let-down are the VC themselves. Remember that heart-breaking sniper girl from the climax of Full Metal Jacket? Well, forget her. With what looks like about four character models and half a dozen shouts to pick from, the VC are just a faceless enemy to cap.

Worthy of a special mention, though, are the booby-traps - oh-so-cunningly (but never unfairly) placed, they're at just the positions you'd expect a real enemy to pick. Ville's clear and you want a Ho Chi Minh flag as a souvenir? Loot away, but watch out for pressure mines. Found a pile of ammo and medicine in the VC base? Yeah, Charles just leaves that stuff lying around, FNG. Think you can sprint up that hill under fire, huh? Sorry, son, didn't see the tripwire - you're going home in a box. They can be disarmed, but this isn't Onimusha - once you're committed, you've got a tight time window before they go off. You'd better really want to get up that trail.

The key word here is pacing. The traps stop you from sprinting through sections you know are clear, but the game pulls it off on a wider scale, too. Though the action's fundamentally the same throughout - shoot stuff, blow other stuff up - tactical variety relieves the monotony. Case in point: the Fort Missions. In the first of these you're infiltrating evil general Diem's stronghold - cue plenty of retchworthy corpses and heavily fortified positions. After the full-frontal assault there's a tense bout of room clearance, kicking in doors and lobbing grenades in one of the game's most claustrophobic moments.

Immediately after that, though, you're given the job of defending the fort - Uncle Sam wants it as an outpost, but Charles wants it back. With the roles reversed, things get much more tense as the VC mount a huge night assault against the beleaguered GIs. You might already know the fort's layout but there's only so far you can fall back, and every gun emplacement that falls makes the situation more desperate. Get the picture? After every solo mission, there's a huge team-based wing-ding, and after every slow 'n steady jungle crawl there's some sustained trigger time on the M60. The only slight downer is the stealth - with no real way of knowing what'll be spotted, the knife's almost useless and alerts are inevitable. Fortunately, these just make the mission tougher - not impossible - so it's easy to blast your way through after the alarm goes out. Besides, there are only two missions of sneaky-time, otherwise it's a straight crescendo from brief skirmishes to all-out war. You'll easily complete this game in seven hours - if you're determined - although getting medals demands more skull-fragmenting headshots than we're usually comfortable with.

Forget Shellshock's grim pretensions. With identical enemies in funny hats shouting "Die, yankee!" and the odd F-Word to liven things up, it's about as serious a look at the horrors of war as Rambo 3. It's also full of fiddly little problems and looks a bit rushed. But - and here's the key thing - none of the problems make it annoying, and all of the good bits make it great fun. It might not be as technically sound as Medal Of Honor: Rising Sun, but it's easily as atmospheric. And better yet, you know that once your tour's over you can kick back and relax. Which is more than can be said for life in the OPS2 office.

Graphics 70%
Mostly nice, but with patches of shoddiness.

Sound 80%
Top effects, too much vocal repetition.

Gameplay 80%
Pacy, varied and full of nice touches.

Lifespan 60%
Medals don't make up for a short game.

Overall 80%
A few dangling corpses don't make for a harrowing game, but there's enough atmosphere here to lift Shellshock above the norm.