Tunnel Rats: 1968

Tunnel Rats: 1968
If you think Uwe Boll's movies are bad, wait until you see this.
Genre(s): First-Person Shooter Survival Horror Platform(s): Microsoft Windows Release: May 15, 2009 Developer(s): Replay Studios Publisher(s): Boll AG Series: Tunnel Rats

Tunnel Rats: 1968 (also simply known as Tunnel Rats) is a first-person shooter video game developed by Replay Studios and published by Uwe Boll under the name Boll AG on May 15, 2009. It serves as a direct video-game tie-in to the critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful movie of the same name directed by Boll. It was released on Microsoft Windows-based computers, and an Xbox 360 version was planned, but cancelled. This game, along with Velvet Assassin, are considered the final nails in the company's coffin and also one of the worst FPS games of all-time if not one of the worst games of all-time. A port for the Xbox 360 was planned but was cancelled for unknown reasons.

Plot

Brooks is an American G.I. serving in the Vietnam War who is sent on a mission to clear the Vietcong tunnels. However, his helicopter is shot down, leaving Brooks stranded in the jungle as the only surviving member of his platoon. Brooks is forced to fight the war alone and neutralize the situation there.

Gameplay

The game consists of 8 levels, each of which consists in dismantling mines so that they do not explode and eliminating opponents. The player goes underground wherever there are mines, often passing through tight tunnels as well as going outside. It's actually the whole game.

Why It Sucks

1. The menu looks incredibly cheaply made, and while the controls are plentiful, the same cannot be said for the graphics or audio settings.
2. The voice acting is terrible to the point that you get the impression that it was literally recorded in an old dirty and smelly basement, and literally none of the actors come from the movie, but rather they sound like random people picked somewhere from the street. It's really hard to find worse voice acting than this.
3. The main character, Brooks, is very foul-mouthed, deranged and racist. He never shuts up and will repeat the same quotes over and over, which makes him irritating very quickly on frustrating or boring missions.
4. Horrendous graphics and textures for a game that was released in 2009 (the same year as titles such as Assassin's Creed II, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Halo 3: ODST, Uncharted 2 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009)) making the game look like a low budget Original Xbox, PlayStation 2, GameCube or Dreamcast game, with plastic looking weapons and character models. The game looks like it was released in 2000 at the best. It's just as bad as Turning Point: Fall of Liberty
5. Terrible optimization with frequent frame-rate drops because it can drop to as low as 15fps, which at times makes the game absolutely unplayable, especially on the hardware created when the game was released.
6. The enemy AI is incredibly stupid as it tries to shoot at the enemy but doesn't look for a better shooting position it just stands still and blindly fires, sometimes not even noticing the player as if they weren't there at all. For this reason, they are incredibly easy to eliminate because they often miss even if the player is only slightly covered. The worst AI, however, have the cutthroats in the tunnels because they do not approach the player at all when they notice them, and when the player moves away, they forget about him as if he was not there.
7. Some of the worst level designs you'll find in a first person shooter, just 8 levels literally all of which look pretty much the same.
8. Despite the fact that the game has countless weapons, you can only carry 3 weapons with you, literally like in Wolfenstein 3D which came out 17 years earlier, which is totally unforgivable.
9. The game literally looks unfinished because it has so many bugs and shortcomings that you could write multi-volume novels about them, for example, the player can pass through walls so that he can, for example, get to other rooms faster or escape off the map very easily. Sometimes enemy corpses also appear out of nowhere and disappear when the player gets close or far away, not to mention grenades don't explode at all when the player dies and the game also crashes very often.
10. The game is very short, as you can finish all of the eight levels in less than 4 hours because all of these levels can be beaten in only 30 minutes.
11. Non-existent physics, meaning you can easily scale up super-steep hills just by walking along it, in the same style as the horses in Skyrim.
12. The plot is incredibly simplistic compared to the movie, because basically a generic soldier is just the sole survivor of a helicopter crash in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. There is absolutely no information about the character or any development of the plot in the form of cutscenes or anything else, just boring voice actors that quickly become annoying.
13. To heal yourself, you must cut off the enemies ears. And if that wasn't gross enough, you must locate a very specific point on the ears to cut them, making it a tedious task.
14. The Steam header is literally just the movie's DVD cover in landscape mode and with a really shoddy Photoshop job!
15. The gameplay is incredibly boring, repetitive and schematic because it literally just consists of going underground, dismantling all mines and shooting enemies, and then exiting the underground and so on. This is what all the levels are about, they are so repetitive that you can even get the impression that you are going through the same level all the time.

Redeeming Qualities

1. The idea of making a psychological first-person shooter based on the original movie was great, but poorly executed.
2. The game's soundtrack is decent, although it doesn't save the game anyway.

Reception

The game was met with generally unfavorable reviews, receiving criticism for its poor writing and voice acting, the annoying voice lines of the protagonist, monotonous tunnel environments and an excessive use of booby traps as a mechanic, particularly the extreme precision required in order to disarm traps, inaccurate gun sights, dated graphics, and its extremely short length. Reviewers also noted several major bugs, such as grenades ceasing to function if the player dies, and the ability for the player to clip into inescapable areas of a map not usually accessible.

GameSpot criticized the portrayal of the player character Brooks as a stranded U.S. soldier with "clumsy and inconsistent" writing and voice acting. The ability to gain health by removing the ears from the corpses of Vietnamese soldiers was considered to be both in poor taste and frustrating, citing a need to locate an exact point on the ear in order to collect it.

IGN gave the game a 38 out of ten, saying that "The action is predictable, the visuals are merely passable, and the main hero is such a jumble of hate and regret that it's impossible to ever really care if he makes it out of the jungle alive. Spare yourself instead and pass on this one".

Rock Paper Shotgun opened its review by acknowledging Uwe Boll's reputation for directing poorly-received film adaptations of video game franchises, and that Tunnel Rats was "excruciatingly, bewilderingly bad"; due to bugs, the reviewer was unable to make it past the second level. GamesRadar similarly criticized the game for being a "nauseating mess from start to finish", but jokingly claimed the game itself was better than Uwe Boll's films.

Tunnel Rats holds an aggregate score of 30/100 on Metacritic based on 7 reviews and an user score of only 3.4 out of 10. The game is considered as one of the worst games of the year and compared to Stalin vs Martians and also one of the worst FPS games of all-time and even one of the worst games of all-time.

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