Tunnel Rats: 1968 is a first-person shooter video game developed by Replay Studios as a tie-in for the Uwe Boll film 1968 Tunnel Rats. It was released for Microsoft Windows in 2009. According to an interview with Uwe Boll, the game was meant to be released on the Xbox 360,[1] but it ultimately has never had an official retail release, and the only digital distribution store that offers the game is Steam. The story takes place after the movie's events as the player character attempts to find the original crew from the film.
Brooks, an American G.I. serving in the Vietnam War, is sent on a mission to clear enemy-controlled tunnels. However, his helicopter is shot down over enemy territory, leaving Brooks stranded in the jungle as the only surviving member of his platoon.[2][3][4]
Tunnel Rats Game
Tunnel Rats: 1968 is a first-person shooter with seven levels.[3] Booby traps, such as tripwire grenades and trap doors, are located throughout the game world; trap doors are disarmed by locating an actionable point used to deactivate them. Tripwires are disarmed in a minigame where the player must stop a sliding bar within a specified zone; stopping within a narrower target also allows the player to collect the grenade that was part of the mechanism.[4][2] "Trophies", including dog tags from fallen G.I.s, and ears from the corpses of Vietnamese soldiers, can be collected to increase Brooks' health.[4][2]
GameSpot felt that Tunnel Rats had "clumsy and inconsistent" writing and voice acting, and criticized the characterization of Brooks for making him "one of the least sympathetic heroes you'll ever play as", describing him as "a cruel, foul-mouthed jerk who is often deranged but never witty. He is apparently supposed to be on a character arc that sends him to the cusp of madness, but in reality he's insane from the start." These criticisms also cited the frequent use of inner monologues to advance the game's story. The mechanic of collecting ears from dead Vietnamese soldiers was considered to be in bad taste due to Brooks' personality, and his spoken remarks when doing so. The game's environments, particularly tunnels, were considered to be monotonous and dated-looking, while the guns' iron sights were criticized for being inaccurate in comparison to the normal on-screen crosshairs. The game was also criticized for its bugs, short length, and the high level of precision required to collect trophies and disarm traps in the environment. Giving the game a 2.5 out of 10, GameSpot argued that Tunnel Rats "seems to have a strange notion of what constitutes 'fun.' Does anyone enjoy searching for booby traps in repetitive, brown tunnels or listening to a psychotic man-child rant about his father?"[2]
Rock Paper Shotgun opened its review by acknowledging Uwe Boll's reputation for poorly-received film adaptations of video game franchises. Noting that it featured the typical "motifs" of his works (such as poor dialogue and an abundance of caves), Tunnel Rats was described as being "excruciatingly, bewilderingly bad, such that the predominant thought while playing was: How? How is it possible to make a game this egregiously bad, one that so fundamentally doesn't understand even the basics of what a game is meant to be." The game was criticized for its writing and voice acting (which also resulted in the protagonist being characterized as "a petulant and hateful little idiot"), gameplay mechanics requiring frustrating levels of precision (including the process of disarming traps, and respectively collecting dog tags and ears from the bodies of American and Vietnamese soldiers to regain health), disproportionate amounts of fall damage from low heights, an inability to manually restart a level or save, and numerous bugs. Bugs also prevented the reviewer from completing the second level.[4] GamesRadar similarly criticized the game for being a "nauseating mess from start to finish", but jokingly felt it was better than Uwe Boll's films.[6]
Theirs is a little-known part of the high-stakes hide-and-seek game that plays out daily along the border. While much of the attention, especially lately, has been focused on walls and what happens above ground, more than 80 tunnels have been found in California and Arizona since 2011.
Some have been almost 3,000 feet long and contain tracks for motorized carts, as well as lights, elevators and ventilation. One ended underneath a house in Calexico built just to provide cover for the tunnelers.
Getting inside the Galvez Tunnel is simple by comparison. Visitors climb down 70 feet of metal ladders, installed in a concrete shaft built after the underground smuggling route was discovered. It intersects the tunnel in a spot located between the primary and secondary border fences.
Still, the hunt for a silver bullet continues. The eight border wall prototypes recently built in Otay Mesa are being tested now for their ability to, among other things, deter tunneling. Each is supposed to include sensors that will detect someone approaching the wall or trying to breach it.
Until that kind of solution arrives, investigators usually find tunnels the old-fashioned way. They patrol the border. They talk to warehouse owners and occupants and ask them to report anything unusual or suspicious.
The Tunnel Rats are part of the Drug Tunnel Task Force, which also includes representatives from Homeland Security, the Drug Enforcement Agency and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It was formed in 2003 as officials noticed that even though most drugs are driven across the border at ports of entry, hidden inside cargo trucks and other vehicles, tunnels were becoming a major player.
After a tunnel is found and cleared of smugglers, the Tunnel Rats are called in to check it for evidence and map it. They make sure the air is safe and the ground stable, and then crawl in with tape measures, compasses and lasers.
At least eight times in recent years, the Border Patrol says, newly discovered tunnels turned out to be old ones. The smugglers started in Mexico using what was already there and when they came to the concrete on the U.S. side, they dug around it.
Tunnel Rats: 1968, inspired by the movie of the same name, is the brainchild of infamous German director Uwe Boll, who has made a name for himself adapting video games into movies. A single-player first-person shooter set during the Vietnam War, Tunnel Rats attempts to express something terrible and disturbing about the horrors of war, and in a way, it succeeds. After spending an hour with the game, you'll begin to understand how terrible it is, and after two hours you'll be profoundly disturbed that you bought it. In fact, the game gives itself away from the start. "You tunnel boys like things real deep," remarks a GI during the opening cutscene, "like deep down in your own dark tunnel of the soul."
The character's voice acting is just as clumsy and inconsistent as the writing, and his inappropriate attitude is reflected throughout the game. From one perspective, Tunnel Rats deserves credit for daring to defy political correctness. However, a consequence of Tunnel Rats' zealously anti-PC approach is that it will offend just about everyone. For instance, the game's portrayal of American soldiers goes from bad (Brooks) to worse when you encounter a GI who has turned into a shrieking cannibal, and to offend the other side, your character issues a steady stream of anti-Vietnamese slurs and goes out of his way to desecrate every Vietnamese corpse. Granted, ripping the ears off of your slain enemies is optional, but since it increases your total health, only the most principled individuals will be able to abstain. In addition to the obviously poor taste of this "feature," the game makes the experience (and its less disgusting counterpart--taking dog tags from dead GIs) especially painful in two ways: first, you can't interact with just any part of the body; you have to find the right pixel to "use" in order to get the ear. Second, for each trophy you collect, you have to listen to your character's insipid, psychotic ramblings, such as, "Beats your precious stag heads, eh, Pops?"
Most of the game takes place in the tunnels, a dreary, subterranean world of endlessly repeating dirt-brown walls, one-hit-kill traps, and Viet Cong, with the occasional addition of a room, usually consisting of several boxes and a portrait of Ho Chi Minh. Navigating the tunnels can go from wearisome to downright nauseating as you spend what feels like hours staring at the floor and looking for unavoidable traps. You disarm one variety by completing pointless, irritating quick-time events and the other with the use key, but once again your cursor must be in exactly the right spot, so attempts to traverse the tunnel at greater than a snail's pace will frequently be rewarded with instant death. Easier to outwit, but equally deadly, are a handful of tunnel-dwelling snakes, who have, for all practical purposes, forged an unholy alliance with the Viet Cong. If all the instant-death obstacles aren't sufficiently frustrating, the checkpoint-only save system forces you repeatedly through the same trap-infested tunnels, unless of course you get the loading bug, in which case you'll have to restart the level entirely. Another bug will send you clipping into forbidden areas from which you can't escape, and additionally, every time you die, you lose the ability to throw grenades for the remainder of the level, so do adjust your strategy accordingly.
Aboveground sections are a welcome relief from the underground torments that make up the majority of the gameplay. Although the jungle is still full of traps, you can jump over them or avoid them entirely, and the Vietnamese enemies are more plentiful out here, so you can indulge in some typical linear shooter action (sans grenades, in all likelihood). For your aiming needs, don't bother using the iron sights; the crosshairs are much more accurate, particularly on the "commie" weapons. As for your enemies, they'll have no trouble shooting you, but that's about the most advanced tactic in their arsenal--some will even charge you with a knife as they stare down the barrel of your AK-47. Graphically, the outdoor scenes are beautiful in comparison with the tunnels, but objectively they don't come close to modern standards, most notably in the character and weapon modeling departments. Sound is likewise underwhelming throughout the game, and you may even notice that the ambient bird sounds from the jungle occasionally filter deep into the tunnels, as if to mock you. 2ff7e9595c
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