Shellshock Live brings back a huge amount of personal nostalgia to me; whilst I was in middle school, me and a few friends used to camp together in the school IT room, playing a flash game by the name of Tanks – Countless hours and lunchtimes were spent between the 5 of us, blowing eachother up in thrilling, heated and often violent battles…

…And I can’t tell you enough how happy I am to see that nostalgia back, improved, and modernized for today’s gamers. Shellshock Live is an Early Access title on Steam, and is the next natural step forwards for this small, niche genre of gaming, including a small but challenging single player campaign, challenges, over 120 unique weapons with various levelled ranks equalling over 250 weapons, 8-player versus and co-op online multiplayer, and various powerups, skills, maps, environmental effects and much, much more.

In my 2 days playing Shellshock Live, I’ve dumped around 6 hours into the game and can’t put it down. Seriously; I think I have an addiction – Games are short, but have the potential to be massive, sprawling wars of accuracy and determination – The campaign being both easy to learn, but hard to master brings a new form of depth to the game, this is without even talking about the wonderful community! In nearly every match I’ve been in, I’ve had some form of tale to take away from it…Tales of love, betrayal, friendship, comedy. All of it in the midst of firing ever intuitive explosives at one another.

The multiplayer aspect of the game comes built in with a server browser, private lobby creator, and gamemode modifiers, fit for creating the perfect kind of carnage for your flavour of the week; fancy a gametype with hyper-exaggerated wind speeds? Do it. Fancy a gamemode where you only do damage by rebounding off of a pink barrier? Do it. Fancy a match where you can only use one type of weapon and kills in one hit? Go for it.

Shellshock Live, however, doesn’t come without it’s problems – One thing that I noticed immediately after joining my first multiplayer match is that there is a severe level balancing issue; if you’re level 1, and go up against a level 80 player, you’ll be annihilated simply due to the level 80 having access to more outrageously overpowered weapons that can hit you for substantially more damage than you can hope to do at level 1. Another thing to note is that whilst central to progression, the inclusion of a skill tree means that you need to focus on essential stats, such as damage or health, since you start with basic stats that are easily trumped by anything else any levelled player will have.

Despite this, however, you’ll still find fun within Shellshock Live, and whilst, yes, you’ll be annihilated repeatedly, as long as you keep joining servers close to or around your level, you’ll be grand (Especially if you play with a group of friends and go into free-for-all matches…). A final thing to mention is that to complete the campaign asap, as it helps you gain essential levels and weapons to help you stand on your own in Multiplayer.

Personally, I would happily rate Shellshock Live an 8/10 for an early access title! – Joe

My score for Shellshock Live would be a 9/10, after a long 66 hours invested into the game! – Craig

You can check out Shellshock Live here on Steam.