Sometimes, a game's name can tell you everything you need to know about it. Driver, for example is a game about driving cars; Microsoft Flight Simulator is all about flying a plane, and Bodycount - well - it's exactly as it sounds too. Bodycount is Codemasters' latest contender to the generic first person shooter crown - a title that has plenty of other competition, in a market that's heavily saturated - and that seems to wear it's generic-ness like a badge of honour.
Things don't exactly get off to the best of starts. Presented with a generic African cityscape, and with the only colour on your TV being a dull shade of brown, Bodycount looks like any other modern-day first person shooter out there. So far, so dull - and then you try to look around. Push the right analogue stick, and there's a good second long pause before anything happens, which you make a mental note to try not to get annoyed about, because you know it's the sort of thing that could cause plenty of problems later.
Brown - it's the new grey.
With little attempt at a storyline, there's little to make Bodycount stand out from the crowd, too - you wouldn't believe they'd hired two professional writers to come up with this one. All we know is that you work for the Network, who... well, we're not entirely sure what they do. They go places, they shoot things, and seemingly have free reign to interject in complex situations with the power of the gun. A bit like the Americans, then. The game begins with you crashing your space age drop pod into this African country, apparently on the brink of a civil war after peace talks had broken down, to, er, maintain the peace. As the American voice over woman tells you "No one else is coming. Just the network. Just us. We'll have to get the two sides talking." How do we do that? By blasting anyone who comes near us, regardless of what side they're on, apparently. As a game in 2011, it's also more than a little bit shameful that Bodycount has no subtitles - although to be honest, you're probably not missing out on much, anyway.
The whole aim of the game, putting the "storyline" to one side, is to get as many "Skillshots" as you can. An arcade shooter at heart, Bodycount so desperately wants to be fun. Skillshots are awarded whenever you kill an enemy in a specific way. Get a headshot, and you'll earn a Skillshot; shoot an enemy from behind - Skillshot; with a grenade - Skillshot. You get the idea. Link the kills together, and you'll build up a multiplier, which is serves absolutely no use, bar giving you a grade at the end of the level, and earning you an achievement if you reach a 25x multiplier. Should you kill an enemy in any way other than with a Skillshot - which is quite easy, taking into account the strange lag on the aiming, which makes any sort of precision tricky - you'll lose your multiplier - but seeing as it doesn't actually count for anything, it's not that big a problem.
Explosions, eh? That's a skillshot.
Moving further through the level, a voice over tells you "Intel charges the OSB". "Oh good", you think to yourself, "... what's the OSB?" This is another problem with Bodycount, in that it presumes you know too much. Things that need explanation get passed over. It'd be nice, for example, to have a list of the available Skillshots, or at least a few examples of how you're meant to get them. Perhaps even a list with clues, that only show the explicit description of what you have to do after you've unlocked them, to encourage experimentation while not leaving you to feel out of your depth. Instead, nope, you get nothing - but there's likely a reason for that. The problem is, Bodycount hasn't got enough Skillshots to actually warrant a description. You can probably count them on two hands. Headshots, mines, grenades, from behind, through cover, zombie, and combinations of the previously listed. There's no need to really experiment with things, because there are so few Skillshots available. Like most of Bodycount, it's an idea that hasn't really been taken far enough.
Another idea that hasn't really gone far enough is the destructible environments. Basically, these let you blow holes through walls, shoot your way through stacks of wood, and generally attempt to turn the battlefield into a place where you're never safe, and your cover is merely a few bullets away from its inevitable doom. And again, it sounds like a great idea, but in the game, it simply doesn't work. Very few things are actually destructible - the edges of doors being one, and certain panels on shanty houses another - meaning that far from being able to take your enemy out without even seeing them, it's something that you'll rarely ever use to a strategic advantage, as it's instead relegated to the realms of mildly impressive, when your bullets make part of a pillar crumble.
As you progress through the game, the environments do start to change, and eventually Bodycount shows a few highlights of what the game could have been. The fancy, sci-fi inspired base of the Network's arch enemies, who all, for some reason, dress like extras in a Cheryl Cole video show a lot more personality, and actually seem fully destructible, which make you realise how much better the destructible environments could have been, while later levels, set in Asia, and Europe, are certainly easy on the eyes - it's just a shame the gameplay can't live up to it.
We gotta fight (fight) fight (fight) fight for this love!
Bodycount, at most times, is an utter rollercoaster of a game. Every time it tries to show you some innovation and personality, it's smacked down again with a design decision that's so utterly stupid, you wonder if they actually ever planned on anyone playing the game. A case in point comes on the fourth level. Here, you have to defuse some bombs, which are attached to the wall of a building on the corner of a street. Nothing too complex here - simply walk up to the wall the bomb's planted on, and press X, then stand around for a while as the timer ticks down. Only it's not that easy - with you standing in the middle of nowhere, completely exposed to all the buildings around, with a few sandbags as your cover, the game decides it'd be a great idea to throw tens of enemies at you - and you have nowhere to hide. With the enemies suddenly swarming out of every door, running up to every window, and coming round every corner, you'll find yourself over run in a few seconds, and, seeing as there's only one of you, and you can only take out one person at a time, you'll find yourself turning into a bullet pin-cushion quicker than you can say "CODEMASTERS. WHY DID YOU DO THIS!" It's not just a one time thing, either - someone, somewhere at Codemasters thought throwing enemies at you without giving you anywhere to hide was a great idea, as the idea's repeated on later levels. Luckily, most enemies die quickly, but the one - a sort of tank type baddie, who just keeps coming, no matter what you throw at him, killed us each and every time, until we eventually watched for him, and threw our entire explosive inventory at him the second he showed up.
Another big problem with Bodycount is that, for reasons known only to Codemasters, it's nigh on impossible to tell when you're about to die. Far from turning the entire screen red or grey, and drastically altering the sound, Bodycount instead simply gives a faint red tint to the extreme edges of the screen, and then, if you're lucky, will occasionally play the sound of a beating heart - against a backdrop of explosions and destruction. You'll be lucky if you notice - but if you don't, you're dead.
I believe I can fly...
Sadly, for every time Bodycount feels like it's starting to get somewhere, it pulls the rug out from under your feet, and gives you something else to pull your hair out about. It has boss fights, in which the bosses can kill you in one hit. When you hold the left trigger to aim, you can't move, for reasons known only to Codemasters. Instead, you stand with your feet glued to the spot, leaning from side to side like you're in a cheap knock off of the Matrix. What we have here is a game that encourages you to get headshots, then makes it hard to aim; a game that encourages getting a high score, but then doesn't even include a leaderboard (bar one for your friends, if they've played it, which seems to only be accessible at the end of a level). There's no split screen, a pitiful multiplayer mode, melee kills take several seconds while you gun slowly slides towards the bottom of the screen, before you pull your knife out - the list goes on. On the plus side, it does have nice menu sound effects, though.
In all, Bodycount feels like a game that was sent out into the public eye well before it was ready. Had it been held back until next June or July, and launched at the start of the quiet summer period, with proper split-screen co-op, and the few strange decisions addressed, this would have done a lot better. It's not all bad, and if you like shooters, there's enough to blast through here - but there's more than enough to put you off playing. In the state it's in now, sadly, Bodycount is a missed opportunity.
Format Reviewed: Xbox 360
