Bodycount Review

Game: Bodycount

Developer: Codemasters Guildford Studio

Publisher: Codemasters

Available on: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 (Reviewed on Xbox 360)

Bodycount was a game that was on our radars for quite a while, ever since we first found out about it around a year ago, then it seemed to drop off of the face of the earth and nothing much was heard from it until around the time of E3 2011, when we got a slew of new screenshots and trailers. All of that (again) piqued our interest and so we waited for the release date to come around so we could get our hands on the apparent spiritual successor to Black.

The time has finally come and the game is out but is it everything that we were promised? Was it worth the wait?

STORY: Unfortunately, all the way through Bodycount, the story is practically non-existant. Sure, there’s one underneath all of the carnage and death that you’ll be wading through, but it’s never pushed to the forefront as it is in other games. At the start of the game you’ll get a basic introduction into what ‘The Network’ is and what their role is when it comes to events that are taking place in the world, but for the most part you’re thrown directly into the thick of the battle with just a “we’ll tell you later” plot point to indicate that something will be explained at some point down the road; which it never really is.

Playing Keepy Uppys using only bullets is a skill - I haz it.

One of the most annoying aspects of the story, which is more to do with the audio of the game than it is the actual content of the story, is that most of the time the player won’t be able to hear what’s going on if they leave their audio settings as they’re set by default. The Network agent that talks on the other end of the phone line is very quiet when it comes to telling us what’s happening, coupled with the fact that you’ll spend most of your time blowing anything you can see sky high, and you’ll begin to understand why it’s so difficult to grasp the story. If you turn the sound up to hear the story you’ll deafen yourself with the weapons and if you set the volume so that the gunfire is at a relatively normal level then you won’t be able to hear 90% of the story that’s being told to you. Whichever way you want to have it, you lose.

GRAPHICS: For the most part the visuals in Bodycount look pretty good, from a distance all of the textures and models look sharp and interesting and all of the people that you’ll encounter look as if they’ve spent a lot of time in their creator’s hands. That being said, when you get up close to things in the game world – and you will spend a lot of time being up close and personal with a lot of people and objects – that crispness of the models starts to break down and you’ll start to notice some very obvious pixelation of textures, especially shadows. As long as you stay focussed on some of the objects that are quite far off in the distance then you’ll be fine.

Another area of the game that looks quite bad is the combat menu. When you press the ‘Back’ button on the Xbox 360 controller (‘Select’ on the PlayStation 3 controller) an image is displayed that gives you a little bit of a breakdown about what’s happening right now as well as what weapons you happen to be carrying at that moment in time. This menu is one of the least interesting pieces of art within a game that I’ve seen in a long time. A lot of games use the same mechanic, press a button and the main character looks at a PDA or something to check on their objectives while on the mission, in Bodycount however, this “PDA” is just an image that’s plastered onto the screen when you press the corresponding button. No animation, no decent sound effects, it just appears – as if it’s some kind of afterthought of the developers.

The best part of the whole game when it comes down to the visuals, is the lip-syncing. There aren’t many characters whose mouth you get to watch while they’re talking but the K-8 Nemesis Widowmaker is one of those characters that you do, an enemy with a helmet, the lower half of which is see through allowing the player to see their lips move while they’re talking. The lip-syncing on this character is some of the best I’ve seen in videogames in recent years and is of a stark contrast to the quality of the rest of the visuals in Bodycount, which was shocking in itself.

Say hello to my LITTLE FRIEND!

SOUND: As I’ve already mentioned there are aspects of the sound design within Bodycount that are just baffling, for one the sound of the weapons is louder than everything else in the game, if left to the defaults, meaning that the player will often miss vital parts of the story because they just so happen to have recently launched a grenade into an area with a boiler. Other than that the rest of the sounds within the game serve their purpose without doing anything overly impressive. The sounds of the weapons are ok, they sound like relatively futuristic guns but with a baseline in the current generation, which is what you would expect if you were to see the game for the first time. This is especially true for The Target’s weapons, which, as well as sounding a little bit more futuristic than your own weapons, look a little bit more advanced too.

There is background music throughout the whole game, it’s produced to a relatively high quality, however, it loops a lot more often than most people would be happy with, often causing frustration in the person playing the game as they listen to the same piece of music for the 100th time in a single sitting.

GAMEPLAY: Despite the first part of this review being slightly negative, the gameplay aspect of Bodycount is by far the best part of the game. There are plenty of explosions throughout the campaign, some of them caused by the player and some of them scripted, but all of them are awesome. The way that the buildings (which happen to be caught in the explosion) crumble and break apart is truly breathtaking to watch, and it never gets old. You’ll eventually find yourself tossing grenades into, onto and through practically anything, just to see how it breaks apart and blows up.

Another side to the destructive quality of the environments in Bodycount is that you can use it to your advantage. Can’t find a way to get to that one particular enemy that you need to kill? Easy, just make your own way there using a couple of grenades and some good old ingenuity. You’ll have that wall down in no time and, who knows, you may take the guy down with the wall. That’s the true beauty of the destructible environments in Bodycount, it allows you to think outside of the box. If the enemy has their sights trained on the front door expecting you to go in that way, make your own side entrance and waste him. The choice is yours.

The weapons that you find yourself using through your playthrough of Bodycount are also quite fun to use. Everything from the trusty shotgun to some truly special weapons created by The Target (the main enemy of the game) are all fun to use. The only downside to the weapon management system is the fact that you can only hold 2 weapons at a time, a primary and a secondary weapon. While this makes combat a little bit easier because you don’t have too many weapons to try and decide what’s going to take down a particular person easier, it does pose the issue that (especially towards the end of the game) you’re going to have about 3 or 4 “favourite” weapons and with this particular way of managing weapons you’re going to have to leave some of the weapons that you love behind. What makes it even harder is the fact that unless you’ve played the mission before then you’ve got no idea what weapons are going to be right for the job. You’ve basically got to pick a couple of weapons and hope that you’ll be able to make it through alive with the choice you’ve made.

Your suit is nice and shiny, but it's full of bullet holes. Sorry 'bout that.

Bodycount’s story mode is quite short, about 5 – 6 hours long depending on how much exploring you’re going to be doing, and that’s really short for a game coming out in this generation of games, where we’d be expecting something more along the lines of 10 – 12 hours of gameplay, but that’s not the main problem most people will have with the core gameplay of the game. Most people will notice that there isn’t really a learning curve in Bodycount, you’re thrown into the thick of battle and told to figure things out as you go along, which you do. Once you think that you’ve gotten the hang of the way things work you’re thrown into a room with a seemingly endless horde of enemies that will kill you time and time again, forcing you to replay sections of the game until you beat them. Then everything, for no apparent reason, gets really simple again. It’s more of a learning wave than a learning curve and it gets pretty old, pretty quickly.

LONGEVITY: There is almost no replay value at all in Bodycount, sure, once you’ve finished the main campaign you can come back and play again in ‘Bodycount Mode’ but, seeing as you don’t get anything for beating your previous score, most people will skip this mode all together in favour of another game they can play with a friend.

For First Person Shooter games, the multiplayer aspect is also another way to keep people playing much longer than the usual shelf life of the game. Bodycount has a multiplayer but as of writing this I was only able to find a single match after trying for hours, and that single match only had 4 people in it. If it’s like that now you can only imagine what it’s going to be like in a few months time. A ghost town.

VERDICT: At the end of the day, even though there are a lot of problems with Bodycount from the story all the way through to the gameplay and the things you can do with the game once you’ve finished the relatively short campaign, the game is fun to play. Blowing things up and watching walls crumble and disintegrate in a semi-realistic fashion never gets old and although it has its problems, I enjoyed most of the time I spent with Bodycount.

It’s a difficult game to recommend to people to buy but if you’ve got a friend that was good enough to buy it, it might be worth it. Bodycount is worth a play but with plenty of caveats. You have been warned.

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