Bodycount Review

Bodycount doesn't tell a gripping story. Bodycount puts a gun in your hands and gives you enough bullets to tear through anything and everything in your path. Bodycount succeeds some of the time in this endeavor, but like any dangerous military operation, things inevitably go wrong.

As an operative of the Network, you exist to solve problems that governments can't. When a violent war breaks out in Africa, you drop into the fray to help put out the fire. Along the way, you uncover the force behind it all: a rival corporation known as the Target.

If the developers at Codemasters designed Bodycount with a gripping tale in mind, I'd call it a complete failure. Instead, Bodycount celebrates the chaos of digital weapons. It embraces the carnage of bullets eating through crates, walls, and explosive barrels alike. Almost everything in the environment bends and breaks to your terrible onslaught. If you see an enemy hiding behind a door, you can pepper the door with rounds and take him down before he steps outside. These same principles work in multiplayer as well, which supports competitive deathmatches and also a two-player survival mode.

The destruction in Bodycount satisfies. To fully enjoy it, you'll need to acclimate to a stiff, unusual aiming system. When looking down the sights, your operative locks in place and dynamic, side-to-side leaning replaces character movement. Squeezing the iron sights trigger halfway will give you fine aiming and movement together, but controlled trigger pressure like that doesn't make for an easy firefight.

I thought I'd hate the aiming in Bodycount when I first snagged the controller, but by the end of the campaign I adapted completely. I shouldn't have to adapt to stiff aiming, but at least I could. I didn't adapt, however, to the grenade mechanics, which are unreliable at best. Grenades get caught on the environment when it looks like you have a clear throwing path. Explosives at your feet never helps things, I can assure you.

My enemies in Bodycount didn't have the same trouble with grenades. In fact, their record-shattering throws betray the divine intervention behind it all. Grenades sailed across entire battlefields after just two shots fired, and some would kill me without any warning. Usually visual or audio clues accompany tossed explosives in games. Not so much in Bodycount. I could hold off an assault for several minutes and then keel over from an explosion that I didn't see or hear coming. Frustration ensued.

Despite my woes with grenades, I managed to endure and I developed a proficiency in Bodycount's controls. But I could never reconcile with the scoring system -- a great idea for the wrong game. Skillful enemy kills rack up a score multiplier on the top of the screen. Headshots, grenade tosses, and other special kills improve the multiplier. Taking down an enemy the "good old fashioned way" destroys this chain.

Bodycount Screenshots

This system encourages careful play. When I completed all the Bodycount single-player missions, I realized that I played the entire campaign slowly and carefully, spending extra time to secure headshots and keeping the multiplier active. This rocks in its own way. But the pacing and visual design of Bodycount encourages aggressive, gratuitous combat. I find beauty in shredding through cover and spraying walls with bullets. This rarely results in skill kills and inevitably leads to a bad ranking at mission's end.

Bodycount punished me for enjoying the explosive spectacle of combat. Why?

The limited environmental palette also puzzles me. Bodycount takes place in three different area types, from start to finish. There are the muddied levels in Africa, the sleek Target bunkers, and then one final environment revealed towards the end of the campaign. I'd welcome more world variety with open, gun-toting arms.

Read more details on how I wrote the Bodycount review.

CLOSING COMMENTS

Bodycount benefits from a solid core, and plenty of moments entertained me throughout the campaign, including some of the more intense gunfights. But the disconnect between Bodycount's chaotic visual spectacle and its precise scoring system drive a large divide between how you want to play and how Bodycount expects you to play. The limited environmental palette and the lack of any real story further damper the fun.

Despite the thrill of wrecking havoc on an unjust world, Bodycount lacks the polish and overall entertainment value of its peers.