Bodycount Review
Surprisingly low.
Version tested: Xbox 360
You can tell a lot about a game from its Achievements. After one hour and six minutes of playing Bodycount, it had doled out 335 points. Not only are the names uninspired ('Boombastic' - really?) but they're handed out in great chunks for standard progression. Unlock a new ability, another 50 points. That's not generosity - it's desperation.
Bodycount is a desperately average FPS, a poorly-conceived and barely finished rush-job entering the most over-saturated genre around. It has a campaign clocking in at around four hours, a multiplayer mode that redefines bare bones, enemies that don't respond to your presence, and a frankly terrible line in costumes.
This was supposed to be Black's spiritual sequel - a line that Codemasters has been playing down since the departure of Bodycount's spookily-named former project lead Stuart Black. But Bodycount loses out in every way to Black, a game released five years ago on last-generation hardware. There's no point in dwelling on the comparison just to stick the boot in, but you wonder why it was made in the first place.
Bodycount's weapons are mundane versions of the usual suspects: pistol, shotgun, machine-gun, etc. There's a decent enough alien shotgun/grenade launcher hybrid waiting in the game's final third, which blows up enemies with crackling purple electricity, but needless to say it's not really worth the entry fee.
Bodycount's shooting, in terms of aiming and firing, is reasonably tuned and could have been the basis of a better game, but here it's constantly hampered by a terrible cover mechanic and a travesty of a melee attack, and that's before we even mention what you're shooting at.
The cover system, such as it is, is based around holding the left trigger while hiding behind something to peek out from the side. You'll use it intentionally maybe five times, if that, in the whole campaign, yet it shares a trigger with normal aiming. This means that if the game thinks you're in cover while aiming, moving your sight around can suddenly jerk the screen sideways - and it's not the most gracefully presented move. Bodycount's fighting doesn't even demand a cover system, never mind one that's neither use nor ornament.
1/8 Mission objectives are parcelled out on the fly but never amount to more than 'move here and press X'.
Backing up this misfire is a destruction system that's downright archaic. Next to what Battlefield has been doing for years and years, Bodycount's effort is paltry. When behind cover, chunks of it will go flying when the bullets hit, and elements of the scenery can be shot or knifed through. That's it. There's no grand scale to it. Certain bits of the environments are destructible while others are not.
But what does for Bodycount is its enemies. The game's spawning mechanism for each level has these chumps running towards their assigned start point, which often seems to be behind the player, before attacking. So for much of Bodycount you'll be sprinting forwards to a checkpoint while the four or five men supposed to stop you sprint in the other direction. It's bizarre.
Things don't get any better once they start attacking. A dumb horde is fine, in its own way, but Bodycount's troops are lemmings, relentlessly jamming into doorways, bunching near explosive barrels, and rushing into the hail of fire that killed their mate.
Sometimes they'll ignore you completely. Just stop in the middle of a firefight, look in a different direction and turn motionless. At one point a crack team of five troopers came undone when they huddled near a barrel, and one threw a grenade that bounced off the head of another and fell at their feet. I'm not making this up.
Worst of all, they can see through walls. At least, that's the only explanation for the deadly-accurate fire that traces you through buildings. If you die in Bodycount, it's always because you're just walking forwards trying to end it all - stay safe and take it slow, and these clowns will never once get the better of you. Except if you try to melee them. The farce of Bodycount's combat is complete with a useless, disembodied knife swipe that's more of a flail, usually followed by the ignominy of being downed by an enemy using the same animation. It's one of the worst melees ever.
But although Bodycount's enemy AI is remarkably poor, the strange thing is that the levels are clearly designed for something better. This is a linear shooter, but its major environments are multi-levelled and expansive - the kind of place that would be perfect for, say, a ruck with the Covenant.
But the potential of enemy troops like the medic - who revives dead troops as stronger zombie versions - and scavenger, who hoovers up all of your rewards and runs away like the goblin from Golden Axe, is never realised on these clumsy battlefields. Whatever the aspirations were, the hugely disappointing group dynamic of Bodycount's enemies make its better ideas no more than footnotes.
Points are awarded for 'skillshots', but these are unimaginative to the extreme: headshots, explosive kills, kills through cover, and variants thereof. Chaining them together is the route to a big level score, but the elephant in the room is Bulletstorm. People Can Fly's recent FPS not only does the same trick in a much more mechanically accomplished fashion, but has so much more flair, imagination and fun about it.
The skillshot feature, like so much else of Bodycount, feels like it's going through the motions. Getting major scores doesn't reward you with anything other than a global leaderboard, and in the days when games are drowning us in more stats and persistence than ever before, Bodycount has almost nothing. Even the multiplayer, the one area you'd expect to find some kind of avatar to tinker with, is absolutely bare bones in its presentation.
1/21 You acquire four abilities to toggle, but real men only use invincibility. The others are pointless in the campaign except in boss fights that specifically require them.
Needless to say, multiplayer is a truly stillborn effort. Including only Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch modes, along with a small clutch of maps, two teams duke it out to be first to 50 kills.
The presence of 'intel' after killing enemies, which is used to charge up special moves, adds a nice coda to the usual deathmatch exchange - the victor has to claim part of their spoils - and the destruction plays much more of a noticeable role than in single-player, so by the end of most maps the key buildings look like Swiss cheese.
Those are two decent ideas in a sea of mediocrity, however, and sometimes even worse. The respawning is especially terrible, and needless to say even early players have worked out where to camp out for easy kills. Among the many crazy things about Bodycount is that its influences are clear and yet not a single one of its features can compete with what other games have been doing as a matter of course for many years.
You begin to think that behind Bodycount there is perhaps the story of an heroic development team tasked with doing far too much with far too little, who have performed a minor miracle in simply shipping something that works. Well, works some of the time. It's an explanation. But the killer fact about Bodycount is that it's nowhere near good enough to compete in the FPS arena, and serves nobody - player, developer or publisher.
4 / 10
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Comments (91) Latest comment 9 months ago
Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!
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Edit: @ BigDaddy - This was made by Codemasters Guildford - that studio was bolstered to make this very game.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/codema...
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Im surprised it got 4/10 after playing the demo. Truly awful.
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Might still rent this anyway....
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When will developers realise you need to do something SPECIAL to make it in the FPS world these days.
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Um, no you don't. Plenty of bland and boring shooters turn a decent profit, and I wouldn't be surprised if this does too.
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I'm not sure why this is chalked up as a negative. I personally find it borderline offensive that finishing a game like LA Noire, and doing quite a bit of sidestuff lands you 260/1200 gamerpoints. Too many games have you perform meaningless stuff that have absolutely nothing to do with the main gist of the game for their achievements.
Doing exactly what the designers intended should be the thing that is encouraged with achievements, because if it's a good designed game then, well, this should be the most fun. I now generally regard people with a high gamerscore, not as elite gamers, but as people with absolutely no joy in life.
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most important fps of this generation?
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Isn't that the point of achievements? What's the point of giving someone a reward for killing an enemy or getting to level 3 when you were going to do that anyway? I always achievements were there to encourage you to experiment and try out cool and unusual things.
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Glad I didn't waste money on a pre-order.
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erm wasn't The Club dev Bizarre and publisher Sega?!
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Of course it depends on who is reviewing the game, but some of the scores Eurogamer have awarded for average games - Borderlands, Just Cause 2 - make me suprised this scored a 4.
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Just hope the rumours of a new Timesplitters are true!
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That's off the top of my head.
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If you pull the Left Trigger halfway, you can still move.
Try reading the controls when prompted to next time.
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the game scored 10/10 with the name of the title, but after that its all bad news, 4/10 ;-((
if everything in the review is true, it sounds really bad.....
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Joke. JOKE!!!
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You know someone's got beef when they criticise achievement titles.
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After all the hype and stuff too. Perhaps its also a victim of the changes in the FPS genre. I think Codemasters should focus on making Grid 2, Dirt 4, and Op Flashpoint. They do need new IP, but not another shooter, as its too crowded out there.
Would be a shame if more jobs were lost, especially since Black Rock just closed up shop.
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There was nothing outstanding, but nothing particular broken with it either
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Bodycount? I thought it looked to have promise, particularly as the level/environment design felt pretty sold and even great in places. But the actual release? Finished the PS3 version in one sitting, and is now living on the shelf of shame with the other incredibly crap games I'll never play again.
Game demo's are becoming like movie trailers. Completely untrustworthy. Codemasters? Stick to racing games from now on, and use external developers to work on everything else.
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Never has this picture been more appropriate than replying to your view of Borderlands as "average".
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I wish an EG reviewer would have the balls to score a game according to their words.
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Doesn't mean I won't be renting it, though.
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Blowing crap up felt quite good though so I might give Bodycount a whirl when the price tag says 10€.
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(So as good as Mafia 2, then?)
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However, knowing that I'm not missing much is something of a relief; having to stop playing Half Life 2 after it gave me motion sickness was, on the other hand, one of the most depressing moments in my gaming life.
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Good games can be released in August though ie Batman AA, clearly this isn't one of them, unfortunately
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Have you tried adjusting the FOV? That can normally fix motion sickness problems.
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How is it possible something like this gets released?
How is it possible that they produce trash like this?
They are not inexperienced noobs, are they?
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A shame really, there are some nice things about the game. I quite liked the design aesthetic, the colours seem more vibrant than many FPS games. And I like the idea of the cover mechanics, though the implemenation was off. But it's not enough.
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There is nothing average about Just Cause2. One of the best games of the last few years. No, seriously.
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But the bad game designing and terrible control response just ruined the experience for me.
Oh my GOD i love that sound effects that plays everytime you fire the gun...so f**ng badass!
I just couldn't finish the demo cuz I kept dying due to bad control sensitive (even though I changed it to my preferences).
And the bad game designing, such as no physical feedback everytime you get hit. You hear a sound fx that plays when you are close to dying. The control settings were wrongly mapped and the cover mechanic was not done right.
I dunno, I put the difficulty to normal settings, unless that's way too hard:/
I was hoping that the demo was an old build for the game:/
This game is a straight up rent.
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In bodycount when you damage a wall pieces fly off where you shoot, you can chip a wall down, but if you are running at a damaged wall, that isnt quite destroyed, your character adds a little extra umph and breaks through the wall with his body.
I agree that the game is aweful, but the destruction system is considerably better than most.
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Isn't this the dev who said he was inspired by Lady Gaga? Google it..
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Ha ha nice pic. Couldn't get into Borderlands - only thought it was any good when i played co-op. I found the whole levelling up thing a bit tedious - at times having to shoot a rat thing or a bloke twenty times with a shotgun because i wasn't a cetain level.
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Thanks arcam, that's really helpful actually! Is there any way to do that on games consoles or is it just a PC thing? I had The Orange Box on 360, but I could always buy it on PC if not. It has to be worth a try!
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Terrible.
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Because the original idea sounded great: Black 2 in everything but name.
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I mean damn boys...the competition is killing on the FPS market. How do you want to compete with CoD (not a big fan of it), Battlefield, Rage later this year, Borderlands, etc. when you make a shooter that can't even succeed to look great in trailers. Hell even Blacksite area 51 that got low grades succeeded to look impressive and have a awesome demo.
But seriously Rich, how was it a surprise to you it would suck? I know you guys may not say if a game is epic fail before you review it (yet for some reason you are allowed to hype a game even when it sucks...Kane and Lynch anyone?). But atleast you don't have to pretend you didn't know it was gonna suck when you where writing your review.
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