Bodycount Review

We've had a plethora of first-person shooters released in recent years. There have been so many that we've even started creating sub-genres to help categories them more efficiently. But with increased numbers comes increased expectation and despite solid intentions, Bodycount fails to match up to the standards that have been set. It's a shame as it does offer up some potential.

Before going any further, it's worth pointing out that Bodycount's story is just about as throw-away as you can get. You play a guy called "Jackson", who's part of an organisation called "The Network". You're initially tasked with taking down bad people, but things accelerate at a lightning pace and you realise that there's a conspiracy.

At no point will you remotely care about what's going on in the story, nor will you remotely care about the character you're playing. And this is a pretty big flaw, even for a first-person shooter, where expectations for story are quite low already.

Thankfully, the rest of the game isn't as woeful as the story, there are some rather neat concepts at play. One such concept is how destruction has been implemented. There are of course some corridor sections to Bodycount, but there are also quite a lot of levels where you're free to roam around. Of course, there are objectives, but the game doesn't hold your hand that much. It ties in well with the destruction, as you can just create your own paths to get from the different objectives. Not many games attempt to even implement full destruction, so the fact Codemasters were able to implement it, in such a thoughtful way, is appreciated.

It's just disappointing that many of the other mechanics end up falling flat. For example, the cover system. It's clear why the developers implemented it the way they did, but that doesn't mean it works very well in practice. The idea, is that there are two levels of aiming. The first allows you to still move around freely, the second plants your feet and allows you to enter a dynamic cover system. The problem is, that when you're in a free-flowing firefight, it falls apart.

More often than not, your primary concern will be about taking out the bad guys as quickly as possible. And if the situation is quite tense, you probably won't be wanting to think about applying different levels of pressure to the aim button in order to initiate different types of aiming. It's actually easier to just move, full-on aim, take down a few people then move again. Trying to get it to work as a proper cover system is too finicky and when you're moving while aiming, it's not very accurate.