An awful mess of a game through and through, Bodycount should be avoided at all costs.
Bodycount places you in the shoes of an unnamed agent known as The Operative working for a company-actually, maybe it's a government agency or perhaps just some shadowy organization, the game never really bothers explaining it-called The Network. The Network is combatting another, presumably evil organization of some kind called The Target. In order to combat The Target, The Operative from The Network will need to infiltrate secret The Target bunkers, all of which are called The Nexus. Eventually, after assaulting all of the locations of The Nexus, The Operative will infiltrate The Target's secret base, known as The Island, where The Network will finally defeat its greatest enemy, The Nemesis. Along the way, The Operative will have to fight a few other factions including an African rebel group known as The Militia and an Asian gang known as-I actually burst out laughing the first time I heard this-The Red Circle Gang. Their emblem: a slight variation of the Japanese flag (note: they are a Chinese gang). Now, I know what you're thinking and yes, this is definitely in the running for most creative original story this year. In all seriousness, though, it doesn't bode well for a game when the developers were actually too lazy or short on funding to even come up with names for their story elements, characters, or locations, and sure enough Bodycount's story is a dismal, dismal failure. Most of my time with the cutscenes was spent trying to see how fast I could skip them, and if you value your brain cells you'll do the same.
To add insult to injury, Bodycount's flabbergastingly awful story is complimented by some of the most patently racist character design that I've ever seen. Your character, an American (I think), sports an outfit that looks vaguely reminiscent of a farmer's garb. I think he's actually wearing overalls and work gloves for most of the game, which makes him look less like a dangerous commando and more like random idiot picked from the fields of Iowa. The enemy models aren't much better, either, with the African militia coming across as a mixture of severely stereotyped Zulu warriors and escaped convicts, complete with orange pants. The Red Circle-sorry, had to chuckle again-is even worse, and most of them look either like Chinese delivery men or sumo wrestlers. I'm all for a little overly clichéd racial hyperbole when it's in the interest of humor, but I think that Codemasters actually intended for these designs to be serious and that makes them extremely unfunny and borderline offensive. Fortunately, The Target operatives that you'll spend most of your time fighting come across as more standard techno fair, but about the thousandth time that you see another carbon copy of the same heavily armored enemy their impact will have worn off and to be honest their design is pretty lackluster to begin with.
Of course, the character design means very little when one considers the fact that Bodycount's graphics will probably make your eyes bleed long before you're able to pick up on any nuances in the detail work. Textures throughout the game look like they were ripped straight off of a PS2 and the entire engine sports the same horrific blurry look that nearly drove me insane in Brink. It's like the game was developed to be high definition on a Game Boy sized screen and then stretched into a low-res mess to fit a TV. On top of that, the environments are so repetitive that they may well put you to sleep. Every Nexus that you infiltrate (there's one at the end of nearly every stage) is more or less a carbon copy of every other Nexus-not a good thing when you consider that they all use some of the most uninspired, bland "high tech" art direction I've ever seen. The environments outside of The Nexus are slightly more interesting and one of the Chinese maps actually comes very close to being decent, but for the most part the same lack of creativity is evident throughout every area in the game. That lack of inspiration is then coupled with a tiny number of environments (there are only three) to produce a real yawner of a campaign. The developers tried to spice it up with a few canned lighting effects, but these once again look like they could have been stolen from a last gen game. The bottom line is that the terribly uncreative art direction, abysmal graphics engine, and dated lighting truly make Bodycount one of the ugliest games I've seen in quite a while. I'm frankly shocked that the Codies allowed this title to release looking the way it does.
The gameplay elements in Bodycount don't fare much better, unfortunately. The shooting itself feels alright, but it's handicapped by a bizarre decision to depart from the standard shooter control format on the PS3 (R1 fire, L1 zoom) in favor of a scheme that sees the R2 and L2 buttons used for shooting and aiming. I suspect that the 360 version works better and that this design was simply ported onto a PS3 controller-another lazy decision by the devs-but it simply doesn't feel right. To make matters worse, an infuriating pressure sensitive system has been put into place that requires you to hold the aim button down firmly to zoom in fully from a strictly stationary position or hold it down lightly to aim while moving. In my ten hours with the game I never got used to this design, and it basically crippled the entire experience. I can only imagine how terrible the scheme must be on a 360 pad given that the triggers weren't exactly designed for pressure sensitive play. To be fair, Codemasters did include a helpful snap-to-target aim assist system that actually makes the game quite playable, but the controls are essentially broken outside of that and that is a major knock against an already floundering title.
If you ever do manage to figure out the control scheme, you may actually have some mind meltingly simple fun with Bodycount. The weapons are relatively interesting if mostly uninspired and the combat actually adds a little bit of depth to the game by way of power ups and abilities that all draw from one "intel" pool which can only be replenished by killing more enemies and grabbing the intel icons they drop. The somewhat destructible environments can also be fun to play with, although it's puzzling to me that only a small number of materials can actually be "shredded" by one's bullets when the game's one and only selling point was its destructibility. You'll also never face the annoying obstacle of running out of ammunition as Bodycount sees to it with huge ammo drops from nearly every enemy that you can essentially continue spraying continuously without ever dropping your last mag.
Unfortunately, these few highpoints are bogged down with repetitive, boring objectives and extremely poor level design. Waypoints frequently won't show up until you've crossed an unmarked you're-in-the-right-place line, and even when they are visible they are frequently difficult to get to or involve serious amounts of backtracking. You will also spend a lot of time dying in Bodycount as there is no overt health indicator to speak of and the frenetic, constant action is sure to get you waxed fairly regularly even on the easier difficulties. I often found my character simply dropping dead from a bullet or grenade that I never saw or heard, giving the action an unpleasantly unpredicatable nature and resulting in a disjointed feeling for most of the game. On the up side, however, the campaign is only about five hours long, so you won't have to suffer for too long to squeeze out the easy achievements and trophies on offer here.
If you were really looking forward to Bodycount, take heart-there's always the multiplayer! It features a wealth of game modes including deathmatch, team deathmatch, and…well actually that's really about it. There is a horde-style mode where you and up to three friends can attempt to hold off waves of enemies for as long as possible, but it offers nothing special and can be extremely frustrating due to a poorly thought out weapon choice system. As for the other modes, they can be reasonably entertaining if you can actually find a match and are not bothered by an embarrassing dearth of maps (only four are included with the game, and they are all modified campaign maps). I spent a few hours toying around with the multiplayer, and judging from the number of times I was dropped into two vs. two matches against the same opponents I'd been seeing all afternoon, I have to assume that there are about ten people in the world playing Bodycount at any given time. When I did get into a match, I discovered glitches that allowed me to pass through solid walls, massively oversized maps that were clearly meant for more players than will ever even know what Bodycount is, and a weapon purchasing system that squanders its potential with silly kiosks and an unpredictable points system. The multiplayer was completely underwhelming in every conceivable way, and to be honest it was barely worth the ftime I spent trying it out. Besides, the online community is already tiny and probably shrinking as we speak, so chances are that unless you get the game within the next couple of weeks or have a bunch of friends with similarly bad taste, you'll be playing all by your lonesome.
In closing, Bodycount is terrible. It feels like a student project or an alpha build of a game set to be released several years from now. It has a few good ideas, but they are buried so far beneath abhorrent design choices that they basically become completely meaningless within the first five minutes. Perhaps if the game had been offered at a $10-15 price point instead of as a full retail release it would have been worth a look just to kill a couple of days. As it stands now, however, the game really doesn't even do enough right for me to recommend a rental, so unless you enjoy wasting your time or would like a good, hard lesson in how much worse your other games really could be, I recommend you avoid this title like the plague.