Bodycount Review

There was a time when arcade games were one of the most successful genres on consoles. Epitomised by the likes of Daytona USA for the SEGA Saturn and Time Crisis for the original PlayStation, the arcade cabinet to table-top console port effortlessly drew hard-earned cash from wilful gamers' pockets all over again as they set out to discover just how close their home system could get to the industry-leading visuals of a cabinet machine. Limited content and the lack of a half-decent story were of little concern in those days – it was all about recreating the buzz of an arcade emporium in the comfort of your own home with the aid of a much flimsier light gun or racing wheel and minus the compulsive injection of 20 pence pieces. It's hardly shocking, then, that in an era where arcade cabinets near extinction in the UK (they cling on in the seedy backwaters of motorway service stations and seaside piers) and console games like Call of Duty pack tens of hours-worth of blockbusting content onto a single disc, the arcade gaming experience is struggling to compete.

Activision would have you believe that the reason Bizarre Creations' Blur (a game we gave 9/10) was so commercially unsuccessful is because gamers aren't interested in arcade racing games anymore, while classic arcade shooter series like Time Crisis (3 & 4 were released on PS3) have been critically ripped apart this generation. Perhaps the best example of an arcade shooter in recent times was Bizarre Creations' The Club, which met a lukewarm reception from critics in 2008 (again, despite a high score from TVG). You see, we love arcade games here at TVG and we love a good arcade-style combo system, which is exactly the kind of experience Codemasters' Bodycount is aiming for. The whole game is based around a combo multiplier that builds in number as you headshot and frag enemies. With little room for a notable storyline or punctuating set-pieces, this score multiplier effectively becomes the centrepiece to Bodycount's gameplay.

Contrary to our initial impressions during the last preview, it's not the lineage of Bodycount's destructible environments from Criterion's 2006 shooter, Black that form the game's primary focus. Sure, blowing up an explosive canister will take out a few foes nearby, and arcking a grenade into the top floor of a wooden guard tower can bring it to a satisfyingly splintered heap, but it's not the propellant of Bodycount; it's more a supporting member of the cast. Drop a trio of mines at the feet of some enemies on patrol, however, and watch as one gets stepped on and detonated, combusting all nearby fuel cans into a x5 multiplier flurry of kills, and you begin to get a picture of where the appeal ultimately lies. Again, as we pointed out during a recent hands-on, the destruction is actually very formulaic and abundantly predictable, which is arguably as it's supposed to be in an arcade shooter of this type – Battlefield: Bad Company 2, however, it is not.

But while there is an

 

obvious tiering of destructability to the levels – with their red oil drums, fuel cans, and gas canisters – which is semi-excusable in all its arcade trashiness, that doesn't make basic oversights like shoddy AI and lazy level design acceptable just because it's an arcade game. And we're not talking about dull, jack-in-the-box AI that's shoddy just because it's so one dimensional; we're talking about schizophrenic AI that fails to make any consistent sense throughout the entirety of the game. Enemies will land grenades on a 50 pence piece right next to you on every throw, and whole platoons will know your precise location at all times (no matter how much cover you hide behind), constantly showering you with bullets leaving little room for respite. And yet, at other times, they'll fail to notice you standing a few metres in front of them, or they'll get stuck in a feedback loop as they attempt to negotiate a wall by repeatedly walking into it.

But if the AI is glitchy, then the level design is just downright cheap. Most levels resemble a mediocre multiplayer map more than they do a precisely orchestrated single-player layout, while the objectives are as colourful and stimulating as sawdust. Many of the 18 levels are so small, in fact, that the developers often resort to making you retrace your steps and activate a beacon or some such in the same general area that you blew up a command console five minutes earlier. The recycling of assets leads to repetitive colour schemes and environments, and Codies even has the cheek to reuse the same maps on multiple levels. We certainly felt a bit ripped off by all of this by the end of the game – even though the single-player campaign may take towards 10 hours to beat, the actual content on show seems to be more fitting of around half that game time.

Perhaps the score multiplier could appease our frustrations over all of these shortcomings though; perhaps it could resurrect a poor example of a dying genre. Regrettably not. It isn't as if there's anything overtly offensive about the score multiplier, or that it's broken in any way; it's just that it doesn't quite fit together particularly well. It's a bit like Orlando Bloom really: he seems like a nice enough guy and we don't have anything against him, but he just doesn't play the role of a hero convincingly – you get the feeling that he just wants to pop down the street and buy some organic pesto from the deli. Similarly, Bodycount's multiplier should be about freneticism and chained kills but it just hasn't been balanced enough to achieve this. There's no time limit on the multiplier, which encourages an overly methodical approach, and this is then made worse by the fact that any regular gun kill breaks the chain. So, rather than risk an attempt at a headshot, you'll end up darting around the levels dropping copious grenades and mines (which are dispatched plentifully from downed enemies) to keep the multiplier up. At times you'll end up using explosives more than guns, which comes across a bit backward to be honest – the resulting gameplay just doesn't quite ring true. When you compare Bodycount's system to the variation, scope, and balance of Bulletstorm's 'Skillshots', for example, it really does pale in comaprison.

We haven't been able to sample Bodycount's multiplayer on the review code provided, but the details are fairly straight forward: competitive multiplayer comes with deathma

tch and team deatchmatch modes for up to 12 players, while a co-op mode that has you fighting off waves of enemies across an enclosed map in the now standard Horde/co-op Zombies style helps to bolster long-term appeal. A further Bodycount Mode, which grades your scoring performance in each single-player level and sets it against ranked leaderboards, adds a touch of replayability. All in all though, none of this helps to save Bodycount from being one of the poorer FPS titles so far this year. It's not the worst – that achievement goes to Duke Nukem Forever so far – but it's uncomfortably close nonetheless.

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Bodycount Preview

On the Xbox Live Arcade this week, EA and Criterion's 2006 title, Black has been reduced in price to 800 Microsoft Points. No doubt it's a price promotion by EA that's been strategically timed to hitch a ride with Codemasters' ramping-up of publicity for Bodycount, which is currently as ramped-up as it gets with the game preparing for launch at the start of next month. Both games share much of the same DNA, not only through a number of developers on Codemasters' Guildford-based team but in the game's overall design as well. Once again, the focus is on guns and destruction; on using destructible environments as a vehicle for gameplay. It was a highly innovative approach to FPS design in 2006 and, actually, it remains relatively underused in current-gen shooters today.

Some games have utilised destructible cover and limited environmental destruction in recent years, but mostly as an added peripheral feature rather than a gameplay 'pillar'. Where titles have gone balls-out with the destruction (Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Red Faction: Guerilla), they've come across more as showy tech-demos than refined examples of game design. It's fair to say that DICE is one studio that's really nailed destructible environments with its Battlefield games and the proprietary Frostbite tech powering them, although we're struggling to think of another developer with such a skilled hand in this area. Perhaps, then, Bodycount bolts from its shaky foundations almost as refreshingly as Black did over five years ago. The space for innovation in this area remains and the market is just as primed to accept it.

But there are some added teeth in the jaws of Bodycount's gameplay – it is, in many ways, Black Mark II. A system of scored combos and power-ups places it firmly into Bulletstorm's territory, leaving us to wonder whether it's a coincidence that all of these game titles start with the letter B (our instinct tells us no). Much like People Can Fly's refreshing shooter, Bodycount rewards you for killing people in ever more creative ways: end somebody with a headshot and you'll get a x1 multiplier; melee kill them from behind, or shoot them with your dying breath/the final bullet in your magazine, on the other hand, and you'll ratchet-up that multiplier even further. Although not quite as wide-ranging as the Bulletstorm equivalent 'Skillshots', these varieties of kill do at least encourage you to experiment a bit. It all correlates to a Bodycount score that's tallied up at the end of each level, leaving you with a graded score from A-E that takes additional factors into account, such as how many of the destructible or explosive set-pieces you took advantage of.

Different types of kills also effect the amount of 'Intel' that spews from the bodies of enemies as you dispatch them. Blue Intel comes from regular kills, yellow from 'skill-kills', and red from chained kills. This Intel is effectively the game's currency – think of it like XP. As you progress in the campaign and collect more Intel, you'll open up the option to use various support actions which start with a timed period of invincibility and move up the tiers through explosive ammo, radar augmentations and, at the top-end of the scale, an airstrike. Roughly comparable to Call of Duty's perks, these abilities were consistent throughout the three levels of single-player and the Horde-style co-op mode we sampled. Although not quite as cathartic and rewarding as their CoD counterparts, they do at least offer an incentive to play the game as intended, with as much fiery destruction and explosive gumption as possible. But it's perhaps this destructible element of the game that underwhelmed us the most in what was, admittedly, a more broad than comprehensive sit-down with the code.

For the sections we played through, most of the game environments' destructibility just seemed so... predictable [prestructable? ed.]. There were red oil barrels, outposts constructed out of wood, glass partitions, and the occasional hut that all said, 'Shoot me and I will fall apart/explode'. It was the same setup with Black in 2006, where abundantly clear signposting informed the gamer: 'Rigged set-piece of destruction here'. Unlike with DICE's Frostbite engine though, we rarely came across a level section that deconstructed in a way we weren't expecting, or made us stand back and marvel at the levels of destruction on show. We'd hoped for a step-up in the design from what Black offered five years ago, but instead what we found were very similar blueprints and ideas buoyed by more advanced technology (e.g. materials that break apart convincingly, smoother physics, and more detailed textures). It just didn't feel that creative for a gameplay dynamic that's rife with possibilities and crying out for more innovative thinking.

All of that said, we did only sample three missions from a total of 18 in the full game, so there's clearly a lot more content in stock that could prove our initial concerns wrong. Codemasters Guildford's Horde-style co-op mode also brings a lot to the table, taking sections from the campaign and using them as maps that you and a co-op partner have to defend from waves of enemies. Defeated waves result in more advanced weaponry and a higher Bodycount score, which can then be posted to online leaderboards for bragging rights. And there's a competitive multiplayer component in the full game too: although limited to deathmatch and team deathmatch modes for 12 players, the prospect of adding human opponents to these destructible environments is a promising one.

Our initial impressions of Bodycount are that it's not quite what we'd hoped it would be. Beyond a staid feel to some of the destructible environments' design, even the gunplay wasn't quite as raucous and off-the-hook as what we'd anticipated given the Black lineage - other than a clever little cover system (half a press of the left-trigger peers down the barrel; a full press prompts an almost skittle-like 'lean' out of cover), Bodycount's core-combat felt a touch on the generic side. There really is a lot more to see of the game though, so we're reserving judgement for now and hoping for the best come review.

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