Bodycount Hands-On Preview

Bodycount has been through a turbulent development process. Originally described as the spiritual successor to EA's first-person military shooter Black, the game has seen its ship date slip numerous times. The situation is further compounded by the public stoush between Codemasters and former creative lead Stuart Black, with the two parting ways citing artistic differences. We recently visited Codemasters' Guildford studio in London to get our hands on the game, shoot some guns, and shoo away info bandits.

Before we picked up the controller to play the game for ourselves, we were given a brief overview of Bodycount. Like its brother from a different mother, Black, Bodycount is all about arming players with a handful of real, hefty weapons to fire to their heart's content. Work has gone into ensuring that the things that go boom are the stars of the show, with beefy shooting and visible impact on the world around you taking centre stage.

Africa played host to our demo, and after landing on a rocky mountainside we had our first victim handed to us on a platter. Spawning in, pistol at the ready, an unsuspecting guard slowly ambled away with his back to us. Naturally we wanted to make it one shot, one kill, and in doing so we weren't about to run the risk of shooting from the hip. It was here that we were introduced to Bodycount's unorthodox gun sights. Once you bring up the tip of your weapon, your feet plant. Rather than being able to strafe around spraying bullets at the target in the middle of the screen as you would in other games, moving the left stick with iron sights up causes you to bob and weave like a boxer, ducking and dodging as you avoid incoming bullets. It's an awkward feeling, and all through our demo we felt like something had gone wrong--with the process of aiming fixing us to a spot rather than allowing us to freely return fire and dive for cover as we would in other shooters.

With our kill count at one we followed the path, deviating to the left and going up some stairs and into a shack where we found an optional weapon: the shotgun. Swapping our peashooter pistol for something capable of making basketball-sized holes in walls seemed like a good choice, and we promptly fired a few rounds to test its abilities and make our own exit. It's this environmental destructibility that, as we engaged our first waves of aware enemies, helped us discover how little cover surfaces provide. Wooden room dividers and floors could be torn up wholesale (though not metal surfaces), allowing us to make impromptu speedy escapes, as well as opening up new entry points for attackers.

Accessibility is Bodycount's design mantra, and as a result, ammunition is plentiful. Fans after a shooter experience where each round must be counted, weighed up, and justified before pulling the trigger can stop reading now. There's no scrounging around in the dark, hopefully searching corners of the room for one extra shell before you go headlong into combat. As well as scattering bullets, killing adversaries causes them to drop blue orbs which represent intel that you can spend on new abilities. Of course, the bad guys aren't going to simply let you waltz in and make enough currency to buy the best unlockable items in the game.

Our immediate job was to locate a C4 package and use it on some enemy antiaircraft guns that were keeping our UAV eyes-in-the-sky at bay. Once we had blown the SAM site to smithereens and accrued enough intel massacring the local populace, we were able to call in a rolling airstrike that rained down fiery death from above. Though we had the chance to see only one ability during our play, the menu system was a four-part segmented wheel, suggesting that at least four different abilities will be available in the finished game, one of which featured a stylised shield icon--perhaps a personal protective device?

Three different types of bad guys were stupid enough to get in the way of our lead during our playthrough. Medics hurry to the aide of gunned-down comrades, reviving them and granting them a second wind. Scavengers rush onto the screen from behind cover, looting any stray intel left lying around on the battlefield. Successfully killing scavengers returns all the intel they manage to accumulate and grants you a big info payday. The third and final rival type is the psycho, a heavily armoured Terminator-style tank class that hits hard and is able to take a beating. Grenades prove to be most effective here and can be used like a traditional thrown explosive--by cooking and then throwing before waiting for it to explode--or used in the more fun way, by double-tapping the grenade button on the shoulder button, which causes them to ignite on contact. The latter approach became particularly useful for taking care of foes that were perched on walkways high above and out of gunfire access--carefully lobbed grenades trapped them in the ensuing fireball.

Taking out the psycho and jogging our way triumphantly to the finishing line, we were presented with a fade-to-white screen--a curious twist on the usual black screen--and a foreboding glimpse at rival faction the Target, a robotic force with an unknown past at the core of Bodycount. After showing us the gritty, hilly dirt of Africa, our guide explained that the finished game will take you inside the enemy's ships, a very different locale made largely of glass and providing see-through cover that can be destroyed. Other real-world locations will include the garish neon lights of cities in Asia.

While the game looks quite good, and the guns certainly are the heroes, we walked away from our hands-on session a little concerned about the game's aiming system. We welcome evolution to what has become a largely stagnant yet extremely competitive genre, but it smacked of reinventing the wheel for the sake of doing so. We're hoping the next time we see it the system may be a little more refined. Bodycount still doesn't have a confirmed release date, but we're eager to see how it changes in the run up to its Aussie winter 2011 release window. Stay tuned for more soon.