
	Platform Playstation 3 Genre Shooter Publisher Codemasters Developer Guildford Studios ESRB M (Mature) Released August 30, 2011

- Very old-school approach to ammunition – drops from dead enemies in colourful spray accompanied by beeps and boops

Not the greatest looking game I’ve played in the last 5 years Iron sights aiming takes some getting used to You will die… A LOT

Review: Gears of War 3 (360) Review: Crysis 2 Decimation Map Pack (PS3) Review: Resistance 3 (PS3)
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Bodycount

Score: 6.0 / 10

Bodycount takes the road of peace through superior firepower. You are a member of the Network. You are sent into the world’s worst battlefields to quell local flare-ups. Needless to say, you aren’t particularly welcomed by either side of these conflagrations and are going to be embattled from all sides. Your only recourse is going to be the judicious use of brute force to shred through all opposition.

Taking a page from the playbook of Bulletstorm, you gain access to enhancements

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by fighting with style. Dispatched enemies explode with a fury of colors showering the ground with collectable loot in a sound-effect storm straight from a 1980’s arcade machine (had to pause for a second after seeing that!). Headshots, flanking to shoot from behind, exploding enemies with the environment – all of these increase the in-game multiplier and therefore the reward for dispatching enemies.

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These rewards can either take the place of temporary upgrades for yourself or even air-support to level the opposition.

For story, Bodycount really comes up short – a “could have seen it from a mile away” conspiracy is lazily unfurled. There’s not much to draw the gamer into the experience from there, which admittedly is ideal for most gamers – they couldn’t care less about the politics of what’s going on, I’m here to blow crap into progressively smaller chunks of crap! For which, those people will be quite satisfied with – everyone else will feel as if you’ve got an unfinished product.

For an FPS, Bodycount doesn’t shove a ton of weapons down your throat – only 10 weapons are available. Limiting things even further, you can only carry two guns at a time; so people will pretty much be allowed to stick out their favorites the entire length of the game without them becoming irrelevant or too underpowered for the end-game. You can choose to go precise sniper or brute force since all the environments shred satisfyingly for those who can’t be bothered to pick apart their opposition.

The iron-sights system takes a little getting used to: a half-pull of the trigger allows what we’re all used to, movement with some precision. A full pull will plant your feet and movement will be replaced with you leaning instead of sidestepping. Needless to say, unlearning a few years of console experience took some doing at the expense of a handful of unnecessary deaths.

The grenade system really left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Your typical lobs seem to work without too much trouble, but the directed throws never seem to connect correctly – they always seem to catch some random piece of the environment and explode ineffectually away from their intended target. Thankfully they didn’t code in a laugh track for the bots on some of these pitiful combat exchanges. The enemy is hardly handcuffed with this limitation – and can seemingly trap you with the kind of precision miracle that you’d expect from a game of Peggle, not an FPS. Pair miracle throws with a lack of notification for grenades in close proximity and you have a recipe for controller-throwing.

A short-game, I was able to navigate Bodycount in a single sitting; rather disappointing that I was able to beat the game in 5 hours. Even with the higher than usual number of deaths that I experienced, it still didn’t provide too much difficulty to work through. All in all, Bodycount provided a few hours of diversion, but I didn’t get much more than that out of it. I certainly won’t be dusting off this title out of my collection to play more.

- Tazman

(October 20, 2011)