Bodycount Review: A Shreddable World, a Hollow Game

Bodycount arrived in 2011 with a promise it could not keep. Codemasters shipped a first-person shooter for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 that talked about tearing the genre apart, about a balletic orgy of bullets, about a world you could shred. What it delivered was a competent, occasionally thrilling shooter that never found a reason to exist beyond the shadow of the game it was following.

Trailer, via GameSpot.

Codemasters Guildford and the Black Inheritance

Bodycount is a spiritual successor to Black, the 2006 shooter that made environmental destruction its calling card. The lineage is not hidden. Codemasters built Bodycount on the same foundation: a first-person game where the scenery is not a backdrop but a resource, where walls and cover and the things enemies hide behind are meant to come apart under fire. The studio behind it was Codemasters Guildford, and the publisher was Codemasters itself.

That inheritance is the whole pitch. Bodycount wants you to feel the world breaking around you, and for a while it works. Nearly everything in the game is destructible, and the destruction is handled with enough weight that a firefight changes the space you are standing in. Cover that existed a moment ago is rubble now. The environment shifts under you, and that shifting is the closest the game gets to a genuine idea.

The problem is that Black already did this, and did it with more confidence. Bodycount spends its energy reminding you of its predecessor instead of building past it.

Jackson, the Network, and the Target

You play as Jackson, a former American soldier recruited by an organization called the Network. The Network presents itself as a private military contractor that resolves international conflicts. Jackson takes the job. He fights terrorists and enemy mercenaries belonging to a hostile outfit called the Target network, and the game sends him across the globe to do it.

The Target network has advanced science-fiction weaponry, and as the plot moves, it becomes clear that Target is influencing global conflicts. Jackson infiltrates and destroys Target bases. The main antagonist is a female Target mercenary who serves as the final boss. The game ends on an ambiguous note that seems to imply the Network has established a dominant influence in global affairs, following the destruction of the last Target bases in Lagos and Jiangsu.

That is the shape of the story, and it is thin. Jackson is a soldier with a gun and a contract. The Network is a mystery the game never bothers to resolve. The twist — that the organization handing you targets may be the real power — is gestured at rather than argued. Bodycount wants to say something about private military power and global conflict, and then it stops wanting to.

A Shreddable World and Its Limits

The core of Bodycount is the destruction, and the game leans on it hard. Environments come apart realistically, and the game generates a dynamically changing play space as you fight. Scoring kills unlocks power-ups, including air strikes that decimate the environment further. There is a cover system that gives the player near complete freedom to aim while in cover, which sounds like a small thing and is not.

That cover system is the best mechanical decision in the game. Most shooters lock you into a position when you take cover, forcing you to pop out on the game’s terms. Bodycount lets you aim freely while protected, and it makes firefights feel looser and more aggressive. Combined with destructible cover, it creates a rhythm: you shoot, the wall goes, you move, you shoot again. When the game is working, that rhythm carries it.

When the game is not working, the destruction becomes noise. A shreddable world is only interesting if the shredding matters, and too often Bodycount’s environments collapse without changing the fight. You blow a hole in a wall and the enemy behind it is still there, still shooting, still standing in the same scripted spot. The dynamic environment is real. The dynamic encounter is not.

Multiplayer, Cooperative and Competitive

Bodycount ships with both competitive and cooperative multiplayer. The competitive side offers traditional deathmatch sessions, individual or team-based. The cooperative side challenges two players to survive increasingly difficult waves of enemies.

This is the standard package for a 2011 shooter, delivered without much distinction. The wave mode is the better half, because the destruction and the cover system feed into it cleanly — two players, a shrinking arena, and enemies coming in harder each round. The deathmatch modes are functional and forgettable. Nothing here would pull a player off the shooters they were already playing.

The Campaign’s Ferocious Action and Its Ceiling

Bodycount’s campaign has moments. The game promises outrageous firefights and ferocious action from both barrels, and it delivers those in bursts. The air strikes are loud. The destruction is satisfying. The close-quarters combat has a punch to it that a lot of shooters of the era lacked.

But the campaign never builds. It repeats. You enter a space, you destroy the space, you kill the enemies in the space, you move to the next space. The power-ups escalate, the enemies get tougher, and the structure stays exactly where it started. There is no escalation in design, only in volume.

And the game does not distinguish itself from the shooters around it. That is the central failure. Bodycount has a mechanic — destruction — and a lineage — Black — and it never figures out what to do with either beyond repeating them.

Release Schedule and Studio Aftermath

The reception had consequences. Because of how Bodycount was received, Codemasters closed the Guildford studio and cut its studio base by a third. That is the real story of this game — not the bullets, not the destruction, but what happened to the people who made it.

What Bodycount Gets Right and What It Costs

The destruction is genuine. The cover system is genuinely good. The cooperative wave mode is genuinely fun for a while. These are not nothing. A game that lets you aim freely from cover while the wall in front of you disintegrates is doing something most of its competitors were not doing.

But a mechanic is not a game. Bodycount has no answer to the question of why you should play it instead of Black, or instead of any other shooter on the shelf in 2011. Its campaign is a loop without a build. Its story is a setup without a payoff. Its multiplayer is a checklist without a hook. The ambiguous ending, with the Network ascendant after the fall of the Target bases in Lagos and Jiangsu, is the game’s one interesting narrative swing, and it lands without weight because nothing before it earned the ambiguity.

The score reflects that. Bodycount is not broken. It is not cynical. It is a game with a real mechanical idea that never becomes a real game. The destruction is the headline, and the destruction is not enough.

Bodycount · Codemasters · FPS · game review · PS3 · Xbox 360