Game: Bodycount

Platform: Xbox 360, Playstation 3

Publisher: Codemasters

Developer: Codemasters

ESRB: M

Genre: shooter

Players: 1-8

What's Hot: awesome gunplay and mayhem, wide open levels, great graphics

What's Not: too much cool stuff goes missing by the time it's over

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Review by: Tom Chick

Bodycount has a lot going for it early on. You're running around Africa, shooting up some convincing shanty towns, mining installations, and so forth, moving around open maps with nary a corridor in sight. And when you do come to a corridor, it's a mysterious corridor in a secret underground installation that looks like a cross between Tron and the Death Star. But you're mostly bursting into ongoing gunfights between two competing factions, which is a nice variation on the usual one-man-vs.-the-world Rambo formula. And in case you're worried about replay value, you're racking up points in a scoring system that seems like exactly the sort of thing to bring you back.

There's plenty of cover, at least before it gets blown away. No need to stick to it, though. A simple lean system lets you pull the trigger back partway to zoom. But if you pull it all the way back, you'll freeze in place, at which point the movement stick leans you sideways and peers over cover. The basic concept is that if you mash the left stick in, you're cowering in place.

But this is more of a rambunctious run-and-gun shooter than a careful cower-and-peer shooter. Killed bad guys strew collectible bits that make pleasant jangling musical tones when you pick them up, so get out there and mix it up. The collectible bits include plentiful ammo, grenades, and mines that you toss out three at a time. No need to be stingy. This is not a game where you save your grenades, much less your ammo. Use 'em if you got 'em, because there's plenty more where that came from! But mostly you'll pick up cool blue tokens that go into your power bank. You burn these whenever you toggle a power on by tapping the d-pad. Up for temporary invulnerability, left for more powerful shots, and right to make the bad guys glow so you can more easily find them. Or, just tap down to call down a big air strike and basically clear out a swath of the map.

And really, it's a spectacular shooter engine. It's big, generous, bombastic, explosive, and far-ranging, with a surprising amount of breakable bits. You can't help but admire the havoc and wish that a game like Deus Ex could get its shooting bits this gloriously right. Or that a hearty shooter like Fear 3 could range this far and wide. Or that a Call of Duty could feel this fresh and lively. I liked Bodycount so much; I even left the music turned on.

But as Bodycount goes on, it resembles an Agatha Christie murder mystery in which the cast of characters begins to disappear one-by-one. The difference here is that instead of characters going missing, the interesting gameplay features disappear. The competing factions turn into the typical swarm of enemies all hunting you down. The wide-open levels turn into long and increasingly narrow corridors. Levels repeat, which is especially galling when you're no longer playing on open maps. You fight superhuman enemies with bucketloads of hit points.

The scoring system turns out to be a tedious exercise in lining up headshots to maintain your multiplier. This doesn't encourage replay so much as it kills any sense of freedom or mayhem. Contrast this with the scoring system in The Club, which was played in short levels at a time, or the scoring system in Fear 3, which encouraged different approaches to how you played. Bodycount's scoring system feels like an afterthought for how little it will make you want to replay a level.

And then you get to the sniper levels. Eventually you're creeping around a train yard with distant lasers poking at you like some distant insta-killing finger of god. At this point, you're left with very little of what made the early levels so good. A few hundred killed bad guys into the game and Bodycount's greatest casualty is its own spirited gunplay.

By the time it's all over, just after you've finished the dopey out-of-place boss fight, you're left with Generic Shooter Videogame Number Umpteen, drawn out with a few levels stuffed with filler instead of gameplay. I really liked Bodycount while I liked it. I just wished I'd liked it longer. Tom Chick, aside from being a regular contributor to GameShark and countless other game sites, owns and operates the popular website Quarter to Three.com

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