E3 2010 Preview: Bodycount
At this year's E3, designer Stuart Black showed himself to be something of an eccentric. As creative director of the upcoming first-person-shooter, Bodycount, he demonstrated a wacky but sincere passion for the over-the-top first-person-shooter, which is the spirtual successor to Black's other over-the-top first person shooter from 2006, Black. (Hrm...Stuart Black made Black? We're lucky his name wasn't Dunwiddy.) Bodycount promises to be one of the most unique shooters seen in some time, a thriller inspired by directors J.J. Abrams and Ridley Scott and freak of nature—er, pop sensation, Lady Gaga.
In Bodycount, you take on the role of Jackson Delgado, a man press-ganged into a shady business called the “Network”—an organization represented in the demo by some deceptively innocuous corporate-style graphics accompanied by a hypnotically pleasant voiceover. At demo start, I was set down in an African hot zone filled with pirates and death squads with only the sultry tones of my flirty female partner (heard through my ear piece) for backup. The point of the mission? Well, due to the roar of the E3 exhibit floor, that was never made clear and while I might have checked my in-game PDA, I was too busy trying not to get shot to do so. What I do know is I was set down under a freeway overpass/shanty town peppered with dirty, tumbledown shacks filled to bursting with gun-toting maniacs.
Even without an objective, the demo level did the job of showing off the caricaturish look of the game as well as its main mechanics: the scoping reticule, which shrinks down when you stop or crouch, indicating greater shot accuracy, and the cover/lean system which lets you—surprise!—take cover and lean around things. The former works well (the AI often stands obligingly still so you can shoot them) although the latter, while useful and easy to use, seems somewhat beside the point in a shooter this bombastic. The game's controls are very intuitive in that they're much like other shooters with right thumbstick movement and right trigger firing, but that's where the similarities end. In a particularly “gamey” move, Bodycount's baddies explode like Jiffy Pop left on the burner when they die, emitting showers of colored orbs. These orbs give health, ammo and Intel—the last of which is used like currency, to buy and upgrade weapons. Seeing these red, blue and yellow balls floating all over the level is pretty strange, but it suits Bodycount's colorful esthetic like it never would a Gears of War or Fallout 3.
The demo also showed off the game's breakables system which Stuart Black was obviously very proud of. Black waxed poetic about how each object as it's destroyed is a “story in three acts”. As he sees it, as you shoot a crate, progressively reducing it to splinters, it's adding to the fiction of the game. Eh...that just might be a concept that's a little too deep for most of us, but all you really need to know is--it's fun to break stuff!
While Bodycount's approach to breakables or shooter-style gameplay might not win any awards for originality, its tongue-in-cheek graphic approach just might. Granted, Black issued a few caveats at the start of the demo, telling us it lacked glass, cloth and lens effects—however, things still looked pretty good wthout them. The game's graphics aren't exactly stylized but they aren't realistic either. They walk a line between the two that's most accurately described is real-ish. Everything's much more colorful than most action shooters; the shanty town shown in the demo had vivid blues and greens and the death squad members had an almost caricaturish look, especially the huge, skull face paint-wearing guys carrying chain guns, which gave the game an almost Borderlands-like feel.
Bodycount's E3 demo reinforces earlier accounts of the game's appeal and originality. Although the J.J. Abrams and Ridley Scott influences are a lot more apparent than the Lady Gaga reference, what the game's shown so far makes plain its unique approach to the shooter genre. In addition to single player, Bodycount will have multi-player Deathmatch and co-op play, although neither of these was shown in the demo. Bodycount is set for release in Spring 2011 on PS3 and Xbox 360.
