You can't blame Bodycount for trying. The long in development shooter from developer Codemasters, and the spiritual successor to cult favorite shooter Black tries very hard to be THE first person shooter game that fans of the genre have been waiting for by incorporating elements from a number of successful series. As a result though, it simply aims too high, and fails to reproduce any of these elements with even a hint of success. Bodycount is the equivalent of going into battle armed with a gun with a huge scope but only one bullet - you're aiming at a lot, but you won't hit much of anything.

Bodycount drops you, as a government agent of “the network,” directly into the middle of a South African civil war, waged between a militia and a group of warlords. As you progress through the game, you'll uncover a conspiracy of some sort. The story isn't given much time or room to develop aside from long blocks of text in between missions, and you're unlikely to grow attached to any of the characters or story elements thanks to just how little time the title devotes to telling a good story.

"...it just doesn't simply tries to do too much..."

Codemasters seems intent on delivering a shoot first, ask questions later type of game, and that would be perfectly fine if it were half as decent as it could have been. While it's technically sound mechanically, it just doesn't simply tries to do too much and as a result, does little right. The issues start with Bodycount's search for just what kind of shooter it wants to be. The game seems most content with being an arcade shooter filled with skill shots much like Bulletstorm, but it lacks the same ingenuity that EA's vulgar title displayed as the only real skill shots include shooting an explosive barrel or going on a killstreak with a specific weapon.

The back of Bodycount's box proclaims that it features “destructible environments.” While this feature is cool, it too is lacking. There really aren't a lot of these destructible environments, and the few that are there are always the same type of building and aren't very helpful to your missions. What's worse is that it never works when you want it to. For example, early on in the game I was locked in a pretty heavy firefight, so I took cover in an abandoned building. I noticed that the bullets that both my adversaries and myself were shooting were doing damage and chipping away at the door frame I was taking cover against. Thinking that I could use this to my advantage; I moved into the middle of the wall and began to shoot at it, to try to give myself a new vantage point, but my bullets just bounced off.

"...you'll be hard pressed not feel bored rather quickly into the game."

The structure of most missions is pretty straight forward, go from point a to point b, shoot a lot of guys and repeat. That's not too terrible as it's a pretty common occurrence with shooters these days, but where Bodycount goes horribly wrong is with its terrible level design. Three environments are recycled over and over, and you're asked to recomplete missions in different ways, and it all feels so incredibly tasky that you'll be hard pressed not feel bored rather quickly into the game.  The multiplayer suite is just as predictable, and worse yet - there's really not a community behind it.

Visually, Bodycount is a mixed bag. The game's menu system and interface is pretty slick and crisp, but the game itself looks incredibly dated. Sure firefights and explosions look decent enough, but there's a very flat and grainy look to most of the game that makes it downright ugly looking.

With a slew of high profile shooters coming this holiday season, Bodycount sadly doesn't stack up. Instead of the superb shooter we could have gotten, we're instead stuck with a series of unfulfilled promises and a whole bunch of could have been. What could have been a great game is instead not even enough to waste an afternoon on.