Bodycam: Locked and Loaded impressions for PC

Bodycam has just released their new free major patch to the game recently, and they’ve changed it up a lot. If you’re not familiar with the game, Bodycam gone through an interesting arc in it’s existence thus far. Following a viral showcasing of another prospective game that people were raving about looking too realistic (Unrecord), Bodycam sort of just… appeared suddenly onto the scene a mere five months after. In many ways, the two games have gotten a bit confused between each other, but make no mistake – this is not Unrecord. Bodycam was thrown together by two brothers who were, at the time, 17 and 20 years old. Presumably inspired by the footage that shook the world of Unrecord, they made their own version. But… I haven’t actually explained what the game actually is, huh?

It’s pretty simple, really: Bodycam is a 6v6 multiplayer shooter that focuses heavily in the aesthetic of making everything appear as if you are viewing things through a head-mounted bodycam. The camera work is heavily distorted and filtered in all the ways that we associate with real camera footage, and world textures are given high enough fidelity that things start blurring the line between real and video game. It’s largely a trick of post-processing, but I don’t want to discount it. If it were truly that easy, I’m sure we’d have seen it more by now. But no matter how hard it is or isn’t, it is hard to argue that it doesn’t look downright stunning a lot of the time. With the new patch only making things look even better, honestly, showing a clip of Bodycam to another person can at times fool them. So long as the rough edges where obvious digital artifacts come through (clipping, primarily), Bodycam does legitimately look arguably like the most realistic visual I’ve ever seen in any video game to date.

In my opinion, the base release felt a lot more like a “proof of concept”, in that it looked amazing, and it was fun to mess with for a bit, but… it was lacking substance. Something to actually do beyond “ooh”ing and “ahh”ing at the graphics. I played the original release and I thought it was pretty neat, especially as something to show off to people, but I probably got all of 90 minutes out of Bodycam before I was done with it. With 6v6 multiplayer matches being the only thing available at the time, and nothing to work toward in any way, the community wasn’t much to speak of either. The people who stuck around were few, and they were very acquainted with Bodycam’s systems. A hard barrier of entry plus a lack of objective is quite an obstacle to get past.

But that’s where the new Locked & Loaded update comes in. Bodycam’s new major update is bring actual things to the game. I mean that maybe a little too literally. There’s actually something in the game to do now beyond looking at it like the fine china your mom won’t let anyone touch. New guns, a loadout system, new maps, a lobby area, diegetic menus, new animations, and weapon customization all come simultaneously to actually give players a reason to stick around. With the new customization and loadout systems, plus the animation and sound reworks, even the old guns feel new, but there are still six more in the mix with this patch.

The changes are all pretty simple and nothing revolutionary in shooter games, so I’m not sure that there’s a ton to comment on here, but I’ll give a short few sentences to get to the gist of it. The loadout system is something you’ll be used to, choose a primary and secondary, a grenade, melee weapon, and a drone. Yes, everyone gets a drone on every loadout. Customize your weapons with a free-form selection of optics, grips, muzzle devices, the whole gamut you’re surely familiar with. Earn credits from playing PvP matches (PVE does not gain any points) to purchase more upgrades and guns. To be honest, I found the cost of the upgrades and guns to be quite high, but I did genuinely enjoy playing it now with all the new stuff, so I at least expect I’ll earn enough credits to get what I want. They do have a testing area in the pre-game lobby, so you can play with all of the guns to decide what to buy before committing the money.

The new map, Trenches, is seemingly where they’ve showcased their full commitment to keeping up the wow factor of visuals. Somehow being even more realistic looking than any other map in the game that I have played or experienced, it was genuinely amazing to jump into. The map is what it says in the name: a series of trenches. The network runs most of a circle around the map, with elevated areas to take up sightlines for long distance fighting, while the trenches stay deep enough that standing doesn’t expose you. A center building connects all corners of the map by being a connecting point for the underground sections of the trenches, so expect to be fighting on essentially three levels: underground, in the trenches, and above ground.

The last thing I want to mention, because I think it is the most interesting thing they’ve added with this update is the stress mechanics. Stress is built up in a way that I don’t believe I’ve seen full documentation on, but I get that it’s just general proximity to gunfire that increases your stress levels. An invisible meter that slowly fills as gunfire continues, and lowers as you get down time. As your stress levels increase, you can see it in your character’s hands; the gun shakes a lot more than normal, and aiming down sights seems to slow. But most of all: built up stress levels make your reloads increasingly sloppy. If you are around gunfire for too long, you’ll find that your reload animations start to warp and change entirely. You miss the magwell upon inserting the new mag, you manually pull the old one out instead of letting it drop freely, or in the case of a lot of the handguns, you accidentally put the mag in backwards. An annoying mechanic on the surface, but one that adds to the ultimate goal of Bodycam: to look as obnoxiously like a real life video as possible. In so many ways, they’ve succeeded.

But the patch notes are extensive, and I don’t want to go over every little thing, so… I think you should just go check it out yourself. $30 might be ever so slightly high feeling for the amount of content, even still, but… it is a one-of-a-kind experience, so long as its biggest competition remains nothing more than a video from three years ago. You should get to experience it yourself. The videos you can watch online are spectacular, but there’s something even more aweing in being the one in control, especially as you get more familiar with point shooting and various other systems.

I find it a bit hard to give it a score because from a technical standpoint and just baseline level of amazing-ness, Bodycam sits steadily at a 10/10. This is a game that merely catching as an onlooker nets an “ooh” and “ahh”. But even still with all of the additions, I would say it’s not something I imagine many people are going to sink a hundred hours into. So from a content quantity/quality ratio perspective, I feel like we’re at a 6/10. I’ll meet those two in the middle and say Bodycam in its current state is a solid 8/10 experience.

Hopefully we see it exit early access some day and have a full lineup of content to move that bar a bit higher!