Bodycam is out on Steam and feels more like a horror game than a competitive shooter

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(Image credit: Reissad Studio)

Image for Bodycam is out on Steam and feels more like a horror game than a competitive shooter

A couple years ago, gameplay footage of a creepily realistic-looking bodycam shooter went viral. That game,called Unrecord, isn’t out yet, but we now have our first taste of what it feels like to play a shooter from the warped perspective of a GoPro with a new FPS simply called Bodycam, which just released in early accesson Steam. In my experience so far, it’s more horror than tactics.

Like Unrecord, Bodycam pairs Unreal Engine 5 environments with cameralike movement and distortion effects to create the illusion that we’ve somehow been sucked into a LiveLeak video. Unrecord is the more convincing-looking of the two, but Bodycam’s blown-out video effect is still uncanny in moments. (I do wonder why these soldiers are wearing cameras on their faces, though.)

The biggest difference between the games is that Unrecord is singleplayer and Bodycam is multiplayer, but either way the question is posed: Do we want first-person shooters that look like realistic bodycam footage?

For me,eh, maybe not. I don’t play shooters because I want to roleplay as court evidence (although Bodycam actually ends up feeling a little more like a Most Dangerous Game situation than a cop or military sim), and the efforts to make it realistic make it uncomfortable to play. Your arms slowly follow your mouse movements rather than mirroring them, and aiming is super unsteady. The Red Orchestra games are probably as realistic as aiming needs to be, for me.

The bodycam thing is a heck of an effect, though. No other shooter has made me feel uneasy in quite the way Bodycam does. One thing that makes it hard is that, unlike eyeballs, the cameras we’re inhabiting have terrible night vision, so other players are often fragments of silhouettes in corners, unseen until their muzzles flash. And the gunfire is loud as hell, another effort to reproduce the effect of real shooting. It all comes together to make something that’s stressful as shit.

There’s a guy in the corner.(Image credit: Reissad Studio)

There’s a guy in the corner.

It ain’t your father’s FPS, in other words, and I guess I’m Dad here. I’ll go back to bunny hopping in XDefiant, thanks, but I do think Bodycam’s novelty could attract a following.

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If you don’t get along with the awkward movement and hard-to-see enemies, Bodycam’s stay on your hard drive might be short, but I do recommend giving it a trial run if you like the tension of games like Tarkov and Hunt: Showdown.

I never saw the player who shot me.(Image credit: Reissad Studio)

I never saw the player who shot me.

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Valve’s Steam page currently lists a second mystery game alongside Deadlock, sending Half-Life 3 theorists into another frenzy of speculationActivision will send you alarmingly detailed data for every single Call of Duty match you’ve played in the last 4 years if you ask, and players are using it to figure out their mysterious SBMM rankings

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Valve’s Steam page currently lists a second mystery game alongside Deadlock, sending Half-Life 3 theorists into another frenzy of speculation

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Activision will send you alarmingly detailed data for every single Call of Duty match you’ve played in the last 4 years if you ask, and players are using it to figure out their mysterious SBMM rankings

LatestCruel is a frantic run-and-gun shooter where you boot cultists out of windows in a cursed apartment block that wants you deadSee more latest►

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