The problem with bodycam shooters

Remember when an FPS appeared on Steam that looked so real its developer had to provide proof it was running in real time? Unrecord wasn’t the first bodycam shooter (and still hasn’t actually come out), but its virality kicked off the trend that informed Better Than Dead, a singleplayer bodycam FPS that released on Steam in early access last week.

I like that Better Than Dead doesn’t have us playing as a cop, which most bodycam shooters do. Quite the opposite, in this case: you’re a nameless, faceless victim of a human trafficking ring in Hong Kong who escapes captivity and embarks on a bloody revenge quest with nothing but a pistol and, yes, a bodycam to record the whole thing. “A blood debt must be paid,” as its level complete screen repeats.

The 14-level story, of which I’ve only played half, is an uncomplicated run of killin’ folks that need killin’. Levels are brief, brutal shooting galleries that bleed into restaurants, apartment complexes, seedy gambling dens, and up and down narrow stairwells. Cans, TVs, and other assorted detritus explode in the crossfire while innocents run frantically through the kill zone. The presence of bystanders and the blurred bodies of women you’re there to liberate pressurizes every encounter, though like the popular cop shooter Ready Or Not, Better Than Dead does not judge too harshly for accidentally spilling the brains of innocents.

And yes, Better Than Dead also does all the little rendering and animation tricks—blown out lighting, video noise, extreme head bob, hyperrealistic textures—that made my eyes believe on multiple occasions that I was looking at a GoPro video from Hong Kong. The effect is especially convincing in outdoor screenshots:

Though I keep returning to a question that crept into my mind while playing Better Than Dead: What does the bodycam shooter have besides shock and awe? Is realism the only goal, and am I supposed to find it sick as hell? Because in this case, spectacle is not carrying me through an otherwise unpleasant game.

And I don’t just mean the subject matter. Wasting faceless men who’ve gotten away with the most monstrous crime humanity is capable of is the highlight of the $15 package, but design decisions that are meant to make Better Than Dead realistic and consequential often cause the actual playing part to become frustrating and futile. In particular, I just never got on board with the protagonists’ wildly exaggerated sway when holding her gun.

You can’t really aim, like at all—at best you’re swinging a pistol in the direction of bodies and hoping for the best. I get that the point is that this character is not a trained killer, and that really comes through in the opening levels, but it also gets less believable and more annoying as her bodycount rises. It doesn’t take long for her to become this Punisher-like boogeyman that the entire crime ring is afraid of, and you’re telling me she can’t confidently point a pistol straight?

Your lone advantage is a bullet time ability that triggers when sliding—an occasional lifesaver that I found too brief, tonally at odds with the rest of the game, and too inconsistent to rely on. The unpredictable behavior of the gun and the seeming randomless of enemy accuracy makes survival feel like a stroke of luck. Not once I did clear a level and think I nailed it—it’s more like I just happened not to get shot.

Better Than Dead goes so overboard on that idea that it suffers as a game, but it’s a fascinating thread to pull thematically. I buy that real gunfights often do come down to luck, and even people with firearm training will resort to imprecise “point shooting” (one step up from spray ‘n pray) in close quarters.

Milsims like Arma, Squad, and Ready Or Not, and now also games like Better Than Dead, put the terrifying reality of guns on full display. Gunfights are a messy, terrifying, and entirely unpredictable horror show from top to bottom. The bodycam POV goes the extra mile in grounding the action in the real world. Aspects of Better Than Dead and Unrecord and Bodycam look so disturbingly real that they recall snippets of LiveLeak videos in my brain that I really wish I hadn’t seen at 13 years old.

The result is that these games come across to me as warnings, rather than much fun, and I leave them even more convinced that society ought to melt down these tools of ruin. Certainly there are those who enjoy milsims and bodycam shooters because they approve of the real world violence that they so fastidiously emulate—I’m not one of them.

I didn’t end up liking Better Than Dead, but I respect its uncomplicated morality, and that it at least aspires to more than law enforcement fantasy. This subgenre makes me confront the conflict between my support for sweeping gun control and love for the history, design, and operation of weapons. I grew up with guns. Target shooting is an undeniably chill afternoon. Guns (the concept) are cool. Guns (the societal presence) are a waking nightmare.

Games have always been my way to enjoy guns without enjoying guns, ya know? To some degree, being an FPS guy means always wearing a shirt that says “I don’t actually want to do this in real life!” If I embrace games whose whole deal is “This is like real life,” can I blame folks for asking questions already answered by my shirt? Now that I’ve given this one a fair shake, I better understand my unease with bodycam shooters: The real world serves up this flavor of horror on the regular, so the fantasy of witnessing it firsthand is unfulfilling.