Bodycam Is So Realistic It’s Borderline Terrifying

I’ve spent a few hours playing Bodycam, the Unreal Engine-powered first-person shooter from two brothers that’s turning heads on social and streaming platforms worldwide. It was released on Steam on June 7, with many users and prospective fans confusing the project with Unrecord, a similar-looking game that surfaced last year with a harrowing reveal trailer.

Both games look similar but while Unrecord reportedly focuses on a single-player narrative, Bodycam is a multiplayer-focused shooter. After getting hands-on with Bodycam for a while, I can confirm that it’s so realistic it’s scary, and it’s how I want all my first-person shooters to behave going forward.

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Bodycam isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s marketed as being a tough-as-nails shooter that walks a fragile line between ‘virtual’ and ‘reality’. In Bodycam, players assume control of a footsoldier in either a military force or a terrorist group, using a series of authentic weapons to take down opponents and complete a range of basic objectives.

Everything from the maps to the game’s audio mechanics have been superbly crafted in Unreal Engine 5, and the visual layer of the game is nothing short of sublime. On a high-end PC, Bodycam looks jaw-droppingly good, offering unparalleled graphics and physics that make something as simple as shooting an opponent a terrifying realistic premise.

Honest disclaimer: don’t play Bodycam if you’re easily disturbed or made uncomfortable by real-world violence.

Allow me to explain. In one sequence, I crept through a gorgeous wooded area on my way to defuse a bomb that had been planted by a terrorist force. In the next moment, I was engaged, and bullets were whipping through the scenery, deafening me. I whirled on an opponent and blasted him with a shotgun, and he was sent collapsing to the floor, his legs bucking wildly as he contorted with the pain of the buckshot slamming into him.

Then, I was hit, and as my camera disconnected I too fell to the ground in the middle of a thick forest, blood gurgling in my throat as my operator choked on his final breaths. It’s intense.

Players have a few gripes with Bodycam, namely with the game’s matchmaking mechanics and server instabilities, but for the few hours that I played, I suffered from two issues:

• In one match, I was doing pretty well and then was suddenly disconnected
• In another match, the player I was spectating after I’d been killed was bugging out, jerking around the map

Aside from that, I have no issues with any aspect of Bodycam. It’s a solid shooter with huge amounts of potential, and although it could be seen as little more than a tech demo, it has left Unrecord sitting in the dust as far as I’m concerned. Some users might brand it a clone or an act of plagiarism, but I maintain that we saw one trailer for Unrecord several months ago and nothing else, while Bodycam is here, in the wild, and making a stellar impression.

Bodycam is available (for now) exclusively on PC.

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