Operation Body Count

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Operation Body Count
"You lose!" — Victor
Genre(s): First-person shooter Platform(s): MS-DOS Release Date: 1994 Developer(s): Capstone Software Publisher(s): Capstone Software

Operation Body Count is a 1994 first-person shooter developed and published by Capstone Software, exclusively for the MS-DOS, running on a modified Wolfenstein 3D engine. In this game, terrorists led by a man named Victor have taken over the UN building and it is up to a squad member and his team to take them down.

Why It Lost

1. The controls are garbage compared to other 1994 shooters. The game doesn't allow you to rebind the WASD keys and this forces you to use the annoying old scheme of using the arrow keys to move, the control key to shoot, space to use, and the alt key to strafe, and the squad mechanic is the reason why you cannot use the WASD keys to move.
2. The graphics look low-quality, blurry, and have terrible textures, even by 1994 standards. There are many glitches, such as the stair's texture being placed incorrectly, and turning on the floor and ceiling makes the framerate drop significantly.
   • What's more is that the dying animation for the terrorists has been plagiarized from Doom.
   • The sprites for both the characters and the weapons look awful. An example is the Galil, which barely resembles an assault rifle and instead looks more like an MP5.
   • Whenever you take damage, the game will constantly flash yellow, which is painful.
   • The levels use the same wall textures with no variety, which shows how lazy the designers were.
   • The game uses computer-generated cutscenes between levels, but they have horrendous animation that looks on par with an art student's project. The most annoying one is every time you die, Victor constantly mocks you with "You lose!" Not to mention, playing with a faster CPU speed breaks the cutscenes by speeding up drastically.
3. Your weapons are not centered correctly, making aiming even more awkward than it already was.
4. The sound effects are subpar because they are bit-crushed to make them low quality. Video games made in this period have been like this because of the limitations of PCs running on MS-DOS, but at the same time, old shooters like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom have better sound effects. To make matters worse, enemy sounds can be heard even if you are far from them.
   • For some reason, an enemy that shoots electricity makes the sound of gunshots instead of an electric attack.
5. The first five levels of the game take place in a dark sewer with giant rats and slime monsters, making the game feel unrealistic.
6. The most annoying enemies are the ones that crawl on the ceiling and shoot thunder, as they can kill you in less than 3 seconds.
   • More stupidly, the slime monsters are the second strongest enemies in the game.
7. The music is lackluster; nothing remarkable due to the aforementioned limitations of MS-DOS, most of the time you barely notice there. Also, many tracks are outright recycled from Capstone's previous game, Corridor 7: Alien Invasion.
8. The difficulty is a mess, the first levels on the sewers, are by far the hardest, but after getting away from the first floors, the game becomes easy except for the booby traps, because enemies are easy to kill, and you don't need to find anything to progress, you just need to kill the enemies.
9. There are problems with the proportion of the characters. For example, the player looks short, but the enemies and the teammates look giant.
10. The recruitment of teammates, while an interesting idea at the time, feels unpolished since the squad members have a terrible AI and are slow. It's best to either leave them alone or kill them to get some armor, as the game will not punish you for doing it.
11. The Uzi and Galil are by far the best in the game since enemies die in one or two hits. making the grenade launcher (which is a rocket launcher), flame thrower, and shotgun completely pointless.
12. There are booby traps scattered throughout the levels after the sewers and they can only be disarmed after the player kills enough enemies, but one time, after you eliminate all of them, the booby traps will still explode. This could be a programming bug that can make the player start the level all over again.
    • Also the booby traps deal damage at random, some kill you instantly and others don't deal that much damage.
    • Some of the corpses of your enemies also contain booby traps that can kill you without you even knowing they are there.
13. The map is completely useless, as it doesn't mark the enemies, nor does it mark the direction you are pointing at, and doesn't help you navigate.
14. You can't shoot through open doors to kill the enemies, but you can shoot through the pillars, which doesn't even make any sense.
15. There are spelling and grammar errors on the back of the game's original box.
16. The HUD is abysmal and filled with unnecessary mechanics and things that you don't even know what they are. Firstly, your ammo is not a number but is instead a bar, which doesn't tell you how many bullets you have left, and as an extra your screen constantly gets stained with blood or slime, which causes you to be unable to see the mini-map.
17. The secrets in the levels can be easily found by hugging the walls, completely defeating their purpose, also it takes away any complexity from the levels.
18. The flamethrower and grenade launcher are dangerous if done at close range as they can deal massive damage to you.
19. Victor, the final and only boss, can be killed in two seconds. Also, the ending has him vanishing like a hologram while laughing. A setup for a sequel that never happened, due to the game failing so badly.
20. The entire game is 40 levels long, which are incredibly tedious and with zero complexity.
21. The game can crash just before the final level and destroy your save file.

Reception

Operation Body Count received mainly negative reviews from critics and players. The game is normally regarded as the worst of Capstone's games.

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