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[March Climber]

Better Than Dead is a brutal first-person shooter set in the depths of photorealistic Hong Kong. In this game, take on the role of a once-enslaved woman, beaten down and powerless — until rage becomes her only strength. Armed with a pistol and a kill list, she's not running anymore.

Every level is a raid. Every fight is personal.

• Photorealistic Hong Kong – Fight your way through iconic action-movie settings: neon-lit restaurants, seedy nightclubs, back alleys, rooftop dens.
• Tight, linear levels – No filler. Just targets, tension, and retribution
• Cinematic action style – Inspired by classic Hong Kong action films from the '80s and '90s.

This game is not VR.

 

[Killer8]

Unrecord, but it's a girl boss and narrated by the AI voice I hear in all those Youtube videos my dad listens to.

 

[Hawk The Slayer]

PS6 graphics.

Since it's in Hong Kong maybe they'll put in some Hong Kong legends like Stephen Chow and Chow Yun Fat

 

[Miles708]

 

[Punished Miku]

This actually hyped me up a bit.

This Bodycam Footage Revenge Thriller Could Be Gaming's Next Big Controversy

Better Than Dead's hyper-realistic style and brutal gunplay shocked even this battle-hardened hack

kotaku.com

 

[DavidGzz]

Looks cool. I love bodycam, but a proper story mode would make the game better.

 

[cinnamonandgravy]

controls look funky

 

[CamHostage]

Unrecord knockoffs* coming in early, I see.

(*yes, I'm aware of BodyCam and the half-dozen game projects with Shoothouse assets and bodycam blueprints.)

 

[DaciaJC]

Whatever became of the first bodycam game to make headlines, I think it was Unrecord? Came out of nowhere a couple years ago and I feel we haven't heard a peep since.

 

[March Climber]

Looks cool. I love bodycam, but a proper story mode would make the game better.

Unrecord knockoffs* coming in early, I see.

Unrecord

We'll have to see which PvE game releases first to take all of the glory.

 

[Darsxx82]

Microprose... What time is today??

Game look very great.

 

[March Climber]

Whatever became of the first bodycam game to make headlines, I think it was Unrecord? Came out of nowhere a couple years ago and I feel we haven't heard a peep since.

Still in development. They're posting updates on their discord from time to time. Source:

UNRECORD is NOT DEAD! And still being worked on. :: Unrecord General Discussions

Many people have been spreading misinformation about the "abandonment of UNRECORD" and the "dead game and development team!" But no, the development team is not dead at all, and is still hard at work as they were a few months ago. They just haven't been making many public announcements or...

steamcommunity.com

 

[CamHostage]

controls look funky

It's a new type of control system that these bodycam-styles games are using which don't stress the typical precision of aiming. Instead, the gun is floaty and "realistic", tied into the motion of the player, making shooting more frantic and reflex-based, with aim-down-sights being where precision is possible despite that also being shaky.

(Or maybe shooting is more precise than I assume? Maybe the cam is loose but the "bullet-dot" is still directly where it would be, and the gun animation autoadjusts to your viewpoint to try to make the illusion work of a fluid gun hand while still playing tight? Still seems like the player would lose their feel for the crosshairs but maybe the feel remains while the look is loosened? I'd like to read up on it if somebody had seen/ watched a breakdown. )

People apparently like BodyCam in prerelease, so this seems to work despite it looking funky to traditional FPS players. (That said, BodyCam looks to keep guns more tightly centered/braced than Unrecord or Better Than Dead, so maybe it's not the same approach.) I haven't tried it yet, but most of the fears I had about how the mechanics would work seem to not bother early accessors. So perhaps this cam-style gunplay will become its own subgenre

 

[dispensergoinup]

This looks great, got my attention.

Thanks MC

 

[Dacvak]

Why does this somehow feel like an AI game that came back in time from 2029?

 

[March Climber]

Why does this somehow feel like an AI game that came back in time from 2029?

It's the trailer voiceover and the enemy AI not being fully there yet.

Right now the enemies sort of run in then stand and shoot at the player's FOV like a Time Crisis game.

I'll keep up with the game here and there to see if they make some changes over development.

 

[Represent.]

That looks awesome.

 

[CamHostage]

It's the trailer voiceover and the enemy AI not being fully there yet.

Right now the enemies sort of run in then stand and shoot at the player's FOV like a Time Crisis game.

True, and they're also under-detailed character models (both texture and animation) in photogrammetry-scanned environs. Comes off like those training seminar videos where they paste cartoon characters on top of office photos...

One of the smart things Unrecord did (or at least used in the trailer) was that "CIA Censored" blur block over the final face. It's maybe a story detail, but it's also a graphical trick. The developers can render helmets and body armor just fine, they have enough room in the animation system to stitch movements which won't clash with the hyper-fluid motion-matching of the gun hands, they can afford to snap/buy some quality scans of barren warehouses and scuzzy alleyways, they can apply enough tricks to lighting and physics to keep the realism-feel going.... but as soon as a character looks like a midscale Metahuman in a photo-realistic world, the Wizard is ummasked. So obfuscate the detail, and the dream keeps going.

EDIT: Ha, they actually tried this trick in the Better Than Dead trailer and I didn't even notice! In the restaurant scene, all the faces have censored blocks over them, but you can tell that the faces under have no detail anyway because the average-blur filter just comes off as peach-colored. Oh well, we'll see what they do or don't fix next time it's shown.

 

[bender]

Someone fire the person in charge of sound effects.

 

[metareferential]

Looks really good.

And hopefully it will be in VR (it's UE5, so it can be injected easily).

 

[Mark Mocherad]

My grandmother thought that this is a real movie, not a game