Bulletstorm

It’s not too hard to see why Bulletstorm is regarded as a minor cult classic. On the one hand, it’s yet another brown-and-grey shooter from an era that was rife with them. On the other hand, it’s extremely competent and packs just enough charming flourishes to set it apart. It underperformed at launch but later gained a reputation as a solid shooter via word of mouth.

While its story won’t win any awards, Bulletstorm does offer up generous helpings of plot and worldbuilding. You take control of down-on-his-luck mercenary, Grayson Hunt, and go on a mission that’s part revenge against an evil warlord, part escape from a collapsing planet. Accompanying you are loyal sidekick Ishi and later a third party member. While your pals do provide some extra firepower, they primarily exist to deliver banter and keep the story moving forward. Thankfully they can’t die and thus require no babysitting.

The game feels like a first-person take on Gears of War, with the biggest twist coming in the form of skillshots and skillpoints. By disposing of enemies with special trick shots you can earn points that let you upgrade your weapons and purchase ammunition. Unfortunately, it’s a clever idea that never reaches its full potential, because skillpoints are too easy to earn and there aren’t enough interesting ways to spend them. Skillshots usually involve tossing enemies into hazards like electricity and thorns, or just straight up shooting them in their *ahem* manly parts. There are many variations on these concepts, with each weapon having its own unique skillshots, but they don’t feel different enough to meaningfully change the gameplay. Likewise, skillpoints don’t let you upgrade your weapons in any interesting ways, so most of your points will be spent increasing your ammo reserves and buying spare bullets. For a concept with so much potential, the execution fails to impress.

What the game absolutely nails, though, are the pacing and sense of scale. It flows almost like a light-gun shooter, as you run from area to area and blast through hordes of bad dudes. The gunplay is fast, ammo is abundant, and the set pieces are epic. You venture through huge caverns, run-down future cities, and mil-sim spaceships, and no two scenes feel alike. While the game is basically a corridor shooter, the massive backdrops ensure it never feels tiny or cramped. By limiting the space of play, the developers are conversely able to create environments that, in some ways, feel more immense than the open worlds that have been in vogue for the last decade plus.

While it didn’t push the first-person shooter genre forward as it undoubtedly hoped to, Bulletstorm is still a solid early ‘10s shooter with a fun campaign and high production values. If you’re looking for a palate cleanser to play between bigger games, you could do a lot worse.

positives

+ the fusion of the upgrades system to a currency accumulated from varied types of kills is ingenious and really leads to less generic and more varied gameplay

+ the physics-based aspects of kicking and drawing in enemies is inherently satisfying if a little overpowered. i enjoyed kicking enemies off of everything. kick kick kick

neutrals

o man, this generation of games really banked on the appeal of gore and grit to console gamers, right down to the name, mechanics and general tone of the game

o it's very on-rails but that does allow for a little more attention to animating ambitious and interesting effects and set pieces that were enjoyable to watch

o the "sci-fi resort town gone wrong" setting is fun if a little incohesive. it does become a bit of a blur, but when the set pieces are good, they are very good indeed

negatives

- the short playtime and fast pacing eschews stuff like establishing context, building atmosphere, or fostering exploration. it's a short, wild on-rails ride through hell

- the game tries to maintain an energy of wise-cracking wit with banter but lacks the presence of consistent characters and endearing sense of humour to do so

really entertaining and rewaring mechanics. everything you do is scored and you can chain kills and certain shots for more score. the gunplay feels very polished and unique, and a lot of unique and fun mechanics. there is a weapon upgrade system, the weapons all feel good and a decent variety. enemy ai is decent, level design can be beautiful but mostly linear.

7

I love fps which add on skills besides your guns when done right, which is really the reason why i love The Darkness 2 so much. While this game isnt quite on the same level in terms of gameplay, there is surely a whole lot of experimentation between the different skills and weapons, and it is really satisfying to discover new combos. You can grapple enemies with your whip, kick them making them fly into the air, or better into spikes. The way that points splatter across the screen each time you kill something makes the game really satisfying to play, not to mention that it excells when it comes to gore.

The game does feel a bit too easy and exploitable, at least on normal difficulty, and at the same time i dont like how the enemies feel bullet sponges towards the end of the game. Visually its not incredible, but it has a nice style, even if it repeats the same settings a bit too many times. The story itself is a bit lame, but the actual dialogues did make me laugh a few times, as they offer a crude and juvenile type of humour.

Overal a really solid fps which offers a few good ideas in a genre which is lacking them.

Ever since I got this old rig bought from a colleague, it has been a never-ending battle between me and the hard drive for space. It didn't help that my first month I consumed 500 GB of bandwidth(a true pirate, ladies and gents) and my hard drive space is only 500 gigabytes. When I went off the grid, one of the things I did was try and get back more space by perusing some of the stuff I have. With that, I set off to HLTB and checked out which of the games have that good game size to hours beaten ratio, and lo and behold, Bulletstorm only takes... ah, I forgot, this should be a coherent narrative but my memory fails me. Let's say it was somewhere between 3(doubtful) to 7(probably) hours.

So I installed it, and my first impressions was it was cheesy. On the onset though, it looked pretty good, and I was proven right as the game moved along. The flashback section where you were walking on the walls of the building in defiance of gravity was awesome, I recalled right there and then that I've played this game before in a gaming cafe, but as with almost all the games I've played on gaming cafes, that session was just an hour and it wasn't enough to leave a lasting impression to me.

Here we are at the present again, and we just crash landed on a beautiful resort planet with a resentful shipmate who just turned cyborg. Oh hey, what's this? A leash? What could it be for? Oh hey I can grab people, the time suddenly slows, what do I do the enemy is getting thrown towards me, *presses E*, my mighty character kicks the enemy and off he turns into a bloody mess as he gets impaled into spikes as I laugh maniacally. I fell in love right there.

Cinematic games always are a rarity on the videogames realm, don't let anyone tell you any different, but this one definitely fits the bill. I think that sentence was poorly constructed, but I digress. This game is full of spectacular set-pieces that literally made my jaw drop. It makes do with a little cast, and while it's all predictable, it doesn't make it any less enjoyable. I still remember every single one of the people that made the journey with me.

The game shines with its unique FPS system which utilizes points for stylish kills(if you're not a videogamer you'll probably think I'm sick in the head right now) which in turn gets you more upgrades for your weapons. Honestly, you'll end up just sticking with a set of weapons because the game is not that tough, but the weapons in and of themselves present the game as a puzzle as some enemies require a special kind of dispatching. By the end, I was able to max everything out.

Oh yeah, I've forgotten to mention that the weapons are fun to use. You can guide a sniper bullet and it feels really cool to see it all play out in slow motion as the enemy scrambles to evade it. The other weapons are fun to use too but my memory is hazy. I remember though that every weapon has a secondary fire, said sniper can be detonated at will if it fails to find its target.

This game is really gory too, but cartoony at that. Nothing that will make you puke, but still the violence is over-the-top it adds to the whole experience. What is the whole experience? It's only one of the most entertaining single player FPS campaign in the history of videogames, full of fun, wit, heart, gore, guns, excitement, and Godzilla. So all in all, bloody fantastic.

After hearing a character shout, “What the dick?” and performing a move called the “rear entry” on an enemy for the first time, it becomes apparent that Bulletstorm is designed with controversy in mind. Everything else comes secondary.

Ever since developers People Can Fly and Epic Games announced they were teaming up for this project, first-person-shooter, fans anticipated the return of relentless, nonsensical run-and-gun action that defined the genre in the ’90s. Games such as Doom, Blood and Quake favored skill, speed and accuracy over the cinematic storytelling and reward-based game design of its contemporaries.

In more ways than one, Bulletstorm is just that. The problem is that its older influences are paired with some terrible, post-dial-up-modem gaming trends. The game has the personality of a foul-mouthed 12-year-old you often find in an online Call of Duty multiplayer match. It obsesses over the idea of point-based rewards and suffers from the same narrow level design that plagues every modern shooter to follow Halo: Combat Evolved.

The game works on the “skillshot” system, which presents a preset list of ways to kill an enemy. Deaths range from finishing off an enemy with a round in a most uncomfortable region of the body (the aforementioned “rear entry”) to bouncing a group of enemies into the sky and shooting them as they descend in slow motion (the “flyswatter”). Performing these moves is essential to progress, as each successful “skillshot” rewards the player with points that can be spent on ammunition and weapon upgrades.

When you strip away the novelty of the moves, you are left with a subpar shooter with brain-dead enemies that beeline toward you whenever they aren’t stumbling on geometry. The same can be said of similar games, such as Serious Sam and People Can Fly’s Painkiller, but these offered challenge and amusement through the sheer number of enemies present on screen. The biggest flaw of Bulletstorm is that it favors high-fidelity backgrounds and player models over hordes of enemies.

In addition to a six- to eight-hour story, there is a score-based challenge mode and a cooperative multiplayer mode that plays similar to the Horde Mode of Gears of War 2, except you are fighting for points in addition to your survival. More points are rewarded for teamwork, such as one player kicking an enemy into the air while another finishes him off with a shotgun blast. However, the multiplayer is unplayable with strangers, because most will do their own thing, resulting in a loss for the team every time.

The game’s relentless stream of dick jokes and sexual innuendo succeeded in getting Fox News’ attention and delighting foulmouthed middle school kids who manage to get their hands on the game. But the game’s clever marketing campaign and bold attitude can’t make up for the game’s misinformed, contradictory design decisions. The game isn’t as smart as it likes to think it is, but neither is it as stupid. Rather, it’s just a sometimes amusing, often brash adventure with a couple of buff marines trying to find their way off of an alien planet. In other words, this “murder boner” is flaccid.