Bulletstorm

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.