Review: Bulletstorm

Holy shit! Bulletstorm had some of the best fucking marketing I’ve seen in a modern game release this side of my ass. When those mother fuckers used humor to spoof other games in the first-person shooter genera, developer People Can Fly and Epic Games consistently shouted one fucking message from their dick, “This game is not an ordinary and boring shooter you asshole!.” It became the rallying cry from the god damned start.  We almost felt that we would never, could never, be ready for what was in store. We were assholes. We were dickless shitbags.

They did get one thing right, Bulletstorm is not some punk-ass, shit-snorting ordinary shooter. Fuck no! As for the latter…read on you son of a bitch.

Oh and “Dicktits."

Bulletstorm (Xbox 360, PS3. PC)
Developer: People Can Fly & Epic Games
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Released: february 22, 2011 (North America)

One thing is important to remember when trying to describe Bulletstorm. For all of its big brutish men with giant guns; for all of its swearing and machismo, Bulletstorm does not take itself very seriously. If I were to describe the game in any way it’s this. Bulletstorm is a combination of Gears of War and Serious Sam.

You play the role of Grayson Hunt, the leader of a mercenary unit called Dead Echo, as he conducts a mission of revenge against the leader of the Confederation of Planets. He swears a lot, has a cyborg Asian friend, and joins up with a female whose breasts are refreshingly small for a game of this caliber.  The plot does the job story wise and has some interesting twits throughout, but the relationship between Hunt and Ishi Sato (the cyborg) seemed forced and almost irrelevant when the motivations of Revenge and self redemption are powerful unto themselves.

The unreal engine is still looking as spiffy as ever in this iteration. People Can Fly really took great care to develop some beautiful vistas for all the carnage to take place, and on more than one occasion you’ll stop just to look around and take it all in. Vista moments are sprinkled throughout the game, and give the player a reprieve from the waves of enemies to simply appreciate the graphical craftsmanship. For all of its mannishness, Bulletstorm is easily one of the prettiest shooters out there today. Sort of like Joe Manganiello.

But you don’t play Bulletstorm for the plot the same way people never read Playboy for the articles.  You came for the skillshot system.

Without the skillshot system Bulletstorm would be nothing more than a linear shooter with some amazing vista’s in the background. It is the linchpin, the main hook, of the game. As you progress you get points for dispatching enemies, but you get more points for killing them in interesting ways.  This is backed up by an array of weapons that have both a primary and secondary firing system, and a leash which allows the player to pull enemies toward him or smash them all into the air in slow motion.  But as much as I enjoyed seeing the different ways to kills enemies, and was impressed by the sheer number of skillshots available, the entire system is held back by one major problem. All of your ammo, all of your secondary shots, even your Thumper (which allows you to smash enemies into the air) can be used up, and used up quickly if you’re not carful.

All of these can be refilled at multiple drop boxes littered throughout the levels but having to do it so consistently really breaks up the gameplay.  Not only that, buying ammo and secondary shots are basically the only things you can do with your skillpoints. No other weapon mods are available. The effect is that you are earning skillpoints not necessarily to become more powerful, but to survive at all.

I can understand that the designers might have felt that giving unlimited abilities would make the player overpowered, but if there was ever a game where I wanted to be overpowered it’s this one. I don’t want to play Bulletstorm while having to conserve my ammo. I wanted to play Bulletstorm like a badass with a big dick, destroying everything in my path and seeing how many points I can wrack up.  There are moments in the game when you are filled to the brim with your abilities, sending enemies flying into spiked walls, blowing up heads and creating general mayhem, and these represent some of the most fun moments of the game. These moments are just too fleeting.

It also causes a “Catch 22” situation. You earn less skillpoints from just simply shooting someone, but if all you have are your normal shots you are left with acquiring skillpoints at a much slower place. Sure you can earn points faster by using your normal leash and environmental hazards but I can’t help but feel that this could have been avoided altogether by simply not hobbling the player.

It also doesn’t help that the AI in the game is atrocious. Many of the enemies will just charge at you mindlessly (think Serious Sam) or have extremely recognizable patters that are easily dealt with. For example, one enemy has armor on with his weak point being his backpack. He will constantly try to face you and has a gun which lobs slow moving bombs at you. I was able to simple circle strafe him while he slowly tried to circle strafe me back, never being able to hit me with his slow movement and cumbersome weapon.  One would think that we were passed this sort of enemy charging in a 2011 game. It actually would have been forgivable and fun if you were always allowed to have every tool at your disposal to deal with them. But having no secondary shots and 3 enemies wailing on you from all sides does not make for a very fun situation.

Where the skillshot system does shine is in situations where it’s necessary to use it for gameplay reasons. Some enemies cannot be killed, or killed very easily, when simply shooting them and it requires some quick thinking to dispatch them using those secondary abilities and the environment before you find yourself getting swamped. I found that the Thumper was a good failsafe method to use in a lot of these situations, but more often than not it just gave me a little more time to scan my environment and setup better methods of killing when my enemies finally came back to earth. Bulletstorm certainly would have benefitted from more of these types of enemies, and more diversity between them. Unfortunately, it always seemed to regress back to the “enemies running straight at you” as soon as things really started to get interesting.

Bulletstorm also features a straight scoring mode called Echoes. These are made up of small digestible sections of the game for the sole purpose of gaining as many points as possible and beating the leaderboards. They are fun, but I didn’t find myself compelled to play too many of them after finishing the main story.

Overall Bulletstorm is a fun game that never really seems to take its main gameplay mechanic as far as it wants to go. The finite ammo and secondary skills make up a cage that it’s always trying to break out of, but never quite can. Instead of being a big guy with a big dick killing stuff, you end up feeling like a big guy who’s always afraid of getting his dick cut off if he tries to have too much fun.

I always thought that that whoever handled the look and atmosphere of Bulletstorm saw the movie The Ice Pirates at some point in their life and its impact transferred, albeit subconsciously, to the look and feel of the game.  Seems I may have been right all along.

Score: 75%
(70-79%: These are solid titles that has a few major issues)