On the face of it, any reasonable person could be forgiven for believing that Bulletstorm should in fact be titled “Brodude: Dude, I’m So Bro Right Now“. The cover art, pre-release advertising, voice work and weapon demos by no-other than R. Lee Ermey (language warning), all smack of big dudes bumping chests in celebration over the mass-murder of mutated malcontents, all the while spitting pubescent, racial and misogynistic epithets at each other. While a significant portion of the dismissive attitude being levelled at Bulletstorm is justified, there is a lot to love amidst the storm of cursing, violence and RARRRRGHs. Oh, and also bullets.
Bulletstorm (alternate title 2 – All Video Games: The Video Game) a People Can Fly and Epic Games joint, seems to riff on a lot of games in it’s lineage. You have a boot with which to kick dudes, as you did in Duke Nukem 3D. You can slow time around an enemy, Max Payne Bullet Time style. You get points for kills as you (realistically probably) did(n’t) in The Club. You will face wave upon wave of enemies, reminiscent of that Serious guy named Sam. The artistic design of the enemies will bring forth memories of Borderlands. The over the top weaponry on offer smacks of People Can Fly’s other FPS title Painkiller. Counter-intuitively, this melange of video game mechanics works to form a fairly cohesive whole, rather than the expected tangled mess of tired relics of a bygone era. Bulletstorm surprises in many ways, not the least of which is a realisation that didn’t strike me until I was a good quarter of the way into my playthrough; I expected to be wading through language’s sewer in search of fast-paced, addictive gameplay. Instead, I found that what I had assumed to be a swollen sack of testosterone, heavy with compensatory cursing and violence was instead a refreshingly fun, colourful and varied shooter amid a brown sea of Call of Duty titles and clones. Let’s collectively thank People Can Fly for finally helping Epic Games discover colour, am I right?
Whilst sliding around in the magnetic boots of Grayson Hunt, the player will spend the majority of the game on the abandoned tourism world of Stygia. The game opens with Hunt and his second in command, Ishi Sato brutally interrogating and finally murdering a bounty hunter that had been sent after them by their former commanding officer, General Sarrano. A short control-familiarisation tutorial later finds Hunt and his crew plummeting toward Stygia in their freshly damaged ship with Sarrano’s disabled capital ship hurtling groundward behind them. So begins the advertised skillshot-laden blood ballet you’ve seen in countless screenshots and preview videos. Shortly into the adventure, Hunt acquires an Energy Leash from a truckcrushed member of Dead Echo, Sarrano’s crack mercenary group. It’s the leash which provides access to the skillshots, rankings and weapon unlocks/upgrades that the entire game is built upon.
Killing mutants in Bulletstorm is both varied and fun. The long list of frankly ridiculous weapons available provide ample opportunity to utterly destroy any challenge thrown at the player, almost to the point of making the game too easy. On Normal, the only real challenge will be found during the major set pieces of the game, such as the huge mining wheel chase showcased in pre-release footage. These sections aren’t mechanically difficult, but the sheer volume of enemies that are present tend to require the player to get familiar with the order in which enemies should be dealt with. A lesson which can only be learned through checkpointing and repetition.
Instruments of wholesale slaughter are generously provided to you through the use of your stolen Dead Echo leash on Confederation drop-pods scattered liberally throughout the Stygian landscape. These pods allow you to spend the skillshot points you’ve racked up on ammunition and upgrades for your weapons. Every weapon in the game has an associated upgrade which provides an alternate fire option. These things are cah-razy. The Peace-Maker Carbine (PMC), the run-of-the-mill assault rifle ever-present throughout your adventures is worthy of a whole new level of respect once it has let-forth a charged shot upon an unsuspecting victim. 100 rounds of ammunition are discharged in a single shot, shredding any enemy unfortunate enough to stand in its path. Little more than a red-hot, flayed skeleton is left behind which soon crumbles to dust. This should give you some idea of the level of ridiculousness that People Can Fly have brought to the table. The Petetrator smacks of the stake-gun from Painkiller, except that this time around the projectile is a massive, spinning drill bit which pins enemies onto surfaces for gruesome/hilarious ragdollin’. (It would be remiss of me not to mention the fact that the skillshot associated with pinning a spinning enemy to the ground with the Penetrator is called “Break Dancing”.) Your arsenal is filled to bursting with many more weapons of this calibre (pun intended). I’m reluctant to list any of them here, however as some of the highlights of Bulletstorm for me were the discovery of their uses through simple and cathartic experimentation.
Skillshots bring a retro feel to proceedings by urging the player forward by the accumulation of points. Every single time the player downs an enemy they recieve points based on the skillshot performed. These range from Bullet Kick and Bullet Slide which simply require the player to kill an enemy in mid-air having kicked or slid into them, to more complex feats such as First In Last Out – “Get an enemy airborne, kill a different enemy, kill the first before he lands”, or Sausage Fest – “Kill an enemy using a hot dog cart explosion.” Each time one of these feats is performed, the title of the skillshot floats above the downed enemy in neon letters along with its point value. The player is encouraged to vary the types of skillshots they attempt by increasing the value of each skillshot the first time they occur – a fact more relevant to Echoes, Bulletstorm’s offline multiplayer mode. Echoes is a time-attack style mode in which players attempt to speed through a level in an attempt to rack up as many points as possible. Unfortunately it seems that all of the Echoes are simply sections of the singleplayer campaign sliced up into short 5-10 minute runs suitable for just such an endeavour. Honestly, unless you’re the kind of person that simply cannot rest until they reach the top of every leaderboard they encounter, Echoes won’t prove particularly attractive. Anarchy, the online multiplayer mode is Bulletstorm’s take on Hoard mode, introduced by Gears of War. Players are required to rack up a minimum point total before the round timer expires. Anarchy is less about surviving the onslaught as it is about ensuring that, as a team, the players gain points through the creative and liberal execution of skillshots. A small number of co-operative skillshots exist which also happen to generate some of the highest point rewards available. Unfortunately, my time with the mode was marred by lacklustre team-mates and fast-onset boredom. Like Echoes, Anarchy simply doesn’t have enough depth to keep me coming back for more. I should note that this is true for any of the Horde mode variants I’ve played to date. They always seem to boil down to a number of easy levels which lull you into a false sense of security, followed by sudden and absolute devastation at the hands of an exponential difficulty curve.
The humour throughout Bulletstorm’s campaign has its tongue buried firmly in its cheek. The story turned out to be more than the assumed thin veneer of plot, applied last-minute as an excuse to include a campaign/story option in the main menu. It certainly won’t win any awards for its narrative efforts, but it did work well to drive the player through the game. Many will find Ishi, your constant companion throughout Bulletstorm annoying. I however enjoyed his company. His stoic and loyal nature, constantly at odds with the cold and temperamental robotic augmentation acquired early in the adventure serves to lend an interesting conflict to what would otherwise be a bland party of two, sharing the same agenda and motivation. The protagonist, Grayson Hunt, shows an unexpected depth of character as he leads his crew to their assumed doom. He’s no John Marston, but at least he’s not just another silent protagonist, right? I think it says a lot that the writers were able to make a group of powerfully unlikable characters likeable over the course of a game which isn’t known or marketed for its writing.
At the end of the day, your enjoyment of Bulletstorm will come down to how much slack you’re willing to give its writing and dialogue. Either way, beneath it all is a shooter which begs you to play it. The fast, refreshing and moreish gameplay on offer stands at odds with the length of the singleplayer campaign, a deficiency only made more obvious by the uninspiring online and offline multiplayer modes. You should play it, but I’d suggest that you give it a chance to find its way to the sale table at your local game store.
