Title: Bulletstorm
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: People Can Fly, EPIC Games
Platform: Xbox 360, PS3, PC
Genre: Shooter
Release Date: February 22, 2011
Price: $59.99
Rating: M
Bulletstorm is what I would describe as the “Family Guy” of video games. It’s not for everyone, and it makes no apologies to the people that don’t like it. It isn’t the best thing on the market, but for what it is, it’s worth checking out.
Bulletstorm is a game from the collaborative efforts of EPIC games and People Can Fly. PCF were mainly a PC based developer, that made the over the top shooter “Painkiller”. I bring that up because you can certainly see the stylistic influence in Bulletstorm. Matching them with the same guys that do the Gears series seems almost like a natural fit.
In Bulletstorm you take on the role of Grayson Hunt. Gray (as he is known to his friends) is a drunken, space pirate on a mission of revenge. When he did wet work for the military his commanding officer was a man named General Sarrano. Grayson was the head of the black ops team called “Dead Echo” and they killed anyone that Sarrano told them to.
Grayson and his team eventually find out that those they were killing were innocent victims of Sarrano’s quest for power. Finding out the secrets of this, Grayson and his band of merry men break off go AWOL and are bound and determined to pay Sarrano back. This all culminates in Grayson attacking Gen. Sarrano’s ship head on, and in the process crashes them both into the planet below. Stygia is a planet that was once a beautiful getaway for the super rich. Now it is overrun by strange creatures and even stranger gangs of cannibalistic humans, hell bent on killing anything they see. Grayson and his friend, who is now half a cyborg (thanks to Gray’s crash landing) set off to hunt down the good General, as well as find a way of this psychotic planet.
Bulletstorm was described to me as “Tony Hawk w/ guns” and I really struggle to find a more simplistic way to boil the game down. The thing about it is it’s pacing is a bit weird. You actually don’t start “scoring” anything until midway through the first act. If someone were to plop this game down in front of anyone without prior knowledge of the “Kills With Skills” motto, they would think it is just a run of the mill shooter. Once you FINALLY get the ability to leash enemies you will also start scoring points for the various ways you dispatch your foes. Needless to say the first couple sections of the game are a bit slow.
Once the game hits the gas, the action never really lets up, which is really the way it should be. Bulletstorm thrives on its pedal to the metal kind of action. The best and most used weapon in your arsenal is the leash. This will sling whip enemies towards the player and allow them to then chain combos and rack up the skill points. Killing the different enemies in a myriad of different ways will net you more and more skill points. With these skill points you can purchase ammo as well as weapon upgrades through “drop pods” scattered around Stygia. These drop pods are never far from each other and you are constantly gaining points, so it never really became a factor to conserve ammo.
Once the story came to a close I didn’t so much care for the characters, but enjoyed the way they had grown in the game. Though it is a bit hard to see how some of them will be allowed to grow more in the inevitable sequel.
Bulletstorm is a bit of an enigma in the realm of video games. It’s really not that deep a game, honestly. It’s a shooter and so few shooters have any story that is worth paying attention to, but that’s not why you will play this game. The language in the game is not kid friendly, to put it lightly. It’s like they wrote the script in a sort of “Mad-Libbs” sort of way, only with EVERY blank the fill word was some form of expletive… or reference to male genitalia. It becomes one of those jokes that’s funny at first, is over used, and then is funny again by the end. A lot was made of the “dick-tits” comment in the game, but in all honesty, I don’t even remember hearing that one.
Bulletstorm is just fun. Figuring out new and horribly sadistic ways to kill your advesaries becomes the game. I died more times than not, not because of over powered enemies or weapons, but because I was trying to line up some ridiculous shot for points. Rarely did I find a section that made me pissed at the game simply because I couldn’t get past it. Sure, I did my fair share of dying but each time I did, I would approach the next try from a different angle or a different skill shot in mind to get around it. Several times I would laugh out loud at the disgusting and juvenile descriptors for these skill shots. Like; “Fire in the hole”, “Gang Banged”,and “Sausage Fest” the latter is accomplished by killing an enemy with a hot dog cart explosion.
If you look at the game from a critical standpoint it probably won’t measure up to the like of Halo Reach or Bioshock, but it was never meant to. Playing this game is just meant to be pure fun, and that is exactly what it is. Is it a game that I will likely purchase, probably not. Bulletstorm is really good for one play through, or milking as many achievements/trophies out of as possible. It’s not a game for everyone, but if you enjoy a dick joke (or twenty) you could probably have a pretty good time with it. Just don’t go into it expecting to finish it a changed person.
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