Kill With Skill...More Like The Longest Dick Joke Ever.
Bulletstorm is probably the biggest game I've played now that I've been torn on deciding what to give it. On one end you have a crazy, over-the-top first person shooter that sports some of the raunchiest killing this side of Duke Nukem. Yet the game is so muddled down with mundane and downright awful potty jokes, that it loses the style I was hoping for. Look I'm all for a good dick joke or two, but Bulletstorm does nothing but speak about such things...and it's something that gets extremely annoying, extremely fast.
The first thing that blew my mind was that this game has a story...which is sort of mind blowing. Seriously, this game doesn't need any kind of story to present what it brings to the table. However, I guess I'm more impressed that the story is more then a simple "hey, here's an arena...kill with skill to earn points". Sure, the story is piss poor, but it's a bit better then what I just described to you. However, the campaign is a mixed bag, and enter Bulletstorm's biggest downfall: Single-Player only campaign! What the hell? I enjoy Gears of War for the simple fact that it is a co-operative adventure. Here, they just completely strip that out, and give you seven acts to playthrough by your lonesome. Garbage. Also, playing through the short, five-hour campaign made me realize that I'm pretty sure Cliffy B is only capable of making one kind of game. Sure, this worked with Gears and it worked with the Unreal series, but here for the third time, this shit is getting kind of stale.
Once you complete the single-player campaign, you have two other modes to choose from: Echoes and Anarchy. Echoes is basically sections of the campaign that have been cut and pasted into a mode to allow you to get a certain star ranking on them. It's cool, and it works, and I enjoyed this mode a hell of a lot more then I enjoyed the campaign. Anarchy is the online, co-operative skillpoint based mode that allows you to join up with four other plays and work together to get a certain score, as you go through waves of enemies. Sound familiar? Hell yeah it does, because its' a retooled version of Horde mode from Gears of war.
Bulletstorm does a few things correct though. The kicking (heavily inspired from Duke Nukem) and the leash are both vital to your skillpoint earning, and they are very effective and cool weapons. I will admit I had a blast playing parts of this game, while other parts were more of a yawn.
Honestly, the biggest fault of Bulletstorm is that it feels more like a $20 downloadable game then it does a full price retail disc game. It does some of it's things effectively, and you will have fun, but overall it is more then anything a disappointment and a giant rehash that yells "been there, done that".
