Bulletstorm

Bulletstorm is a first person shooter and places you in the role of Grayson Hunt, a former soldier turned space pirate. It feels like a parody of many other modern fps games, with its ridiculous humour and style. The game takes place on the planet of Stygia, after Gray and his crew attack the ship commanded by his former commanding officer and nemesis, General Sarrano, causing both ships to crash on the planet. It quickly becomes apparent that the planet they are trapped on is filled with hostile mutants and raiders. The goal of the game becomes to escape the planet alive. The early levels are spent establishing the dangers of the planet and the predicament which Gray and his friend Ishi find themselves in. The narrative of Bulletstorm is actually about redemption, and is a grim and serious background,. Despite this, the way the story is told is ridiculous and riddled with immature humour. Characters will utter crazy combinations of expletives and the mood is extremely light. This mix of serious themes and poor overdone humour does not work well, denigrating both somewhat. Despite this I enjoyed the events of the story and the humour does give a few laughs with the unexpected shouts of cocksucker and dick jokes. The ending of the game doesn't resolve anything and leaves the door open for a sequel in a disgusting way which far too many games do at the moment. 

Visually Bulletstorm is an impressive game. You spend the majority of the game outdoors, so its great that People Can Fly created some amazing backdrops for the game. You get great views of the city and wilderness of Stygia, and it gives a real sense of scale to the game. Its just a pity that you cannot ever go to most of these places, but its still nice to look at the visual background. The graphics themselves are lovely, with good character models and textures throughout the game. The environments are generally impressive, as you pass through tourist pool areas and hotels, a mall, a mining complex and office buildings and they are all nicely detailed. The game uses a great amount of colour and brightness, catching the eye of the player and adding a vivid and vibrant feel to the world. The sound is also generally good, with un-intrusive music and great sound effects for the enemies. The characters are all voiced in an over the top manner, especially Sarrano, but this is fitting given the humour the game is going for. 

Gameplay in Bulletstorm is fast and fun. This is not a game were you take cover and shoot at enemies doing the same. You get up close in melee and deliver a duke nukem style boot which sends enemies into the air and allows you to make use of the game's major selling point: its skillshot feature. You are awarded points for killing enemies in a particularly creative or gruesome manner. You can impale them on spikes, electrocute them on loose cables, feed them to carnivores plants, throw them from great heights and many other ways. These points are spent on improving your weapon capacity and buying ammo. Many of the ways you kill enemies have amusing names like "gag reflex, rear entry and ejectulate". There is a surprisingly small selection of weapons and no grenades in the game, which is odd considering its level of creativity on the area of enemy deaths, but this is not a huge issue. The levels are impressive structurally but are all remarkably linear and the game depend heavily on scripted events to carry its exciting points. This is ok as the game has some great scripted events and some surprises in its campaign. The AI is generally aggressive and pursues you, even closing for melee whenever possible. The partner AI is much less aggressive, and lets you do most of the work. However, Bulletstorm's ally AI has an amazing feature: unlike cod, battlefield, homefront, medal of honor and many other titles in the fps genre the allies don't generally block doors on you or get in your way and actually advance without the player, innovation or what!

The variety of enemy types is quite small in the game, with the vast majority of enemies being different skins of mutants. The few non human enemies are interesting but there are too few of them which is a real shame and this is an area I feel the game really fell down on. Multiplayer is another area I feel the game wasted huge potential on. For the whole campaign you have at leat 1 partner with you, yet the campaign is single player only, no co-op. This is a huge letdown as the campaign is a fun ride and would be greatly enriched with a friend playing it with you. Echo mode is a mode in which you replay sections of the single player and rack up as many points as possible for the leaderboard. I got bored of this very fast as without a partner its just the singleplayer stuff without the story progress. Anarchy is Bulletstorm's version of horde, were you and a team of human players face waves of enemies and try to get a high score based on skillshots and performance. The levels are small and the mode suffers heavily from lack of enemy types.

Bulletstorm took me around 8 hours to finish, and was a fun and action packed campaign. The game has some impressive and exciting set pieces and events, and the level design while linear, manages to feel open and look impressive. The graphics are excellent and the colour palette is refreshingly varied. The story is fairly stereotypical and the script is awful on paper but it actually has a charm about it and the game is conscious of how ridiculous it all is, although dick jokes do stop being funny after a few hours. The AI is good but there are far too few types of enemies in the game and the multiplayer is hugely disappointing. Due to a lack of solid online modes and co-op, I feel that Bulletstorm is not recommendable at full retail price, but is a solid game with a refreshing style for the often stagnant fps genre.

Pros:

• Good graphics and lovely colour palette
• Skill points based kills are fun to watch and do
• Environmental backdrops are impressive and add a sense of scale to the world
• Aggressive enemy AI makes for frantic combat
• Good amount of different locations keep the campaign fresh
• Set pieces and scripted events are impressive and are the highlights of the campaign

• Multiplayer is shallow and disappointing
• No co-op campaign is a huge miss of potential
• Serious story and light hearted script do not mix well
• Enemies are too similiar, more variety and less humans please
• Ending is very poor and acts as sequel bait
• Despite appearances the levels are very linear and funnel the player
• Only 1 boss fight

Wtf:

• How do you kill a dick?

• 6/10