Bulletstorm Goes Beyond The Headshot

It's 2010, and if you take it all the way back to Wolfenstein 3D, we've been going bananas for first-person shooters for 18 years. They've taken on various forms over the years and they've informed the expansion of the shooter genre, as well. Some of them, for example, take place from a third-person perspective. Revolutionary, I know. Games like GoldenEye 007, Kingpin, and Soldier of Fortune started placing more importance on body-specific damage, leading to the rise of the headshot--that one-hit kill that skilled players can pull off again and again. With the ability to take down most enemies in one shot, experienced players can now whip through most shooters with relative ease, essentially min-maxing the experience by picking the simplest, most accurate weapon--like a basic pistol--and ignoring whatever else the developers may have cooked up.

You could argue that this is a player issue, and that these guys should stop trying to just blast their way through games as quickly as possible. But my counter is that this is really a design issue. Most linear games probably shouldn't rely on a player's ability to "make their own fun" along the way. Properly incentivizing the player to use all of the abilities at his or her disposal seems like one of those key principles that more games should have. This is something I've been thinking about more and more lately, usually while I'm headshotting my way through yet another action game. So it was a pleasant surprise to take a look at the latest first-person shooter from People Can Fly, which seems to recognize the issue and has plans to do something about it.

To encourage you to mess around with your enemies a bit, Bulletstorm has a points system in place that rewards creative kills. It's not entirely unlike 2008's The Club. Each weapon will have its own set of unique kills, and you'll also earn points for properly using your other abilities. In addition to shooting at dudes, you'll also have a big, Duke Nukem-like boot, a low slide that pops enemies up into the air when kicked, and an energy leash that you can use to grab and manipulate enemies or nearby objects, like a spherical trash can that explodes when shot. The game also gives you time to toy with the opposition by causing any enemy you kick to briefly warp into a localized state of slow-motion. It doesn't drop the speed of the entire game, just the enemy you've interacted with. This gives you time to kick an enemy, lasso him back in your direction, maybe kick again, then finish off with a flail gun attack to the neck or something.

"Killing with skill" earns you more points than a standard kill. Points are spent on upgrades for your various items, though the extent of the upgrades hasn't been put on display just yet. One thing we were shown was the ability to use your energy leash to slam the ground, popping up nearby enemies and objects high into the air, setting them up for whatever else you feel like doing to them. But we'll have to wait for more weapons to be revealed before we can understand the full extent of the combat.

So far, two weapons have been shown. There's a fairly standard assault rifle, which looks like it's fine for, you know, shooting guys in the head. Then there's the aforementioned flail gun, which fires two grenades tied together with a chain. The projectile fires out like bolos, and it will whip around anything it comes in contact with. Also, it doesn't immediately detonate, letting you blow up things via a remote trigger. This lets you wrap the grenades around a pole or other stationary object, like a remote mine. Or you can wrap it around a garbage can, then kick the garbage can at enemies, setting off the grenades when they get close. It seems like a versatile weapon, and it's imaginative in the way you'd hope for a weapon designed by the studio behind Painkiller to be.

All of this looks like it's running at or close to 60 frames per second, though obviously we were only shown a short slice of the overall product. Though questions directed at Epic representatives were mostly deflected, the game will have some kind of multiplayer component, and with the way the campaign has AI allies rolling with you from place to place, cooperative play seems likely, as well. We'll have to wait for E3 for our next bit on Bulletstorm, but the good news is that Epic and EA are letting people play the game for themselves there, and it'll be interesting to see how well the game's different attacks combine. In case you missed it earlier this week, here's the released trailer for Bulletstorm.