Bulletstorm

   Bulletstorm is a nonstop action packed filled ride of gunplay and excitement.   The developer People Can Fly has put together an interesting experience and experiment that tests what a first person shooter can be.   Does this is experiment into a genre that is filled with some many contenders able to hold up against the best of them?

You play as Grayson Hunt a member of an elite ex-squad called Dark Echo, who was once head by General Serrano.   You learn early on that the guys of Dark Echo were betrayed by their general and are looking to exact their revenge.   Grayson and his ex-squad mate’s catch up to the general’s ship that is orbiting a planet called Stygia.   A drunken Grayson decides to slam his small ship into the general’s rather large ship in an attempt to destroy his ship.   Both ships take massive amounts of damage and they both start to fall out of orbit and land on Stygia.   You and your half robotic partner Ishi take on the journey to get off of the distant planet no matter what and to hunt down and kill your ex-general.   The games story is surprisingly good.   I thoroughly enjoyed the revenge tale and it helps keep the game moving.  

This is not your everyday first person shooter; Bulletstorm has some interesting mechanics to it that sets it apart from anything else out there.   Skill Shots can add some more strategy to dispatching your enemies.   The game gives you points and point bonuses depending on how gruesome you kill your enemies.   Sure you can still do head shots but they won’t net you a lot of points.   Now if you slide into somebody and then kick them in midair and they land onto a spiked plant then you will receive a lot more points.   The points are then used as currency in the store where you can then upgrade your weapons and buy ammo.  

Not only that but you have been given the use of an Energy Leash that you can use to grab a hold of an enemy and pull them towards you.   This helps you create interesting gunplay scenarios like; you can fling somebody towards you then kick them in midair and then blow their head off as they are flying backwards into a spiked plant.   The game gives you an open canvas to splatter blood on it.   But if you need help the game gives you a list of Skill Shots you can do against enemies.   This list is huge, you are not able to see the whole list when you first start but you unlock them once you progress farther in the game.   The first time you are able to pull off a Skill Shot you will then get an extra point bonus for the first time you do one.   With so many different ways to kill your enemies the game never gets boring.    

The weapons at your disposal only add to the sure blood mess you will make.   With a four barrel shotgun called the Bone Duster to the bullet guiding sniper rifle to even the Flail gun that shoots two grenades tied together by a chain to wrap around an enemy and then detonates.   The guns available offer a lot of variety to how you can play.   I found myself sometimes forgetting that I had the leash.   You have to almost forget your instincts when it comes to first person shooters.   This is a good thing; this sets it so far apart from the Call of Duty’s and Halo’s.   It is also weird for a FPS to not have a grenade at your disposal.   There were times when a grenade would come in handy.

The look of the game is great.   The once sprawling cityscapes are now over grown jungle areas.   The environments look good and the enemies look nasty.   There was never any point when the game would slow down.   No matter how many enemies are screen and things blowing up in the background.   The facial animations of the characters are one of the low points.   They don’t link up to what they are saying.   Another problem I ran into was random pop in of objects.   I also found some clipping issues with your character or an enemy going in and out of walls.   Sometime you would kick somebody they would fly back into a wall and get stuck in it.

One of my favorite parts of the game is in the beginning when you are going through an amusement park.   Then you stumble upon miniature city that you rampage through.   You are like the size of Godzilla in relation to you and the mock city buildings.   It is great running through the streets kicking bad guys into buildings.   The game only has a couple of mounted gun sequences which is great.   They also have at one time where you control a three story tall robot Godzilla like creature.   You use him to demolish blockades and annihilate anyone that gets in your way.      

The voice over work and the dialog is not that great.   All of the characters talk with a gravelly voice and they curse up a storm.   It can get annoying after a while, when every sentence that comes out of their mouths contains 2 curse words.   They are trying to go for the shock value, it just gets annoying and there is no need for it.  

The overall presentation of the game is great, from the good looking environments, the good story, and the Skill Shot mechanic is awesome.   But the bad voice work and the bugs that are present in the game take it down a notch.   People Can Fly has done a great job with this game and I hope when they make another one that they can fix some of the issues that are present in the game.   If you pick this up you will have a great time.