A few months before the release of Bulletstorm a small demo emerged onto the internet called “Duty Calls”. Throughout the five minutes or so of game time the demo steadily mocked the Call of Duty franchise for its “boring” combat, predictable storyline and overly serious attitude. It ended in ridiculous fashion when you retrieved the “Nuclear Missile Bomb” from “The Leader Enemy Boss”, and then proceed to give the thumbs up while the American flag sprouts from your fingers. It was all very funny and well done, but why was this released on to the internet? The next caption read “Putting the Fun back into Gun, BulletStorm: Kill with Skill” and it all made sense. Just like the soldiers you play in the game, Epic Games and People May Fly weren’t afraid to piss off the bigger competitors and give them the finger while doing it.
In the campaign you play the foul-mouthed and seemingly indestructible Grayson Hunt. Betrayed by Sarrano his former commander, the ex-soldier dedicates his life to finding and killing said Commander. Ten years after the betrayal he runs into Sarrano’s ship in space and in a suicidal stunt manages to bring both ships down into the planet Stygia, a planet seemingly solely populated by people wanting to kill you. The main, (some would say only) focus in Bulletstorm is its combat. The game throws a ridiculous amount of enemies at you and hands you even more ridiculous tools in which to dispose of them. Each weapon brings its own flavour to the combat and are each lethal in their own way. Alongside those weapons you have a leash on your arm with which you can drag enemies over to you in a Scorpion-esque fashion and a kick which would put Chuck Norris to shame. On top of that, every weapon has a “charge” function which brings even more destruction to the table. For example the pistol can take a man’s head clean off, but the charge function will turn it into a flare gun which you can fire into a charging enemy and watch as he spirals into his friends and turns them all into burning, screaming bags of points.
Ah yes, points, they’re what the game comes down to. In Bulletstorm simply killing everything in front of you to complete the mission isn’t enough. As the caption says, you have to do it with skill. All your kills have points attached to them; a simple kill will net you a measly ten points, but wrap and enemy in a chain bomb and kick him into a group of enemies who happen to be standing next to a bomb and watch your points soar. Each kill has its own “skillshot” attached to it and with 135 skillshots in the game you’ll have a hard time repeating kills over and over again. The game has a list of every skillshot and how to get them, but the fun is in experimenting yourself, I have tried 75% of the skillshots in game and I’ve probably looked up on five of them. Bulletstorm goes out of its way to pat you on the head for your killing and the moments where you truly pull off something fantastic and watch all the numbers fly over head can be quite exhilarating.
While you can have a lot of fun trimming the hoards of Stygia the actual set pieces in the game are lacking. Anytime something big came around, the game would invert itself and suddenly Grayson would take control of me. Most of the games set-pieces boil down to you pressing a single button and watching as the action unfolds, in a game that prides itself on making you look cool as you fight, the fact it takes that ability away from you in the most dramatic moments is both galling and extremely frustrating. When someone wants to play a video game, they want to do exactly that, play it. If the player was given full control over those set pieces, what they would lack in visual impressiveness they would vastly make up in excitement and immersion. Simply pressing “x” does not kill the most basic of enemies so it should not kill the biggest and baddest Bulletstorm has to offer.
A lot has been made of the humour in Bulletstorm and for the most part it is a funny game. It is crude and tickles the lowest part of your funny bone, but it’s in tone with the whole over the top nature of the game so it works. What doesn’t work quite so well is when the story tries to put the ridiculousness of the game on pause and gets serious. It’s hard to get into the moment when Grayson gets philosophical with his old ex-soldier buddy Ishi, since not two minutes ago he was shouting “Eat this dick-tits” as he threw an enemy strapped with explosives into another group of enemies to attain the skillshot “Gang-bang”. For the most part the story fits well and provides a few chuckles, but these moments of seriousness (more frequent towards the end) jerks you out of your point-gaining fervour and feels very much out of place.
Fun is a word we’ve probably lost sight of while reviewing games, but it is brought into the fore in Bulletstorm. Killing enemies is fun, listening to the crude jokes is fun, the guns are fun and gaining new skillshots is fun. Bulletstorm isn’t a game that attempts to further the genre in any way; it’s not a game we’ll all look back on as something that changed the nature of the FPS. But for all the fantastic narrative devices in the Half-life series or the exploration in the Stalker series none of those games achieve the same amount of pure joy you get from the combat in Bulletstorm.
