Bulletstorm

Shooting a guy is easy. Shooting a guy in the head gets you more points. Shooting a guy in the sensitive bits, then shooting him in the head gets you even more points. Firing a bola made of grenades around a guy's neck, using the lash to send him and his friends into the air, then watching the ensuing explosion immediately kill half of them and send the other half flying into metal spikes gets you tons of points.

Bulletstorm's Stygia is an amusement park, tempting the player with fast and colorful rides and games. People Can Fly managed to turn what could have been a bleak, brown wasteland into a lush and varied world of abandoned (but still powered) buildings, jungles, canyons, and tons of homicidal psychopaths.

Bulletstorm is an orgy of carnage, and easily one of the most violent video games of all time. Thanks to its incredibly stylized approach to the first-person shooter, it turns everyday video game activities like running and gunning into a competitive sport where technique matters even more than efficiency.

The lack of a cooperative campaign mode is unfortunate; Anarchy proves that People Can Fly incorporated cooperative mechanics into the game, and the fact that Grayson is almost always accompanied by at least one partner during the campaign would have offered prime opportunity for a co-op mode.

There's no high-minded philosophy and meticulous, pointed architecture here; only new, colorful locations to rush through with guns blazing.