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. It's not just who you kill, or how many you kill, but how you kill, and that distinction makes EA, Epic Games, and People Can Fly's Bulletstorm ($59.99) for PS3 (the version I tested), Xbox 360, and PC fun. Great graphics (despite some irritating bugs) and surprisingly solid writing and voice acting are the icing on Bulletstorm's murderous cake, and help it overcome its short play time and limited extras.
Bulletstorm: The Story Behind The Madness
You play mercenary Grayson Hunt, voiced by the inimitable, ubiquitous Steve Blum, who finds himself stranded on the planet Stygia after a drunken attempt to kill the man who betrayed his crew. Through some early contrivances, Grayson gets his hands on a boot that sends enemies flying across the room in slow motion, an energy lash that sends enemies flying into the air in slow motion, and a visual interface that grades how stylishly he kills his enemies and rewards him with weapon upgrade points for use at conveniently placed drop pods.
Creative Carnage
All of these contrivances combine to form Bulletstorm's main mechanic: skillshots. The interface that grades your kills has over a hundred different special conditions for murder, and the more you hit, the more points you get. 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. Acquired points are used to upgrade your weapons so that you can unleash even more devastating attacks. You can also blow enemies' torsos off with a four-barreled shotgun, kick them into cacti and spikes and off cliffs, and generally just go nuts in different and increasingly violent ways. It's a system that rewards creativity more than speed, and feels incredibly rewarding when you unlock a new skillshot. You can check a database of available skillshots at any time during the game, and as you get more weapons and upgrades, more skillshots become available.
Obviously, this game is not for kids, and it thoroughly earns its M rating. The constant spray of blood is one of the reasons, and Grayson's sharp tongue is the other. He and the other characters in the game swear with a creativity that borders on the poetic, combining expletives in new and ever more more obscene ways. Bulletstorm has come under fire by some news outlets and countries for its violence and obscenity, but at heart it's no more offensive than a Paul Verhoeven movie. Mind the rating, don't let your kids play it, and enjoy.
Atomspheric Levels
If BioShock's Rapture was a museum, building atmosphere for the player and enticing him to linger and ponder on the game's message, 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. There's no high-minded philosophy and meticulous, pointed architecture here; only new, colorful locations to rush through with guns blazing. Shooting a rushing army of crazed mutants with a minigun in an abandoned club while Disco Inferno plays is something you don't usually see in video games, but it's in Bulletstorm.
Graphics Issues, Limited Game Play
Bulletstorm isn't perfect, however. Once you get through the single-player campaign, it's pretty short on content. Depending on the difficulty level, Bulletstorm will last between six and ten hours, and after that there are only two extra modes. "Echoes" lets you replay certain fights in the game with an emphasis on getting the highest skillshot point total, putting your score up on a leaderboard to compete with friends online. "Anarchy" pits you and three friends against rushing waves of enemies, with a skillshot point goal to reach with each wave. Neither mode adds a lot of meat to the game, but skillshot-hungry gamers will probably enjoy the challenge and focus they offer. 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.
People Can Fly used Epic's Unreal Engine, a graphics engine prone to texture pop-in. It's especially pronounced in this game; in the PlayStation 3 version I reviewed, I constantly saw blurry textures during cutscenes, waiting several seconds before they fully loaded and became clear. It's a minor complaint, though, and it won't get in the way of the game play.
Should You Buy Bulletstorm?
While Bulletstorm is light on content and maturity, it's heavy on style and tons of fun to play. It's a must-rent game for any action fan, and worth buying if you like coming back to get higher and higher scores while indulging in a bit of the old ultraviolence.
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