Bulletstorm review – FPS meets arcade fun

Bulletstorm is a breath of fresh air for FPS games. The Duty Calls parody ad, complete with in-game cries of “boring” was a statement on the state of modern shooters, as if each were as serious a look at war as Platoon, Band of Brothers or Generation Kill. Of course, this Tom Clancyesque style of fiction has as much in common with reality as Plan B’s magical super subs, but that’s another story. Eschewing the gritty ‘realism’ of modern shooters for over the top science fiction is only the beginning, though.

Bulletstom’s goal of dragging the FPS out of the muck of ‘reality’ is one I can get behind. To achieve this, developers People Can Fly appear to have thrown Gears Of War and Duke Nukem into a blender, topped it off with a bottle of cheap scotch (and an ounce for the chefs) and distilled directly into the disc manufacturing process. The results are a gloriously bloody technicolour mess.

As the campaign starts, you play Grayson Hunt, a man screwed over by his former boss, General Serrano, and out for revenge. Hunt and his crew have been working as an elite team for years, taking out drug smugglers and other baddies across the galaxy, but find out that some of their targets were less than guilty. There’s not much more you need to know, as betrayal and revenge are really all the motivation you need. Grayson is a foul mouthed character, is just about everyone in the game. Not just the occasional f-bomb, but the kind of poetic cursing that’s right up there will Bill Hicks or the character of Deb from Dexter (who, in a side note, has delivered some of the most inventive curse phrases ever put to film). In tow, and gathered along the way, are a cast of characters that ostensibly help you during your struggle, but more on that later.

The majority of the story unfolds on the planet Stygia, filled with scenery that goes from sweeping desert vistas to techno-grunge from level to level, all with the breakneck speed of a roller coaster. Early on in the game, you’re given one its standout features, the Leash. An electric blue lasso that extends from your left hand, the Leash allows you to manipulate the environment grab your foes and pull them towards you. When you do, the flying bodies slip into slow motion, allowing you to deliver killing shots, or kick them into pointy bits of scenery or off a cliff. As you upgrade your leash capabilities, you’re able to deliver all kinds of fun damage to the bad guys. Beyond the standard encounters with swarms of baddies, there are a number of boss and mini-boss fights that happen just frequently enough to prevent the normal combat from getting stale. Even the Quicktime events are handled better than in most games, awarding you points for hitting a prompt quickly, or finding the right pace to go hand-over-hand on a rope.

It’s these points, and how they’re awarded, that forms the crux of what makes Bulletstorm stand out. As you progress through the game, you’re awarded points for the variety and inventiveness of your kills, aka Skillshots. These points become currency you can spend at drop points scattered through the levels to buy ammo, upgrade weapons and the like. Every time an enemy is taken down, the points float out of them like little blue souls evapourating in the air. In many ways it feels like a blood-drenched version of Sonic The Hedgehog. Using a hotdog cart explosion to kill an enemy gives you the Sausage Fest bonus while shooting a miniboss in the ass is Fire In The Hole, and there are over a hundred different Skillshots, many with names just as puerile and fun. There’s a full checklist, some only obtainable with specific weapons, just asking the player to try and get them all.

The only downside of the single player campaign, depending on your point of view, is the utter uselessness of the non-player characters that are along for the ride. Sure, they draw fire from the bad guys, but don’t expect them to save your ass in a tight situation. As long as you keep this in mind, it shouldn’t bother you too much though. After all, you don’t want an NPC taking away all your Skillshot bonus points. Think of them as sidekicks, meant more to advance the implausibly over-the-top story than as real AIs, and you should be fine.

Beyond the campaign, Bulletstorm also has a good mix of multiplayer modes, including a great take on Horde mode called Anarchy. Anarchy has you playing with up to three friends fighting increasingly tough foes. While you compete for the best score, it actually drives you to work cooperatively to gain points with team challenges, and you can’t progress to the next level until you hit a target score. This makes the name Anarchy somewhat counterintuitive, because it’s best played with a team with good communication skills.

It’s Echoes mode that really makes the game stand out. Each Echo allows you to replay individual segments of the game with a set start and end point. You’ll want to move through it as fast as possible to get some bonus points, but the real goal is to achieve as many Skillshots as you can in that time. Any single run through can be as short as two or three minutes and your score is added to the leaderboards. After score a paltry 2610 and 1 star in my first Echo game, I saw a friend of mine had 2680, which was all the prompting I needed to make a second run through for bragging rights. It brought back that same feeling when playing arcade games and seeing your three letter initials in second place.

I’m not sure how well Bulletstorm will hold out in the long run. However, the Skillshot system, which could have come across as gimmicky has some legs to it if for no other reason than to drive you to compete against your friends. The raunchy dialogue, over the top set pieces and Echo mode all make Bulletstorm deliver on the promise of “Kill With Skill”. Pushing yourself to get creative with weapons and the environment to dispatch your foes for the sheer adolescent joy of it is something FPS games have been missing since Duke Nukem last graced monitors over a decade ago. People Can Fly should be commended for doing something new with the FPS genre, and not just because it flies in the face of current trends.