Bulletstorm is a violent fast-paced first-person shooter developed by Epic Games and People Can Fly, the team behind the awesome pain killer franchise. It was released in 2011 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. It's an incredibly over-the-top experience with some of the most satisfying gunplay that the FPS genre has to offer.
GAME STORY
In Bulletstorm, you take on the role of Grayson Hunt, voiced by the legendary Steve Blum whose voice alone has the power to spontaneously impregnate women. Grayson is a former member of the dead echo squad, a blackops team working for the evil general Serrano carrying out political assassinations under the guise that they're killing actual criminals. During a routine mission they discover they're being used to kill innocent people and shortly after this Serrano betrays them and leaves more for dead. After this, the squad goes rouge where they seem to do little more than just get drunk all the time and killed the odd bounty hunter.
In the game's opening up to killing an affirmation bounty hunter they happen to run into Serrano spaceship known as the Ulysses and a drunken Greyson decides it's a good idea to attack them head-on with their own pint-sized spaceship. They do manage to cripple Serrano Shepard in the process they crush land on the planet stygia and most of Grayson's crew is killed soon after with his best friend Ishii mortally wounded and brought back to life through cybernetic implants that have him fighting to gain control his mind over a murderous AI system.
The planet they've landed on was originally a large resort destination for tourists that soon got overrun by the tens of thousands of convicts that were held beneath the planet's surface. Then things went even further to shit due to the radiation and other deadly flora and fauna that the planet contained, now it's basically a war zone where mutants and bandits all fight for dominance and this is the battleground the player has to traverse.
Initially, Grayson and Ishii are just trying to reach the location of one of Serrano's troops in the hopes they can escape the planet on the dropship that's going to be sent in as a rescue, turns out this trooper is a woman named Trischka someone with a link to Grayson's past and also involved in the reasons behind Serena's betrayal. What ensues is an uneasy truce as the three agree to work together to escape the planet eventually encountering Serrano for the game's finale. This is surprisingly well-written and dark stuff with a really intense prologue where you watch how Grayson basically ruins the lives of several hundred people within the first five minutes of the game.
What polarizes with this generally well laid out plot is how characters often make really immature dick jokes or childish remarks the type of insults you'd expect to hear from a fourteen-year-old kid.
That's mostly keeping in tune with the game's comic book-like feel I mean this is a game with some ludicrous action. One of the earliest levels in the game has you want a train car being chased by a giant grinding wheel.
Few chapters later, you’re given the controls of a large mechanical dinosaur which tears everything to pieces with its powerful machine gun. You'll fight a giant mutant plant in an epic boss battle, controller mounted minigun on the back of a chopper decimating bans on nearby rooftops and dodge lightning anomalies as you move through a ruined building during an energy storm.
Early on in the game, you get your hands on an instinct to leash which is an energy whip of sorts that can be used to grab enemies and pull them towards you for an easy kill but it also gives you access to something called the skill shot system. The skill shot system is a passive grading program that is constantly assessing how you perform in combat, the more creatively you kill an enemy the more points you give in which you can then spend or stock up on ammo or weapon upgrades when you reach a nearby drop kits so obviously you want to kill enemies as lavishly as possible so you've got enough points to stay well equipped.
Killing an enemy the standard way by you know just shooting them until they're dead will give you a measly 10 points but killing them with a headshot for instance will net you 25 points. The amount of skill shots in the game is extensive and some are genuinely tough to pull off but most of them you'll do unintentionally during combat.
There are dozens and dozens of these skill shots and they all give you varying amounts of points depending on how hard or easy they are to pull off. All of the different weapons also have their own skill shots attached to them, you've got your standard machine gun and revolver, shotgun, couple of grenade launchers, spear gun and a sniper rifle all of the associated skill shots are actually more varied than you think.
The spear gun is probably my favorite, not only because it can kill enemies in a single hit but also because the projectile has a tendency to ricochet around and take out anyone else unlucky enough to be standing around. If you line up a bunch of bad guys in fire, you can also impale multiple enemies earning you the shish kebob skill shot and this skill shot thing is really more than a gimmick because the entire game is centered around this mechanic and that's really satisfying when you're able to pull off a series of impressive shots with score multipliers popping up all over the screen.
Most of the weapons are great fun to use all offering up alternate fire modes though some of them are a bit gimmicky and not all that useful in certain situations. The sniper rifle is a good example of this letting you steer a bullet in slow motion as you're firing at enemies which is neat but there's only a couple of instances in the entire campaign where you have to use it to progress and you're better off keeping more useful weapons equipped in the meantime. You're given a three weapon limit which kind of sucks meaning you have to frequently switch weapons in and out drop gets throughout its level.
The only real issue I can find with the skill shot system is that it's not entirely consistent I mean most of the time the environments allow you to kill enemies lavishly and as creatively as you'd like but some of them just feature little to no interaction with the destructive elements forcing you to kill enemies much more routinely. There are rare occasions when you're trying to pull off a skill shot and you just can't get it to work you know maybe there's a hit detection problem and one of your planned attacks doesn't pull off I mean I'd say this happens about 20% of the time in the overall campaign which isn't bad but it's just kind of frustrating when you know how fun the combat can be.
Another thing is that when you're in combat with a dozen guys and you're running around kicking people into power lines or into piranhas filled lakes or just thinking of a wacky way to kill your next enemy you're constantly being shot up by the other eleven people you are not focusing on, every enemy in this game is a hit scare enemy, and like I said, while you're dealing with bad guy number one the other eleven aren't standing around waiting for their turn. What this means is that in larger scale battles, you'll most often have to kill enemies in a boring and routine way because the damage you take is just relentless.
On that note, playing Bulletstorm on the higher difficulties kind of removes that experimentation element as well because you take damage so quickly, you can't really afford to dick around that much in the combat. For some reason too there's no jump button in this game and when you come to small ledges you have to press a context-sensitive but to vault over it which is just annoying.
GAME GRAPHICS OVERVIEW
This truly is an incredible looking game at times with some gorgeous particle effects and environments. Bulletstorm runs on the Unreal 4 engine and I can't speak for the console versions but on the PC, this is just a great looking game with incredibly large environments and just like I said, it's sane set pieces. The real centerpiece here is the combat system, racing has an antigravity boot that you can use to kick enemies off nearby ledges or into environmental hazards and you can also slide along the ground which launches enemies into the air in a similar fashion.
| Minimum system requirement | Recommended system requirement |
|---|---|
| OS: Windows 7/8/8.1/10 x64 | OS: Windows 7/8/8.1/10 x64 |
| Processor: AMD A8-3850 | Processor: Intel Core i5-760 / AMD Athlon II X4 645 AM3 |
| Memory: 6 GB RAM | Memory: 8 GB RAM |
| Graphics: Radeon HD 6850 | Graphics: GeForce GTX 750 Ti / Radeon HD 7770 |
| DirectX: Version 11 | DirectX: Version 11 |
| Network: Broadband Internet connection | Network: Broadband Internet connection |
| Storage: 15 GB available space | Storage: 15 GB available space |
| Sound Card: DirectX Compatible | Sound Card: DirectX Compatible |
| Developer: | People Can Fly |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Gearbox Publishing |
| Genre: | Action, Adventure |
| Release date: | 2011 |
CONCLUSION
Bulletstorm also has something of a weak ending, the final boss fight is a QuickTime event which is a total letdown and the ending was written to allow a sequel which ultimately got cancelled leaving the storyline unresolved. When everything in this game clicks, there's really nothing else quite like it and the only other shooting game I can think of that comes this close to being over the top is all the shooting games like blood and Shadow Warrior but even those can't really match the type of carnage you can cause in Bulletsrorm.
I don't think bullet sum is really a must-play title but it is very entertaining throughout its four or five hour duration, but I can't think of any other game that lets you kill someone by kicking them into a Venus flytrap so it might just be worth checking out for that alone.
Thanks for reading.
Images were gotten from www.gamespot.com
