Musings on ... Bulletstorm

Bulletstorm was made by People Can Fly and Epic Games, and was Published by Electronic Arts. It is a shooter. And it's very silly.

Now, I was sceptical about Bulletstorm when I first approached it. I'd heard that it was pretty fun, but essentially nothing special. Thankfully I feel like that's unfair, and that it's actually pretty great. It's never going to win any awards by any stretch of the imagination, and it's not massively impressive on any scale, but most importantly it's fun.

It harks back to a time when games were about running around making enemies explode and just having fun. Little story, few cut-scenes (still too many) and an over-abundance of quick-time events. But that doesn't make it a bad game, and the most surprising thing going into it was how clever it was.

For those who don't know, the central mechanic is built around killing people in interesting ways. To aid you in this most glorious of tasks you have a leash and a kick button. Together these let you set enemies up in the best way possible to score the most points. It actually becomes a matter of pride to get as many point as possible, and ever getting a simple 10 for killing an enemy feels awful.

The listed skill-shots can feel a little constricting at times, and there's no room for doing something which you consider to be awesome, but which wasn't in the game. On the whole though, the desire to complete as many skill-shots as possible becomes one of the greatest driving forces in the game. Unfortunately there's not a whole lot else driving you. Enemies rarely change, varying between melee guys, ranged guys, ranged guys who can dodge your leash and boot, tougher ranged guys, and enemies with teenie-tiny weakspots which are a nightmare to kill.

There is a story, but it's nothing to write home about. It's functional for sure, and does its job satisfactorily, but that's not really why you're there anyway. Who cares about story when there're still hundreds of guys to kick into cacti. That's not to say the writing is bad, far from it in fact. Yes there's a lot of swearing, and an awful lot of peurile humour, but it's genuinely funny at a lot of points and really helps to define the different characters through the way they speak.

Yes I did mention quick-time events before (+10 points for observation), and yes they are generally annoying. As far as I can tell there's no penalty for failing, other than you don't get a points bonus. Of course, being generally incredible at pushing left or right-click when prompted I never failed, but on multiple occasions one took me by surprise. Seriously, telegraph when one's coming along so I'm not midway through eating an apple. They aren't as egregious as most QTEs, and at least they come with a reward. They're certainly no Battlefield 3 anyway, man those were terrible. There is also an obligatory turret section, although I forgot to screenshot it at the time (Edit: no I didn't! Enjoy!)

But it kind of doesn't matter too much. The spectacle is so impressive (really, the game looks great) that you're rarely paying attention to the bad stuff. The good stuff just throws itself at you all the time. There are few frustrating parts, the environments are well designed, the weapons are barrels of fun to use. It's just generally pretty good.

Multiplayer is weird, essentially just being a co-op version of single player, but not really. Essentially you're all locked in a zone, á la all horde modes, and are given a number of points to aim for to proceed. Early on these are stupendously easy, but pretty soon you're forced to work together and really work to get the points. It's pretty fun, but nothing amazingly special, essentially just a nice distraction from the single player.

So yeah, don't pay £40 or anything for it, but for £10 or £15, it's great.