BOY - Critic

Bulletstorm
Playstation 3, Xbox 360, PC
“In the new video game Bulletstorm, players
are rewarded for shooting enemies in the private
parts (such as the buttocks).”
My worry is that no matter what I write in this
review, no matter how much I ache and strain
to articulate how good Bulletstorm is, it will be
superfluous fluff compared to the priceless
extract (above) from the Fox News article “Is Bulletstorm
the Worst Video Game in the World?”. I
think it’s the brackets that make it; it’s as though
the author is providing an optional example in
case you’re pondering which body parts Epic
Games and People Can Fly specifically target.
I’d be okay with the groin, sure, but leave my
flocculent, mellifluous buttocks out of it. Never
did a soft buttock harm you, they are a simple
folk, the purest of the naughty bits.
Yes it’s immature, yes it’s exploitative, you
could call it dumb, but, unlike so many similar
games that try to pretend they aren’t, Bulletstorm
is so over-the-top, so unapologetically
bombastic that it becomes like coal placed
under enormous pressure. You play as Grayson
Hunt, a heavy-drinking space-pirate who strings
together profanity with Shakespearean loquacious
gymnastics, a talent that every character
in the universe shares. Normally, I’m apathetic
to, or a touch annoyed by, the cookie-cutter
characters in these big action games, but he’s
just so energetically gruff and childishly-manly
that I can’t help but like him.
Bulletstorm might have the most the
viscerally rewarding combat of any first-person
shooter I have ever played and, to top it off,
maybe some of the most strategic and nuanced
mechanics as well. Bulletstorm breaks the mould
by including the ability to kick your enemies and
send them flying, leash them towards you from
a distance, or slide towards them swiftly and
knock them down. It’s obviously and completely
unrealistic, but these mechanics make the
combat far more frantic and skillful agility based,
diametrically opposed to the “shooting gallery”
of cover shooters.
The game’s second innovation is the skillshot
system, which assigns points to creative ways of
dispatching your foes. Ordinarily, I find points
floating off enemies’ heads to be a cheap and
manipulative achievement surrogate but in
Bulletstorm there is such an astonishing number
of ways your kick, slide, leash and brilliantly
conceived armory can be used together that the
points genuinely encourage you to strategise.
Skillshots serve as an incentive to experience
everything the game has to offer and by its
conclusion there will be plenty left untried. The
combat is just that deep. Did I mention that they
have names like gang-bang, rear-entry and gagreflex?
Oh Bulletstorm, you’re so offensive.
It’s sort of gorgeous as well. I don’t mean the
technical, if steroid fueled, impressiveness of the
Unreal 3 engine - that I can take or leave - but
the design of the characters and the environ-
Critic 01 51
Editor Toby Hills
Games Review
ments. So many of these gruff shooters have,
in a faux “gritty” seriousness I guess, chosen
an entirely grey colour palate. Bulletstorm isn’t
afraid to be bright and colourful, to wow you
with stunningly varied vistas and breathtaking
architecture, unsettlingly enemy designs and
monsters the size of suburbs. More than once
I laughed audibly at the sheer bigness of the
events I saw taking place on the screen.
I’m surprised that I ended up loving it
so much. See, I want emotional breadth in
videogames, and I want forward momentum
and experimentation in the quest to find that
emotion. Nothing terrifies me more than the
prospect that in the future, because of the vast
coffers required to develop videogames, the
only full-priced products we will see will be intellectually
bankrupt, shallow, empowerment-fantasy,
bro-shooters like Gears of War and Killzone
because of their guaranteed profitability.
But Bulletstorm, despite its made-up-wordabout-fighting
title, is nothing like those games.
Gears of War chained itself down because it
held up a facade of maturity, when everyone
knows that you played Gears of War 2 because
your gun had a chainsaw, not because of the
emotional subplot between a character and his
missing wife. Bulletstorm wallows gleefully in its
immaturity and it soars because it isn’t held back
by a meaningless pretence. It doesn’t pay lip
service to anything to try and get politicians off
its back. It’s honest.