Storm Warning
The year is 2011. Every single shooter on the market is brown and grey. Running down hallways, listening to military jargon, getting in helicopters that inevitably crash. It’s all so tiresome. If only there were a game that subverted all these tropes. A real game for real gamers, that was all about having fun, going balls-to-the-wall and killin’ dudes in the most creative ways imaginable. A game that doesn’t take itself seriously, that says the word “dick” in every sentence. Yeah, that’s my kind of game. Maybe it also has constant interruptions, excessive dialogue, clunky movement and a scoring system that’s so superficial it’s practically painted on. Wait, no. Those last few bits sound awful. Go back to the dicks.
That’s right, today we’re covering Bulletstorm, a game that’s constantly telling you how much fun you’re having (when you’re not). It tries to come off as the most outrageous thing, the complete antithesis of the modern military shooter, only to turn around and do the exact same thing everyone else was doing. This time it’s different, because they do it while talking in a funny voice. All of its kooky fun is barely skin deep. Peel back the paper-thin layer and beneath it is the skeleton of a boring, brown and grey shooter. Who else could make kicking people off a cliff into a chore? Bulletstorm could, baby! Because Bulletstorm isn’t like all the other shooters. It dyes its hair blue and tells its parents to shut up.
Summary
Bulletstorm (2011) is a first person shooter… with attitude. There are seven guns to pick from, and since this is a console-first game, you can only carry four, which is two more than in other games of this era (you can carry every gun in the “overload” mode, which is like a new game plus, but you have to complete the game to unlock it). The game’s defining mechanics are the leash and the kick. The leash lets you grab enemies and pull them towards you, and the kick lets you kick enemies away from you, usually into something painful. Combine the leash, kick and the various guns to create elaborate kills that are really cool the first few times.
These creative kills, called “skill shots”, reward you with points. These points are then used to buy things like ammo, ammunition and bullets. That’s it. You use them to buy ammo. These skill shots range from simple things like kicking an enemy into a cactus, or blasting their head off, to more complicated things like pushing them into a cactus or blasting their head off while they’re in the air. No, I didn’t repeat myself, but I am being redundant, much like the game is.
Shooting and killing is a mere obstacle that prevents you from reaching your real goal: walking up to things and pressing “interact” on them. You’ll be walking up to switches, consoles, touchscreens, controls and anything you could ever dream of, and pressing a button on them. This happens incredibly often, to the point where I’m pretty sure it outnumbers the actual gun fights in the game. Sometimes you have to wait for your allies to press a button, robbing you of seconds upon seconds of fun. There will be a big, juicy button to press, but it’s on the other side of a door. You wish you could press it. Your finger throbs at the thought of pushing that button, but your buddy Ishi, your alleged friend, he jumps over the wall and presses the button for you. You can hear the click-clack of pressing, and you’re not the one doing it. That fiend. That back-stabbing, button-pressing fink. The door opens and you walk to the next gun fight, with the thought of what could have been still fresh in your mind.
There’s also a story in this game. I’m a dirty cutscene skipper. Any time I can’t control my character I start mashing whatever button will get me out of there and back into gameplay. Bulletstorm thought there might be people like me, so they made most cutscenes happen in game. In the middle of gameplay, no less! They made sure there was a cutscene every two minutes, because the writers worked hard on this story and by golly, you’re gonna watch it. When the game wasn’t wrestling the keyboard out of my hands to show me something exploding, it was filling my ears with dialogue. Constant, non-stop, incessant, overflowing, ceaseless, continuous dialogue.
Now I’ll explain the gameplay, but before we get there, we have to wait for our friend Ishi to open the door for us. Here he comes. He’s getting into position. He’s looking at the button. He’s considering the button. Looks like he figured it out. He’s a smart boy, that Ishi. He’s pressing the button. Oh! He did it! The button has been pressed! Now we wait a little bit for the door to open. It’s getting there. Just a little more. There we go! Thanks, Ishi. Let’s go on to the gameplay, then.
Gameplay
Bulletstorm is a very rudimentary, run-of-the-mill first person shooter from the early 2010s. I have to specify the time frame because if I called it just a regular first person shooter, you might think it’s a boomer shooter or something more entertaining, but it isn’t. It’s another one of those games where you move like a refrigerator on legs, you can only sprint forward, sprinting disables your weapons and the levels were designed with a ruler. It also has other wonderful genre staples such as hitscan enemies, regenerating health and constant dialogue.
What differentiates it a little are the leash and the kick. The leash pulls things towards you, and the kick pushes them away. These two simple ideas could lead to a lot of depth and creativity, allowing you to manipulate the environment in different ways. In practice, they’re very overpowered and one-note.
When you hit an enemy with either of these two options, they enter an anti-gravity state. In this state, they float for three seconds, completely helpless against whatever punishment you want to unleash on them. Combat encounters can be handled very easily by flinging and kicking enemies around. If anything starts to present a threat, you can press a button to remove them from the fight for three seconds.
This anti-gravity state is awkward when combined with the kick. If I kick someone, I expect them to go flying away from me, but in this game kicking someone causes them to float in front of you for three seconds. After that, they fly to wherever they were aimed. Kicking them while they’re floating doesn’t cancel the anti-gravity state or send them flying instantly, it just nudges them along a bit. This makes simple tasks like attaching an explosive into an enemy and kicking him into a crowd a completely unintuitive and frustrating process. Instead of wrestling with the game’s dumb physics to set up elaborate kills, just shoot them in the head and be done with it.
It feels less like useful crowd control and more like an easy solution to any problem. Is someone shooting at you from far away? Leash them and kill them in mid-air. Are they trying to kill you from up close? Kick them away and shoot them. Kick them into a cactus, or off a cliff. Are you up against multiple enemies? Press and hold the leash button for a Thumper attack, which sends everyone in a large area flying. You can take an entire room of enemies and turn them into ketchup by slamming them against the ceiling with the push of a single button. The Thumper has limited ammo you can only replenish at dropkits, but it’s so cheap that there’s no reason to not purchase it at every opportunity. The Thumper turns the already trivial combat encounters into a glorified quick time event where you hold a button and watch everyone die with little interaction. It also gives you a mess of points, which you can then use to buy more Thumper ammo. Lather, rinse, repeat.
It’s not like the enemies themselves are a threat. They mostly run straight at you like fast zombies. Even the enemies in a quote-unquote “PRIMITIVE” game like Final Fight don’t run at you and die. They try to surround the player, to jump over them and attack from sneaky angles. The ones in Bulletstorm rush at you in a straight line and practically beg to be executed.
At least the guns are fun to use, right? Right?
Well, here comes Ishi again to open the door to the next topic, the guns. Yep. There he goes. He’s pressing those buttons. Hey, Ishi, you think maybe I could press one of those? No? Okay. No, it’s okay. I’ll watch. So, have you seen any good movies lately? Not you, Ishi, the reader. I know no one reads this, but I have to do something while you fiddle with that control pad. Ah, there we go. On to the guns.
Guns
Besides pressing buttons and listening to inane dialogue, the thing you’ll be doing the most in this game is shooting. There are seven guns available: Assault rifle, handgun (more like a hand cannon), shotgun, sniper rifle, explosive flail launcher, cannonball launcher and the drill gun. If you’re anything like me, the first thing you noticed about the selection of guns, is that there are less than ten, which is paltry by 1990s standards. The second is that the selection isn’t all that kooky. In a game with such a limited armory and an emphasis on being different and fun, I’d expect the weirdo guns to outnumber the regular ones by a factor of 2:1.
I’ll focus on the “fun” ones first. The flail gun is the first weapon you get that is used for more than just shooting dudes until they die. It fires a flail that, when it hits an enemy, wraps around them and incapacitates them. After a while, or if you press the trigger again, the flail explodes. Using this you can turn enemies into explosive projectiles (if the kick were any good for this, but more on that later). You can also leave them on the ground and detonate them when someone walks near them, like a mine, but less effective since you have to detonate it manually and you could have just shot it at someone directly to get the additional benefit of stunning them. You can’t detonate it manually while holding another weapon, so you’re standing there waiting to activate a mine when you could be launching more and getting better results.
The next wacky weapon is the drill launcher. If you’re familiar with Turok, you have an idea of what this might be. It fires a drill that burrows into enemies. If it’s shot at their head, it kills them instantly and burrows into their brain. This sounds neat on paper, but every other gun can already insta-kill with a head shot. The other thing it does is it sends enemies flying and they get stuck to a wall. This gun has a unique problem: it auto targets the body and magnetizes the bullet to it against certain enemies. In the late game there are heavily armored enemies that could be killed with a single headshot with this gun, but getting the drill to go into their head was practically impossible. I tested this by firing one at a stationary enemy and the drill just kept flying to his chest, even when my reticle was on his head. A minor annoyance, but be on the look out for more of those.
The cannonball launcher can barely be counted as a creative weapon, since it’s just a grenade launcher. It works just like one, except you can knock an enemy down with the projectile. Any cool thing you can do with this gun is overshadowed by the fact that you can fire a cannonball in the general direction of some enemies, detonate it and you wipe them all out.
The sniper deserves a special mention. Instead of being a regular rifle, it fires a remote-controlled bullet. When you shoot, the game goes into bullet cam and you can steer it into an enemy. Any time I used the sniper (which was very infrequently), all it did was remind me that I could be playing Sniper Elite instead. The gun works in a very strange way, where you have to designate a target first. While aiming you see little diamonds above the enemies’ heads. When you aim at someone’s general direction their diamond turns red, meaning the gun is targeting that one. When you fire, the bullet then homes in on that specific target. If you stray too far the bullet sort of disappears and you get the message “target lost”.
This auto targeting system is very janky. It often targets what the game thinks you want to shoot at, and if it detects the bullet straying too far from the target, it stops. What the game considers too far from the target is a complete mystery. Sometimes an enemy will be too far away and the bullet disintegrates before it hits. Imagine that, an enemy that can’t be hit with a sniper because he’s too far away.
Whenever you fire at a target with the sniper, they will go into a mad sprint trying to dodge the bullet. This makes targeting them a pain in the ass, since you don’t know where they’ll be sprinting off to, and if you have multiple enemies you want to take out with it, it won’t work because your target became The Flash and bolted off at the speed of light. This also has a habit of throwing off the game’s targeting system, leading to some niche cases where your target sprints off half a pixel too far and the bullet forgets what it was doing in mid-air, and just stops. A very gimmicky weapon used in very specific, very boring sections. I never felt the need to use it, nor did I ever want to for fun.
You might think the number of guns in the game is low, which I certainly do, but they try to make up for it by giving each gun an alternate fire mode. These have limited ammo that can only be replenished at dropkits, which are ammo stations. You spend the points you get from the skill shots to buy ammo, and that’s the only thing you spend them on. The only thing worth buying at these beacons is alternate fire ammo (called “charge”), because you can find regular bullets everywhere and these charges are incredibly strong.
The assault rifle gets a shot that melts any non-boss enemy. It pierces, meaning you can take out any number of bad guys in a straight line. The hand gun becomes a flair gun, and fires a flair that sends an enemy flying or can explode and set others on fire. The flail shoots out a charged flail which cuts through enemies in a straight line. The Sniper gets an explosive bullet, the shotgun gets yet another super charged shot that melts anything in front of it, but this time it can melt bosses. The cannonball shoots a ball that bounces around for about 20 seconds, exploding every time it bounces. This one usually gets stuck bouncing in the same spot. You can kick it or leash it to move it around. When it’s active, it makes a horrible noise of constant explosions that peaks the audio. The drill lets you shoot one enemy, then select another enemy to fly him into, making them kiss.
The charges are redundant and most of them can be reduced to “kills anything in front of you”, which I think goes against what this game is trying to be. It’s all about the skill shots and being creative, but the arsenal just gives you four flavors of “delete enemy”.
Another thing about the weapons is that you can never unequip the assault rifle. It’s forced to be your primary, and the other three slots are left up to you. This severely limits your choices and sticks you with the most boring gun in the game whether you like it or not.
The skill shot system is- wait, here comes Ishi. He’s going to open the door to the Skill Shot discussion. There he goes. He’s pressing things. God, I wish I could push that button. It looks so… tactile. Oh listen to those beeping sounds. I could be making those beeping sounds. Go on, Ishi! Push those buttons! What a trooper.
Skill Shots and Scoring
One of the game’s big selling points alongside the leash and the kick. Whenever you kill an enemy, you get points. The more creative you are, the more points you get. Get really wild and crazy for some big scores. At least that’s how it’s advertised, and how I thought it worked. In reality, you don’t get points for being stylish and varied. The reward for killing enemies in one shot, in the most boring and efficient way possible, is greater than the reward for setting up Looney Tunes style traps.
There are different types of skill shots, including shooting a body part, throwing them into something, getting multiple kills and the combos. The most common ones are shooting at enemies. Shoot them in the head, get a headshot bonus. This one is incredibly easy to get, and I got it by accident multiple times just by firing indiscriminately at a group of enemies. These are boring and something you go for because it’s what you do, and not for any score incentive.
The second most common are the environmental kills. Kick a guy into something, or off a cliff, and you get points. They all kill your target instantly, too, so if you don’t feel like exerting any effort, you can stand next to a cactus and fling enemies into it until the fight ends. This also includes exploding barrels. Enemies love to stand next to exploding barrels, and one shot causes them to detonate, taking out an entire room and showering you with points and gore.
There are combos in the game, but they are incredibly limited and simple. A lot of obvious combinations don’t yield additional points. The first thing that came to mind with the flail was to shoot it at someone, then kick them into an environmental prop. That must be a combo, right? It isn’t. It just counts as a regular environmental kill. There are no inter-weapon combos, either. Nothing like “tie an enemy with the flail, then send them flying with the flair gun”. You can do it, but the game won’t acknowledge it, and the only reason you’d do something as inefficient as that would be for fun and score. The lack of combos makes the weapons feel a lot less fun, and doesn’t incentivize the player to explore the system at any depth, which is a good thing since the system has no depth.
If it sounds like the only examples I could come up with for combos is “tie someone with the flail, then do something else”, it’s because the flail is the only gun that doesn’t instantly murder your target. It’s the perfect kind of set-up for more fun follow-ups, but there are none.
Western game developers are allergic to any kind of scoring system. All they know is “number go up”. Bulletstorm is no different. There are no multipliers, no chaining system, there are no special modifiers, it’s just additive. This is not a bad thing, as long as the system is well implemented. Earlier shmups such as Gunbird have a simple scoring system with no fancy mechanics or decorations. Bulletstorm’s system is simple and no-frills, but also completely unnecessary and poorly implemented. I love getting big numbers, points and combos, so for me to say that a scoring system is useless hurts.
The game puts a lot of superficial emphasis on using multiple skill shots, and it rewards you for it, but it doesn’t punish you for getting lazy. There is hardly any point decay, meaning that you can re-use the same skill shot over and over again and get the same amount of points. There are multiple areas in the game where there are spikes in the environment and you can sit in one spot kicking dudes into them repeatedly and you’ll keep racking up 100 points each time.
These environmental hazards aren’t done well, either. Some, like the explosive barrels, are one-time use, for obvious reasons. You can only blow something up once. When it comes to spikes, electrical wires and such, however, you can keep throwing enemies into them like it’s nothing. Contrast this with X-men Origins: Wolverine. In that game, anytime you impale someone on a spike, their body stays there and that prop can’t be used again, making them a limited resource. You can’t camp the spike and keep stacking bodies like you’re making shish kebabs for a cookout, unlike in Bulletstorm. There are rooms in this game that are completely trivialized because there’s a cactus nearby where you can keep slinging people onto it, and the game doesn’t really care.
“But Roger!” you interject. “There’s score decay in Echoes, the optional score-attack mode!” Thank you for pointing that out, hypothetical reader who has played Bulletstorm enough to know this. Yes, that is true. The second time you use a skill shot, its score will be significantly reduced. In the optional score-attack mode, which doesn’t add anything interesting to the scoring.
Echoes mode does add a few things, and I think it’s the best way to play the game. It removes most of the time-wasting, gets rid of the yapping and lets you replay combat sections for score. It’s almost what I asked for: a mode that lets me play the game uninterrupted. Almost, since even in Echoes, we still have those annoying flow-breaking in-game cutscenes. You still have to stand around waiting for your allies to open doors, you still have to look at things approaching in slow motion, you still have to walk around hallways between encounters. Time-wasting is in the game’s DNA.
If regular Echoes isn’t enough, there’s also ULTIMATE Echoes, which continues this game’s full chain of disappointment. Ultimate Echoes sounds like it would be a more difficult version of score attack, and it does offer some new things. Higher score requirements, challenges and limits on how to play. The end product isn’t a new take on how the game plays, but somehow, it’s an even lamer version of it. If you complete the challenges, the stage just ends right there, meaning you don’t even have to play through the entire thing. The challenges themselves are incredibly basic and moronic. Score 5 head shots in a row? That’s it? You shoot 5 guys and the challenge ends in under a minute. That’s what they label as “ULTIMATE”? Complete the stage without using your guns. Sounds difficult, right? Well, then you kick everything to death in the most inefficient way possible and you still hit the score goal. It’s Ultimate, alright. The ultimate disappointment.
I’ve mentioned how the easy the game is, but it has to be repeated and emphasized, especially when talking about Echoes. Hitting the maximum score and getting 3 stars on each level is so easy it becomes insulting. I played through most of these like a drunken chimpanzee and still managed to ace them while also finishing one or two full minutes under the time limit. On the first try. I thought I would be able to spend some time trying to figure out the best way to get through each level, getting the best score and the lowest time, shaving off seconds after each attempt while using every skill shot to get the biggest numbers, but no. I play through them once, giving an absolute clown shoes performance, and that’s it. I get three gold stars and a juice box and there’s no more challenge. I’m surprised they don’t give me an achievement for playing the game and breathing at the same time.
Part of why this is so easy is how incidental everything feels. Sometimes I’ll shoot an enemy and accidentally hit an explosive and the entire stage goes up in flames, rewarding me with thousands upon thousands of points, and all I did was shoot at one thing. There was one stage where something exploded- I have no idea what it was- and it gave me so many points that I got an achievement for it. I didn’t even cause the explosion. I was picking my nose, and suddenly the apocalypse happens, banks collapse, rivers run red with blood and someone hands me a medal for killing Hitler.
The entirety of the scoring system is plagued with these inconsistencies. Sometimes I shoot an enemy that’s on fire, expecting to get the “afterburner” bonus, but the enemy dies and it doesn’t count. I shoot an enemy in the air, and it doesn’t count as an aerial kill. There’s a skill shot called “rear entry”, where you shoot an enemy in the ass because this game is hilarious, but it’s so precise that it rarely even registers, except when you blind fire and somehow get it. There’s one that gives you points for shooting an enemy in the throat, but it usually results in a head shot, since they’re one pixel apart. I once got this one while trying to shoot an enemy in the arm.
All of these annoyances add up to a system that feels like a roulette. Combine the inconsistency of the skill shots, with how easy it is to accidentally genocide an entire screen with an explosive, with how simple the scoring is, and you end up with a lousy mechanic that doesn’t add much. Like I said in my review for Gungrave G.O.R.E., it gives you the outward appearance of arcade gameplay without the actual substance. It is a signifier with nothing signified. When the screen lights up with dozens of skill shots, and I get thousands of points, it’s not because I carefully orchestrated a symphony of death, it’s because I pressed Q and sent everyone to meet Jesus by force.
Using score mechanics is never a requirement for finishing these types of games. Bayonetta, Devil May and ULTRAKILL can be beaten even if you play in completely unstylish ways and ignore the scoring system. The system is there for added fun and depth. It serves to reward players who want to learn the game at a deeper level and it also signals to the player that there is more to it. The scoring system in Bulletstorm is so flimsy that it does the exact opposite. You try to be stylish and set up elaborate kills, and you’re rewarded with a few points. You camp one spot or spam the same explosive weapon at a choke point, and the game rewards you with even more points. It’s telling you “forget all that flashy nonsense and sit here kicking dudes over a cliff”. It simplifies an already easy game and rewards you for it, a complete reversal of what the game advertises.
Jank
There are two types of Jank I’ve seen: Under polish and over polish. Under polish is the one most people are familiar with. Things that don’t quite work how they should. Things that look off, constant little bugs, annoyances that could have been ironed out with a few more weeks of cleanup. Minor graphical glitches and such. The kind of thing I highlighted in my review for Wanted: Dead. The other kind, over polish, is the one Bulletstorm suffers from. Where the developer patches out any weird or inconsistent interaction and sands off the edges, leading to a very restrictive, on-rails experience. The game knows what you want to do better than you do, so it will do what it thinks you want to do.
Before I talk about the jank, I have to explain what I mean by “prescribed actions”. It’s like autocorrect for games. Kicked objects don’t react like they should, they home in on enemies instead of flying forward, the leash has a very generous auto target that goes wherever it wants. There was one arena that had a dropkit in the center and I was trying to hook the pilot out of a gyrocopter, and the leash kept flying towards the dropkit and not at the thing I had my target on. They’re things that happen, not because the mechanics are interacting in real time, but because that’s how the game is programmed. You do input A, so input B happens, even if input B isn’t the thing you were intending.
This has to do with how context-sensitive everything is. Hopping over a small ledge is a chore; you can’t vault over it unless you see the prompt to do so. Even if you’re standing right in front of it, if you don’t look at a specific spot for the prompt to appear, you won’t be able to go over it. You can’t even change elevation without a specific prompt. To drop down you have to press R, and it’s only in certain spots.
This reliance on context-sensitive actions makes the game feel restricted. You can’t jump up or down things, so arenas are very flat and boring. The walls that are meant to be used as cover are usually just in the way, so in the middle of a fight you might try to vault over one, but you can’t because the prompt doesn’t show up.
The massive collision boxes on everything are a huge annoyance, too. I found myself getting stuck often on level geometry. The small, cramped, hallway-style levels don’t lend themselves to any sort of smooth movement. I’d try to maneuver and end up caught on a box or a bit of rubble.
Your allies are another source of frustration. They’re always in the way taking up space, doing nothing important. Trying to move around them is like trying to get a car into the dining room without wrecking the table. They love to stand around in gun fights blocking slides or getting in the way of launched enemies. I’m not 100% sure if they can contribute to fights, but there were times where things exploded and I had nothing do do with it, so I assumed it was one of my allies, but it’s inconsistent.
One thing that really ticks me off about this game is-- wait, here comes Ishi again. Here to press another button? Hello? Ishi? He’s just standing there. Hey, Ishi, are you going to do something about this? No? Well, I guess we’re stuck here in the Jank section. Oh wait, my bad. I have to press the button this time, but I wasn’t standing on the exact pixel to get the prompt to show up. I apologize. Sorry, Ishi. I’ll send us over to the pacing section now. Wait for Ishi to follow us.
Pacing
The annoying running gag throughout this review is a way to illustrate how awful this game’s pace is. There is a horrible stop and go flow that’s like driving in a traffic jam. The pattern is: combat encounter, walk, button, repeat. Each combat encounter takes place in its own contained arena. This is something modern shooters do a lot. They segregate encounters into their own tiny pocket dimensions. There’s no overlap between fights, and you never see enemies outside of the designated combat zones. No more natural placement, no fights between rooms, no enemies that chase you through a level, no enemies guarding a specific area. You get to an obvious area with chest-high walls, trigger the encounter and you leave through an empty level.
The pace of the combat/walking cycle is very choppy. Combat encounters last around 30 seconds to a minute, followed by a minute of walking. You’re not exploring the level, either, since each level is just a hallway. You’re forced to walk forward and press a button, or worse yet, wait for one of your allies to press it for you while you sit there doing nothing. Then the next combat encounter starts and you have 30 seconds of fun, before the game rips the controller away from you to make you look at something.
That’s another thing about the pace; the constant stopping to look at things. There’s always some big, dumb explosion happening somewhere, or some enemy entering the arena, and it’s VERY important for you to look at them. There are also a ton of walk and talk sections where your movement speed is locked to a walk and you’re forced to listen to the characters yammer about something and tell “jokes”. Combine the constant stop and chats with the microscopic combat encounters and it’s like you’re playing Wario Ware with minute-long load times between each game.
The general pacing of the game and its difficulty curve as a whole is abysmal, too. I counted how long it took from booting the game up until I got to actually play it (discounting loading times) and it was eleven minutes. Eleven whole minutes of walking and talking, prologue, set up and absolute nonsense with unfunny dialogue. It was another four minutes after that until I got to shoot an enemy that wasn’t in a quicktime event, and around four minutes more until I finally got the leash and access to the skill shots. Eighteen minutes in total from booting the game up, to the point where I am actually playing Bulletstorm as advertised, with the skill shots, leash and kicking dudes in the face. Eighteen minutes, and that’s skipping cutscenes. I find it absurd that it takes that long to get to the gameplay. In that same amount of time you would be at the end of Quake’s first episode.
The game never gets into full gear, either. A car is judged by how fast it can go from zero to sixty miles, and I judge games by a similar metric. How long does a game take to go from nothing, to its full challenge; when the game hits sixty miles per hour. Most modern Triple-A games get good near the very end, during the last hour. Bulletstorm takes eighteen minutes to get to zero miles per hour, and it never hits sixty. The game never got to the point where I had to use all my available tools to overcome a challenge. There are never more than eight enemies on screen at once, and they can all be dispatched in a few shots of the grenade launcher. I played this on VERY HARD, and I never got to a point where I thought “Yeah, I’m playing Bulletstorm”. I spent the entire campaign waiting for it to actually ramp up and get good. Going back to the car analogy, this is like a car that goes from zero to 40 miles in 30 seconds, and it’s constantly stuttering, jittery and full of passengers trying to tell you bad knock-knock jokes.
Here comes Ishi again. That’s it. I’ve had it, mister. I’m pushing my own buttons from now on. I’m sick of this gag. Speaking of being done with jokes…
Comedy
Comedy is subjective. You might think it’s hypocritical of me to criticize Bulletstorm’s comedy after filling this absurdly long review with terrible jokes, but I will try to do this objectively. Read the following word: Dick. Did you read it? Did you bust a gut laughing? Did you fall out of your chair and, as the kids say, ROFL and LMAO? No? Okay, how about this: Butt hole dick. If you found these two example amusing, then you might enjoy Bulletstorm’s hilarious brand of comedy, which consists of the word “dick” in different arrangements. Everything is dick, there’s a skill shot for shooting someone in the dick, one of the character says she’s going to “kill your dicks”, which prompts a forty second long bit about killing dicks, the main character screams “Take a lick of the salty taint of doom, you braindead biker whores”. WTF, the salty taint of doom? Holds up spork, that’s so effing random. I hated every second of it. It’s cringe and Reddit. It reminds me of that one Game Grumps episode where they play Mickey Mousecapades, and Arin keeps doing a GameDude impression, and he keeps going on about how the game is “poopy ass dicks”, except Bulletstorm does it trying to get a serious laugh. It reminds me of Borderlands, which is never good. Borderlands at least had the decency to let you play relatively uninterrupted, and you could mute the voices. In Bulletstorm you don’t have that luxury, you’ll still be subjected to constant interruptions, but in complete silence.
In fact, this game has a lot in common with Borderlands: masked psycho enemies that just run at you like idiots, obnoxious dialogue, characters that never shut up, trying to be serious and completely failing at it, they’re both mediocre first person shooters with colorful graphics to hide their monotonous core gameplay and the jokes in both games are about as funny as a cancer diagnosis.
To expand on the failed humor, let’s take a quick detour and look at Duty Calls.
Duty Calls: The Calm Before the Storm
To promote their wacky new game, the creators of Bulletstorm released Duty Calls, a short demo parodying Call of Duty. It mocks the game’s serious tone, boring gunplay, hallway level design, dumb mission briefings, slow motion sequences and the infamous bloody screen. It was one big, interactive middle finger to all those boring military shooters of the time. Those are old-hat, and they had something better. They had Bulletstorm, which was nothing like those dull, realistic games.
Except that Bulletstorm is just like that. It’s exactly like the thing they’re parodying. Down to the most minute detail, which I will go over now.
Boring gunplay? Well, in Bulletstorm you get a drill launcher and a gun that shoots cannonballs, but you’re forced to carry the boring assault rife and there are only six guns in the entire game, and most of them are Call of Duty staples: assault rifle, sniper, shotgun, grenade launcher. There are even turret sections and helicopter crashes. I’m not a fan of the Call of Duty series, but from what I remember, the gunplay in those is a lot snappier and more fun than in Bulletstorm.
Hallway levels? The levels in Bulletstorm are hallways, too. You barely have any room to run past an enemy to get to a better spot. The days of wide open arenas were far gone by that point, and no game, Bulletstorm included, had any level wider than an office hallway.
Dumb mission briefings? Did these people not play their own game? Bulletstorm is lousy with flow-breaking moments where a character blabbers instructions at you. They’re constantly barking “You have to go there”, “you have to do this”, “we need to do the very obvious thing you’re already aware of”. To make matters worse, the dialogue in Bulletstorm is full of that very same military jargon they lampoon. You’re constantly being given sitreps, characters vomit words on you about sargeants and platoons, divisions and other such hierarchical things. It does the same thing, but it’s okay when they do it, because when they do it, they do it with a funny voice. Parody is when you do the same thing, but in a mocking tone. If I went down to the liquor store and pointed a gun at the cashier, I’d be committing a crime. If I were wearing a clown suit and told him to put the money in the bag while honking my big ‘ol clown nose, it would be perfectly fine. I point the gun at him and say “Boy, wouldn’t it be funny if I were to rob you just now? It’d be so awkward hahaha!” because it’s okay to do something wrong if you constantly call attention to how you’re not supposed to be doing it.
The next item on the agenda: slow motion sequences. Duty Calls parodies this with an enemy general that shows up and says “You cannot stop me unless the game goes in slow motion for some reason, and I become easy to shoot”. He says this just after killing one of your allies while he says “Oh, I’m dead, increasing the drama of the story”. Hi-larious. This is a description of what happens in Duty Calls, but it can also be applied, one-to-one, beat-for-beat to Bulletstorm. The final confrontation is just this. Exactly this. The big, bad Sargent Sarrano kills your ally, laughs in his face and then the game goes into slow motion and you kill him in a quick time event. Again. Do the bad thing, but do it in a funny voice, and it makes it okay. I put on my big funny hat and rob a bank and say “Ohh gee wouldn’t it be soooo cliché if I took one of you hostage?” in a Rick Sanchez voice, and the cops won’t arrest me because I’m doing a funny parody of a bank robbery, I’m not really doing it! Hahaha funny federal crime! Wubba lubba dub dub! I’m pickle bank robber!
It goes without saying that Bullestorm also does the bloody screen when you take damage. It was a requirement at the time. There was probably a government office dedicated to making sure every single first person shooter released between 2006 and 2016 had a bloody screen effect.
They even mock Call of Duty’s progression with the whole “Master Sargent Shooter Person” pop up, while also having their own meaningless pop ups everywhere with the skill shot system. They don’t reflect actual skill, don’t mean anything and reward you with meaningless points. They could fill the screen with lorem ipsum text and it would have the same effect.
Why did they feel the need to mock Call of Duty, only to turn around and do the exact same thing? Is all the military jargon in Bulletstorm a parody? Is it supposed to be funny? If it is, then why does the game stop and force me to listen to it? Even if it’s a funny haha parody, it shouldn’t interrupt gameplay. What about the horrible level design? Is that a parody, too? Why not parody things by doing them right?
The conclusion I ended up with was that the developers didn’t have a problem with how military shooters played, just with how they present themselves. It’s boring because it’s realistic, but if you do the same thing with a wacky voice, it’s funny now. If you say dick every three words, it’s now acceptable to have boring cutscenes full of military jargon. It’s okay to have hallway level design, as long as those hallways have spikes in them where you can kick an enemy into and call them a spike-dick. The game can go into slow motion for no reason to let you kill a high-ranking military officer, if it’s done in a funny way. Wait, that scene is played completely straight.
Why do I bring this up? Well, for one, it was a big publicity stunt that caught a lot of attention. It was a parody of Call of Duty from a major studio, back during the heyday of military shooters. They were striking while the iron was red hot, and a lot of people took notice. The other, and more relevant reason I bring this up, is because it shows the lack of understanding that went into making this game. Bulletstorm isn’t a fun, arcadey game because it plays like one, or because it’s pure balls to the wall gameplay with deep mechanics and a real sense of identity. It’s just a military shooter in a goofy hat. The only problem they had with those boring games was that they didn’t say dick enough, so they fixed it. They made the most bombastic game ever, with the same kind of theme-park set pieces that have no impact on gameplay, the same hallway level design, the same boring dialogue and all the same things, but this one was different for superficial reasons. The same way the scoring system and the skill shot systems are also superficial. You peel the paint off Bulletstorm and you get Call of Duty.
I sling a lot of shit at IGN and other big-name mainstream review outlets. So much so that I know it will come back to bite me in the ass at some point. I keep saying how they don’t really play the games they review, or don’t understand them at a deeper level, they never discuss their mechanics, they place too much emphasis on graphics and worst of all, they gave Final Fantasy 16 a 9/10. Now imagine if I were to write an entire review exactly like one from IGN, but I call it a parody. I take a game, write a little about it, slap a 7/10 at the end and publish it. No jokes, no nothing. You wouldn’t be able to tell it’s a parody, you’d just think it’s a serious review, but then I tell you it’s a parody. Would you be able to tell the difference? Would you read that surface-level review of KILL KNIGHT, where I say it’s “too short” and lament the lack of narrative, then give it a score at the end without much of a justification, and be satisfied with it? I don’t think so. Now, imagine if I were to call it a parody then made a separate 3,000 word article about how much better I am than IGN and those other reviewers, while doing exactly what they do. Would you see it as a masterful troll, a work of high comedy, or would you think I’m just a moron (or at least a bigger moron than I already am)?
Conclusion
That was Bulletstorm. A dull, janky little shooter that advertises itself as a party, but delivers disappointment. Between its terrible pace, lack of combat options, linear level design and poorly-implemented scoring system, it never gets off the ground in a satisfying way. All that effort they spent on non-interactive set pieces and horrible jokes could have been used to make a more complete package. I said package, which can be interpreted as dick! How funny!
The game can be completed in under eight hours, which is ridiculously short and unsatisfying, much like a penis. FUNNY. People online whine, cry and complain about game length all the time. An arcade game is too short, it’s not worth the price! There’s no story or anything to it, they say. Well, I finished Bulletstorm, in eight hours, and I got everything out of it. I don’t feel the need nor the desire to go back and replay it, because of its terrible pacing, and the horrible scoring system and limited arsenal means there’s nothing to go back and explore. I did the Echoes, too, like I mentioned earlier, and got through them in one go, and don’t feel like revisiting them thanks to how boring they are. This is a full-priced Triple-A title (to be fair I only paid five dollars for it), that only has eight hours of content in it. I will keep repeating myself to make the point: Eight hours to go from “I have never played this” to “I have seen everything this game has to offer and will never touch it again”. In the equivalent of one work day I finished the game and hit my head against the skill ceiling. I have beaten Bayonetta around four times, including once in one sitting, and I will keep replaying it. Every time I replay it I get something out of it. I played through Wanted: Dead three times, and I still play it every now and then. I will not be replaying Bulletstorm at any point. I’m disappointed and I only paid five dollars. If I had paid sixty, I’d be flipping cars and forming a militia.
I don’t recommend Bulletstorm. It delivers on its premise in a very shallow way through a short campaign padded with an excessive amount of non-interactive set pieces and walk and talk sections. Combat encounters are too short, and the whole game is too easy. The worst part about this whole thing? I don’t hate the gameplay. There’s potential here. The gunplay is alright, and the idea of getting stylish kills is fun, but it flops in the execution. If I had hated the gameplay, I would have dropped it after an hour and gotten a refund, but I kept playing to see if it ever got to a point where it gave me more than two minutes of uninterrupted combat, and that point never came. It’s like if you’re watching TV and someone kept getting in the way. If you were watching something you hate, you wouldn’t mind the constant interruptions, but if it’s something you’re interested in and want to watch, It would piss you off. Thing is, what little fun I managed to squeeze out of the gameplay is drowned out by the game’s terrible pacing. Even the Echoes mode, which removes the dialogue and such, still has a ton of pauses and sections where you sit around waiting for someone to open the door for you. It’s like trying to play the game and every few seconds someone grabs the controller from your hands and tells you a boring story. I just wanted to play the game, but the game itself wouldn’t let me. At least now, in 2024, I can play ULTRAKILL and satisfy my craving for a stylish shooter with a scoring system.
It would have been a lot better with a few changes. For one, get rid of all the constant pauses. I don’t know if they’re disguised loading screens, considering the fact that there are already plenty of regular loading screens in the game. If the game requires that much loading and that many interruptions, then maybe tone it down and let gameplay take center stage. The scoring system could have been a lot better, too. Give the game a grading system, with more modifiers and encourage the player to use more weapons and be stylish. They went out of their way to justify the system with an in-world explanation, only to have it be one of the most shallow scoring systems ever. With these two changes, by minimizing interruptions and making the scoring more interesting, the game would have been great, even with its boring levels and jank. And for the love of God, please make the game a lot harder.
I would have liked to see more utility from the weapons. The flail gun is a good weapon for setting things up, but the others just kill anything. Give them more little tricks, or more things for them to do. The drill launches enemies, which is fun, but if you launch them into an environmental hazard, it doesn’t count as a special kill. Remove the anti-gravity state from the kick and give it to another weapon, which can be used to set up kill, but we didn’t get that in Bulletstorm, so that’s that.
Alright, Ishi, open the door and let’s leave this review.
Ishi? Hello, Ishi? Oh no, he went home after I retired this bit! We’re stuck here in the review for Bulletstorm! So…uh… know any good dick jokes?
