(Played on Steam Deck, chose the Xbox One release just for button display reason. About 6 hours to see credits on Normal)
2011’s Bulletstorm is a game at war with itself in almost every aspect. Co-developed by Epic Games from USA and People Can People of Poland, this game sure mixes blockbuster atheistic and Eastern Block jank into a bloody mess. While Gearbox’s shady remaster did address issues like a lack of New Game Plus, it’s not hard to see why the rather forced sequel bait at this game’s final chapters never led to anything.
Oh, my word…
Set in a far future when humanity has spread across the stars, Bulletstorm tried to tell a story about how the stars are better off without humanity (Focus on “tried”). Grayson Hunt (Played by Steve Blum, not sure whether Mr. Blum getting into a package deal with EA or the dev wanting the voice of Cowboy Bebop’s Spike Spigel led to this cast choice.) is a space marine turned space pirate. After he encountered the evil general who “forced” his retirement yet again, Grayson stranded himself on a world turned from resort to hell called Elysium. He got to shoot his way out of this planet.
The messiness of Bulletstorm partially comes from its writing. Who can forget EA’s marketing focus on the game’s foul-mouthed cast? There is an option to “turn swear off”, though more than a couple of s-word, b-word and f-word still got through in the pre-rendered cut scenes.
The process is bit baffling. For one, some replacements might sound more insulting, like the one from “cock-suck” (With the gesture in animation unchanged no less.) to “fruitcake” is likely more homophobic than the original’s just demasculinizing. For another, while some of those replacements are alternative take on the same line, others are either pauses in the audio or some effect block out the naughty words.
I suppose the proper nouns baffle me even more this time around. Take the enemy factions for example, there are the Skulls and the Creeps. The former is your usual lifted directly from Mad Max films wasteland punk/biker gang shooters like this just cannot live without while the latter are gun wielding mutants with skull faces. Would have been less confusing if they reversed those 2, heh?
No quite high efficiency
To start with the conclusion, Bulletstorm’s another selling point called “Kill with skill” is utter bullshit, excuse my French. The game can be classified as a gun-plus action game like them Bioshocks, numbered installments in Mass Effect series and the 2 overlooked first-person shooters based on the Dark Horse comic titled Darkness. The gimmick here is a futuristic lash to pull enemies off their feet and towards player, so the floating enemies can be shot in place more than the usual center mass.
While the game was marketed to be against headshots, it only discourages player for hitting enemies in the torso. The player here is on a score attack and scores are used to upgrade the weapons and purchase ammo. The basic score for a kill is 10, then 25 for headshots and more for blowing limbs off with selected weapons. There are times when player kill the enemies every deliberately with lash-pulling, kicking and lead-pumping only to get 10 points just because the leads are in the torso.
The game does not have bullet-time per se, but floating enemy (By either pulling or kicking) is in slow motion. This is a double-edged blade that truly cuts both ways. On the upside, this allows players to shoot enemies in places like their balls and their asses just to score some more. On the downside, it would be a slow-ass fall if one intends to kill someone by getting their targets off a ledge (By kicking, pulling or kicking more than once after pulling. One got to do the third more often than not,) And if the game thinks the enemy just breaks his (All enemy types here do present as masculine.) spine on a ledge after you kick him toward it, you only got 10 points. What the fuck is this game’s problem with damage done to a human torso I dare to ask?
This game appeals to the sadistic side of ultra violence while yours truly much prefer the high efficiency, high body count type. Compared to them Bioshocks, Mass Effects and even almost forgotten Darkness, my visual killer instinct just does not glue with Bullestorm. The so-called “skills” this game live and die by are just too elaborate to be intuitive.
The 2017 remaster did address the lack of New Game Plus in the 2011 release. After credits roll and back to the main menu, there is Overkill, an option to play earlier stages with weapons unlocked much later into the game. Sniping the first turret guy with the remotely controlled bullet is fun. But with this walled behind going through this game once, it cannot help but feel too little too late.
Better just leaving it hanging...
Released between 2010’s Vanquish and 2015’s the Order 1886, Bulletstorm is the mid-chapter of a “begging for sequel” trilogy. Revisiting them in this roaring twenties, your truly had it easy to see why that’s the case. The 2015 game does not even have a mechanic gimmick worth a damn compared to the other 2 and those gimmicks ain't exactly worth writing home about by the end.
Like those 2, Bulletstorm ultimately felt half-baked. Yet this refused to pat players on their back story had the balls to tease sequels in the most eyeroll inducing way. The clash between Eastern Block jank (Like giving players no other defense during the remote control a robot dinosaur) and the 5 to 15 seconds of money shots need 3 to 6 months to render certainly resulted in a product not knowing what exactly it is.
While its marketing raged against some shooter tropes of the late aughts, the final product had no problems embracing many genre trapping of its days. It’s shame to see so many effort wasted on such avoidable mediocrity.