Bulletstorm

Bulletstorm

So apart from possibly being the worst type of weather, Bulletstorm is an FPS brought to us by People Can Fly (makers of Painkiller) and Epic (the Gears of War guys). You would think the run gun fun of Painkiller and the gritty realism of Gears of war would make a good mix, and for the most part, that’s correct. You have an array of varied weapons, ranging from the obligatory assault rifle to what I like to call the bouncing ball of justice. This weapon fires a bouncing betty-esc ball which is content to bounce up and down two feet in front of you waiting for you to run up and kick it into onrushing enemies. Sounds good in theory but connecting with it is a matter left to the baby Jesus and his legs are tiny, he can’t kick shit. I’ll take this time to reaffirm to anyone that, as you can imagine; having to fire a gun, watch the bullet, kick the bullet in the right direction and hope it hits what you were looking at before what you were looking at has realised what a berk you’re making of yourself and has fucked off, is quite flow breaking in an FPS no matter how satisfying it is when you blow up onlooking mutants. Your mighty boot is useful for something when being combined with your Energy Leash. Using this, you can pull enemies towards you and give them a swift punt and then pair that with a shotgun to send various bits of bad guys flying in various directions. All in all, Bulletstorm offers some cathartic weapons, some with satisfying feels and uses like the Flail gun, that sends two linked grenades that wrap around foes before detonating. The main issue come with the secondary fire on your guns. Although giving you a more powerful, alternative shot, having to press the shoulder button to activate the secondary fire and then the trigger to fire it gives you one more thing to think about in the heat of battle. This could have been circumvented by just using the shoulder button to deploy the secondary fire, because no one holds a controller with one finger on each shoulder and trigger button. 

 So, that’s the Painkiller influence now what about the Gears of war influence? 

Well most of that lies in the characters and settings. The main character looks like the love child of Marcus Fenix and Monkey from Enslaved; a big, grizzled, overly manly man with the stature of an upright car and the hair and sideburns that could star in their own Pantene advert. In contrast to the gung-ho muscle head main protagonist, he has a level headed, logical second in command. Sounds out of place in a game like this although, most of this could do with the fact that he becomes part robot, so if the revolutionary space army doesn’t work out for him, he would kick arse on Robot wars. Both make haste on their journey through lovely, picture-esc sky boxes filled with vivid foliage and glistening glass from the crumbling ruins that lay all around you from the once upright city-scape, and if you haven’t noticed by now, I’m trying to avoid talking about the story.

It’s not bad, it just doesn’t stand out from the other modern FPS stories. You’re a space marine who has learned of the dark truth behind the man running your squad and now you vow to destroy him for what he has done. Forgetting that the army doesn’t look fondly on killing a commanding officer, but fuck that let’s shoot his ship down and hunt the bastard! Our heroes find their man, General Sarrano, and he makes them realise that maybe this is bigger than they thought! Grayson (that’s Chevy Mcsideburns name by the way) is a fickle man and absorbs information as gospel the instant it leaves a character’s mouth, Sarrano abusing this fact in particular. Ishi (that’s Robo-Joe) plays straight man to Gray’s flippant antics, disapproving of Grayson’s thirst for revenge, all the while losing his mind to the machine man! The last member to round off the cast is Trishka. True to female character models in gritty war shooters, she’s so much better in every way to the guys for no other reason than to avoid having a kidnapped princess story on our hands. So, naturally she saves your stupid arse on several occasions, when in reality, you would probably be able to pull yourself onto a ledge when you look like a man that benches the entire gym. After finding Sarrano, and therefore being in a prime position to shoot him in the face, Gray changes his mind. I guess he’s more of a chase guy than an end result man, instead choosing to blindly follow the genocidal prick that ultimately brought him to this planet. At this point I think its apt to talk more about Gears of war because if you’ve played the first Gears then you’ve played Bulletstorm and had more fun. The story culminates in a similar way but seems to lose all the nice side elements and, looking back, I don’t remember there being any roadblocks besides chest high walls and debris that Gray relishes in getting stuck on. Bulletstorm isn’t a long game, at least it didn’t feel like it, but after the 30^th smashed and burning room with overgrowing trees all over the place it does start to all mesh together. 

The main drive for this is Gray’s guilt for all the people he’s killed, which he hammers home in every cut-scene, just in case the game puts you into a bored trance and you forget what you’re doing here I guess. But once he finds out about Sarrano’s sorted past, Gray embarks on a redemption quest to kill him with gusto because that’s how he thinks forgiveness works. It’s like the Dom’s wife thing that drives Gears one just without all the other characters having an equally depressing backstory to balance it out, and with less Dom’s wife, probably because Gray shot her too. The character’s delivery is played to an odd contrast when you think about it though. Leaping from Gray’s incessant whining about all the lives that he couldn’t save from his own destructive nature, to Sarrano’s constant swearing, sarcasm and casual racism. All the while running through a city on the verge of cataclysm, putting bullets in anything that moves. Bulletstorm wants to have its sweary, bullet-ridden cake and eat it, and it starts to come across a bit over the top. 

Final Thought: It’s fun. A nice way to kill a few hours at a time with a decent satisfaction level in relation to the weapons. Harking back to the weapons of the doom and quake era, as intentional and obvious as the homage is, it works. But if you can wait a little longer and save your money or swallow your sadness and trade in some of you more played games, I would suggest Gears of War.

I’m sure you’ll have fun with Bulletstorm, or Gears of War, gunning down legions of mutants, but keep checking back to Game Changers for more game news and more.