Bulletstorm Review

Never before have I been in such a state of ambivalence whilst playing a computer game.


Bulletstorm is fucking ridiculous. Now, I expected this, the developers seemingly approached the game with a mentality of ridiculous...ness, but it's worse than that. I think they may have gone too far.


Perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself, I think I need some sort of structure in these reviews after reading the minefield that was my Minecraft review. Let's start from the beginning.


Long ago (about a year ago I think) a company called People Can Fly (who were recently bought out by Epic Games, the company that brought us the "oh-so-fun" Gears of War games) announced a game called Bulletstorm. They released trailers, in which the player was seen generally fucking people's lives up. Mutilation and dismemberment were sprayed across the screen and the player seemed to be rewarded for such acts by highlighting different ways of expunging the glorified pixels and awarding points accordingly. This lead to Americans going mental and claiming that everyone who plays this game will become a rapist (http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/02/08/bulletstorm-worst-game-kids/ I wish I was joking). 


Of course, being the mentally unstable individual I am, and due to the fact I'm now banned from parks, I pre-order this title, knowing that it would be an amusing journey through my own, and indeed the developer's warped psyches. 


After waiting an inordinate amount of time for the game to unlock on Steam (another way in which Americans have annoyed me today, seeing that I had to wait for the American time zone release for some unbeknownst reason, seeing as it was released in America two days ago (but again, I am going offtrack)) I was finally able to enter the game and give it a go. 


So let's being with the story...


Right this might be difficult. I have just stopped playing the game for a short break to start writing this review and I have already forgotten every single characters name bar one, and he's not even the main character. This is not a good sign. Almost all characters in this game are completely unmemorable. I feel no attachment to any of them. I feel connected to none of them. The only one who is vaguely three dimensional (also the character I can remember the name of "Ishi") is literally turned into a fucking robot, so he no longer shows emotion. You could see he was the placeholder "nice guy" as he saves a little girl who was plopped directly into the plot for no real reason, only to show that... Ishi was the nice guy. 


The game starts with you, the main character, who I will henceforth refer to as Captain Wolverine McBadAss, as that is clearly the inspiration for said character in a nutshell, and his stalwart companion, who shall be referred to as Lieutenant Biker O'Cares'not (it doesn't matter what he's called he dies pretty sharpish anyway) "interrogating" a bounty hunter on your space ship. I say "interrogating" because you're drunk, your friend is drunk, the bounty hunter has a bottle of nondescript booze duct taped to his head and you don't care what he says, he's going to be sucked out of the air-lock anyway. Which turns out to be a bad thing, as you were too drunk to check if the dude had a grenade the size of his fucking head on him and somehow swims round the side of the ship and blows up a window. You close it, and still drunk, act nonchalant and tell your crew to run away into space. You then appear at a big ship, containing your NEMESIS and decide to open fire then drive your ship into the big ship seemingly killing everyone including yourself (despite Ishi telling you you're a drunken madman, oh Ishi why do they never listen? Perhaps it's a commentary on the subversive racism of modern society, probably it's just because you're the sensitive pussy of the ship and no one cares don't worry soon you'll be Mecha-Ishi).


CUE FLASHBACK SCENE


Of course they show you, in a 3 minute scene, why you are a misunderstood alcoholic and not just a cunt. A scene in which you kill an innocent man, then look on his computer, where Ishi (god bless him) shows you that , OH MY GOD! You've been killing innocent men. How could you, General I'm Clearly the Bad Guy Look At My Fucking Teeth!? You then save the innocent man's daughter, well I say save, you tell her to put her head down as people are shooting at you, then you leave her in the building and get the fuck out. Heroes, one and all. 


CUE BACK TO THE FUTURE


You're alive! Crashed, but alive! But Ishi is hurt! Not Ishi! Wolverine McBadAss seems genuinely distraught, and is sent out by Doctor Threelines (guess how long he survives) to find a battery to make Ishi even more of a Japanese cliché. You do this, come back, and watch Biker O'Cares'not and Doctor Threelines die as you all protect Ishi. WMBA (as he shall henceforth be called) is seemingly unfazed by this but concentrates all his attention on Mecha-Ishi, who has lost all emotion and is essentially being controlled by a vacuum cleaner, a vacuum cleaner of DEATH, who tries to kill WMBA on multiple occasions.


The rest of the story is just getting off the planet. WMBA goes from yelling encouragement to his own genitals and weaponry at killing people, to telling their newly acquired sexy-lady-companion to forgive Ishi, for he's not a bastard, just part toaster. He switches from telling Ishi how sorry he is about the fact he now has a hard drive in place of some of his brain, to singing a song to the robot dinosaur he finds about how it's a better robot that Ishi because it's 50 foot tall and shoots lasers. (I'm running out of the electrical component gags now).


It's impossible to feel anything but disdain for the characters, storyline and writing, oh god the writing. The "script" of this game is apparently the love child of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Duke Nukem and Little Britain. There are rarely any conversations, only people screaming insults at each other. Now I'm British, so I love a good bit of swearing, but there's something about Bulletstorm that seems so dull. It's like a kid who's found it's big boy words for the first time and can't help but use them whenever possible. This is genuinely a conversation between the main character and his sexy female counterpart


SFC: "If you follow me I'll kill your dick!"
WMBA: "Kill my dick? How the fuck are you going to kill my dick? I'll kill your dick!"


Why is it that computer game writing is getting worse and worse, it's like someone tipped the bottom of the sitcom barrel out onto a computer.


Now, surely, you're thinking, "But Badger! I thought this game was supposed to be ridiculous! You've got to ignore the storyline and concentrate on the ridiculously fun game-play!"


Well, firstly, I doubt anyone is actually reading this so you're probably not thinking that, but if you are, there's one problem with that...


It's not that fun.


I mean... it's a bit of a laugh. The kicking people into cacti is fun for a bit, or using the laser lasso to pull someone off a cliff is enjoyable to a point, but then you start slogging through the game and it soon loses it's pazzaz. The weaponry just doesn't have enough kick to it. You standard assault rifle shoots what feels like pebbles at your hordes of enemies, the shotgun feels like it's just tickling the enemy most of the time and I felt that I spent most of my time just going for headshots to get through the drudgery of the levels. For a game that prides itself on it's crazy point scoring game-play it does little to encourage the player to score points. Racking up a big combo is a fun for a while, but the gimmick, like the rest of the game, grows tired, quickly. It suffers from a mutation of the dullness of Gears of War games, the disease of running down grey coloured corridors with lots of chest high walls, killing the same thing over and over, only this time, at least, the scenery isn't a dull, chaotically changing from waterfalled city, to desert wastelands, seemingly at random. 


There are other hints that this game spent too long on the gimmick, little details that don't matter on there own, but together destroy the illusion of immersing yourself in a game. Such as the fact that whenever Captain Wolverine McBadAss checks his wrist radar, he changes back to his default weapon looks at his other wrist, puts wrist away, changes back to the weapon he was holding originally. This may seem like nitpicking, but it's just an example of bad coding that distances the player from the gaming experience. 




Along with the PC version (the version I have) being a console port and various useful settings being removed from the interface, requiring some .ini file tinkering. The game feels unpolished. Pretty, yes. Gimmicky, yes. Fun, for a while. But this game gets too dull, too quickly, and gives you no incentive to look past the faults.