By Michael Lowell

March 20, 2011

Bulletstorm
PlayStation 3, PC, Xbox 360 (Reviewed on PlayStation 3)
Developer: People Can Fly, co-developed by Epic Games
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Released: February 22, 2011

Note A: The grammatical errors have been fixed.  Totally sloppy and inexcusable on my part.  Won’t happen again.

Note B: This review contains spoilers.

The breaking point is going to come.  It has to.  It’s been ten painful years since Halo.  The genre that once used a twenty-five-month span to serve gamers System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six, Half-Life, Starsiege Tribes, Quake III: Arena, and Unreal Tournament has dissolved into a putrid grunge of tactical shooters.  That’s not to say they’re all bad, but the genre has become a mothering owl puking regurgitated bile into eager and open mouths.  And regardless of what you think it takes to become a Console Shooter Legend™, the audience is getting a little bit too skilled for Call of Duty: Black Ops.  The rejection of urban warfare would seem to be inevitable.  They’ve been playing the same game for way too long.  Console shooters are eventually going to want “more complex”.  With the exception of the side-scrolling platformer (a pursuit typically aimed at younger children), it’s happened in nearly every major genre: Space Invaders becomes Gradius becomes Parodius and becomes a whole platoon of “bullet hell” shooters; Final Fight becomes Streets of Rage and then finds a niche in arcades and eventually transforms into Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden and God of War; Street Fighter becomes Tekken and Soul Calibur and eventually leads into Guilty Gear and BlazBlue; even the computer-oriented development phase for the first-person shooter yielded Wolfenstein 3-D which led to Doom that gave us Quake which gave us a whole wealth of varied shooters (and only devolved when the industry used console shooter development as a reset button).  “Console shooters feature more moving parts and more complicated playstyles” is bound to happen.

If we’re lucky, Bulletstorm is going to be the reminder of how good shooters were in the nineties.  Bulletstorm developer People Can Fly got their claim to fame with 2004′s Painkiller.  Unfortunately, it was a run-and-gun shooter closer to Serious Sam than Quake.    Fortunately, People Can Fly figured it out this round.  Bulletstorm takes the genre back to the late nineties by leaping into the twenty-sixth century and reminding us that the first-person shooter genre was built by men.  Not your girly team formulas and your pussy snipers, but fucking men.  Your laser beams and your rocket launchers?  Fuck them.  I’ll take them all on.  Come meet me in the middle of the room and let’s dance.  You do the same, People Can Fly.  But I don’t wanna shoot you guys.  I want to shake your hands.  Bulletstorm isn’t perfect.  It’s far from it.  You made some mistakes and your game has some baggage.  But here’s the good part: Bulletstorm is the first console shooter I have ever played that felt as if it was designed (rather than ported) for computers.  In other words, Bulletstorm’s a shooter that plays well on a computer.  Know what that means?  It’s a pretty damn good shooter.

Bulletstorm is out to mock muscle-bound shooters, their foul-mouthed participants, and the attack squadrons they’re a part of, the ones featuring names that wouldn’t feel out of place if they were part of a college fraternity.  It’s all there: The overconfident, beer-swilling cowboy who insists that rumbling sound isn’t going to be a setback (Grayson Hunt as voiced by Steve Blum), the cyborg desperately trying to keep computer circuits from taking over his brain (Ishi as voiced by Andrew Kishino), the rogue and pissed-off cutie-pie (Trhiska as voiced by Jennifer Hale, and it’s becoming more convenient to list the games where she does not voice a character).  It’s all standard stuff, until Bulletstorm teaches humanity there are hundreds of ways to use “dick” in a compound word.  Those expressions of disbelief are then used to introduce five-hundred-foot, setpiece-destroying movie monsters.  And as the situation rolls from worst to worstest and Grayson triggers one clusterfuck after another, sworn enemy and hilarious adversary General Sarrano (voiced by Anthony De Longis) will constantly taunt you for killing the “innocent soldiers with families” that he sent to wipe you out.  Breath of fresh air, refreshing take on the genre, blah blah.  It’s great stuff.  Yeah, there’s plot holes.  The idea of escaping a twenty-sixth-century neutron bomb (the kind of bomb that kills all life on a planet and leaves every structure standing) by using its explosive thrust to escape the planet’s orbit in an evacuation capsule is, well, kind of stupid.  That may be the point of the game, though.  So essentially, Epic Games subcontractor People Can Fly is parodying the Gears of War franchise, produced by Epic Games.  That’s deep.  It’s kind of like the corporate movie studios that have no qualms distributing Michael Moore’s anti-corporate message.  (Why?  There’s too much money to pass up.  Duh.)  It works a hell of a lot better than 2010′s Bayonetta and its beat ‘em up comedy variety hour.  Bulletstorm doesn’t get caught up on the details.  No secret cults or five-hundred-year wars or any of that bullshit.  Something’s in your way, they’re pissed, and killing them will cause even worse things to happen.  That’s good enough.

Just like real life, throwing a human being off a tall cliff and to his death yields 100 points.

That doesn’t mean the parody has completely cleared the runway.  Parody has proven very fucking hard in the video game gig.  It’s very easy to say one thing and then program another.  The Simpsons Game was certainly funny, but didn’t blink an eye as it employed the game mechanics it openly mocked.  Hyperdimension Neptunia attempted to parody the entire video game industry and wrecked its chance at “teh funnay” by transforming into one of the most formulaic role-playing games in recent memory.  And if you only spent sixty minutes with Bulletstorm, you’d really think People Can Fly really fucked it up.  The game parodying the current generation of on-rails single-player missions?  Surprise!  It’s on-rails!  Whoops!  You’ll find the occasional ammunition case in the lonely side of a war zone and you’ll shoot the occasional news droid.  There’s your element of non-linear level design.  Bulletstorm is completely detached from the days when secret rooms were abound.  You aren’t going off the path and dammit, you’re going to enjoy it.  Those guys who are pissed off at you?  They’re your target.  They’re always going to be dead-ahead.  There’s not much need to poke your head left and right.  It’s not much of a surprise that the best firefight in the game takes place in a small square room with a balcony, no choke points, and enemies flooding from every angle.  That is, “OH GOD THEY’RE EVERYWHERE!”  It happens about once or twice and that’s all the creative level design you’re getting.

Why is the level design such a nightmare?  I’ll be pretty blunt about it: Unreal Engine 3 is a gigantic piece of shit.  Unreal Engine 3 is a tool set packed with dynamite, electric saws, industrial stepladders, and all I need is a god damn hammer.  It’s not that the game controls poorly because of the game engine.  It’s the environmental interactions, which are pretty crucial in a game whose scoring system is predicated on environmental interactions.  I don’t think it’s any surprise that the list of non-shooters to receive critical acclaim currently is limited to Batman: Arkham Asylum.  As far as I can gather, every environmental interaction has to be programmed into the game by the developers rather than having a game engine that can automatically figure that out for you.  This means you can’t leap back over a barricade after you’ve made the move, because the “Press X to Jump” function is only tethered to the front.  This also means you can walk up a pile of debris and find yourself locked to a hand railing with no way of getting down except tracing your steps backwards.  Your characters weren’t programmed to jump twenty-four inches to the ground.  And thanks to a rather muted color palette, every environmental action requires an overlay.  (In a previous review of Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, I held this against developer Ninja Theory.  Apparently, I should have just yelled at the company for licensing Unreal Engine 3.)

“So it’s just another crazy shooter with a straight-forward single-player mode and no deathmatch present.  Sure, it has a score-basedco-operative mode!  But that’s not why I’m paying for Xbox Live!  What’s supposed to be so exciting about that?”  Oh, the consumer will find things to hate.  “Bulletstorm’s single-player campaign sucked!  It was too short!  It was only nine hours long!  Why did I pay sixty dollars for this crap?”  The paying public will miss the point.  Short single-player campaigns are perfectly fine.  There’s an entire library of legendary Cave shoot ‘em ups that can be completed in half an hour.  Many of the best games for the Nintendo Entertainment System can be completed in under an hour.  Nobody seems to have a problem with any of those.  It’s the single-player video games with no incentive for a second or third playthrough that are the problem.  Know what we call those?  Bad video games.  Great (and also very good) video games can be played on multiple occasions and remain interesting.  What does People Can Fly do to make a nine-hour single-player campaign interesting?  We’ve already learned the modern single-player campaign has to cater to casuals.  If any of those players die at the same junction four times in a row, it’s going to be a pretty angry GameFAQs post.  The developer doesn’t need that sort of negative attention.  So that’s the question: How does Bulletstorm give the casuals an entertaining time and still challenge the better players?

It’s funny.  The idea was there for years and nobody realized it.  Call of Duty has been rewarding people for “mission objectives” and “killing two people with a single bullet” and “destroying an attack helicopter by saying the secret word”.  All these games have been using wonderful metrics to measure multiplayer combat.  So there you go.  The purpose and meaning of Bulletstorm is to play for the highest score possible.  You don’t play to complete the game.  Both the single-player and co-operative modes are about score.  Contrary to the history of video games on eight-bit video game consoles (where “beating the game” was the achievement), scoring systems can go a very long way in measuring a player’s ability to master the system.  Playing for score can make things a hell of a lot more interesting.   If it wasn’t for score, Bayonetta would simply be another beat ‘em up where you find the best combo and abuse the hell out of it.  (Yeah, I’m totally aware of that Kilgore exploit.  Totally aware.  It still needs to be used tactfully in order to earn a maximum score.)  Instead, Bayonetta is one of the best games of 2010.  If it wasn’t for score, the people who play Cave shooters would simply rest their moxy on beating the game and becoming good enough to do it as part of a one-credit-clear.  Instead, you can now back and improve upon that one-credit-clear.  Is it a revolutionary concept to wire score into the single-player shooter?  Hardly.  There was once a first-person shooter genre where Wolfenstein 3-D, Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold, Corridor 7: Alien Invasion, and Descent all used scoring systems, an archetype that quickly faded as Doom became the blueprint for the genre.  The problem was pretty obvious: With the exception of the Descent franchise (which, when cranked to their highest difficulty levels, may feature the hardest single-player campaigns in the history of the genre), nobody really found a way to make the scoring systems mean a whole lot.

Well, what has Metal Gear Solid taught us about human beings?  Why was Batman: Arkham Asylum able to persevere with a simple combat scheme?  Well, we’re a bunch of gigantic assholes.  We’ve found having one means for killing one-hundred different enemies is far less entertaining than one-hundred ways to decapitate, maim, and incapacitate a single type of target.  It’s not about blood and guts.  It’s how we get to the blood and guts.  There 131 “skillshots” in Bulletstorm spread across seven guns (all featuring an alternative fire capacity), an energy whip that acts as a leash (also featuring an alternative fire method), and the always-reliable kick in the gut.  These nine weapons (along with the environmental hazards they can be directed into) are some of the most satisfying I have ever used in any first-person shooter.  And that’s before you begin finding all the cool ways that you can render flesh.  Doing that requires some pretty deft execution.  (Do yourself a favor and untoggle aim-assistance.  It will make this a hell of a lot harder.)  It’s one thing to brag about achieving every skill shot.  It’s another to consistently unload a variety of them on every enemy that gets in your way.  And damn, it’s a lot of fun.  That’s why I’m not holding the level design against Bulletstorm and I don’t even have the room to hold the console-ized weapon scheme against the game.  “Two specialty guns and your machine gun” just adds strategy to determining which weapons to equip when you come to the next checkpoint.

Good shooters let you trace your steps by following the trail of blood backwards.  Great shooters
let you find the next area by following the trail of blood forward.

Not that the scoring system is perfect.  It’s way too simple.  Diminishing returns on various abilities don’t come quickly enough.  So in a lot of firefights, it can become very tough to top the easiest option, where you kick half-a-dozen men into a cactus patch or a row of errant electrical wiring.  This becomes much less of a problem as your weapon roster opens up, though the game never gives you an option to repeat the previous levels with your new goodies.  And it’s quite unfortunate that those 131 skillshots don’t even cover the entire range of creative mayhem.  Most notably, I found a way to use the Flail Launcher (featuring chain-connected, remote-controlled grenades) to turn a portable trash incinerator (one of many spread about the game world) into a bootable incendiary grenade.  Disappointment abound when I only received environmental damage rather than a dedicated skillshot bonus.  Boo.  The biggest mistake with the scoring system has nothing to do with the scoring itself.  It’s the display method.  If you simply hammered your way through every level, it’d be very easy to miss that the game is recording your output on a per-chapter basis.  You have to dig into the deepest parts of the start menu to discover your performance.  And after all, this is the crux of the game.  It would have gone a very long way to silence an audience that’s too stupid to read into the Grayson Hunt cue that “I’m being graded on my performance!” if they actually showed you were being graded on your performance.  That is, somewhere in the field of play.  Not the darkest part of the menus.

So we have a scoring system.  Does it work?  That is, “Does it force the player to play the game in a more interesting manner?”  Absolutely.  What’s the sin holding Bulletstorm back?  You know, the game trying to be separate itself from the wannabes on the market?  Every significant tactical shooter has used regenerating health of a mechanic that emulates it.  Competitive Counter-Strike is split into “rounds” that reset the action and the player’s life total.  Call of Duty and Halo allowed the player to regain their health after evading fire for a number of seconds. There’s a reason it works in tactical shooters: The first is that regenerating health allows for a small life bar, thus enforcing the futility of the one-man army.  Coupled with a lack of defensive counter-moves (your dodges and your jumps and your blazing run speed current in Quake and Unreal Tournament), it ensures the better player will get the better end of a one-on-one situation but never a one-on-two situation.  This makes the games much easier to sell to an audience that goes all butthurt when one man is dominating a round.  Too much firepower to overcome.  The second reason for regenerating health is that it streamlines tactics.  It makes tactical shooters faster and it makes them more fun.  Health tallies would overcomplicated the formula.  Forcing players to adjust for map layouts and the enemy’s armaments is already good enough.  It allows players to run set plays and set strategies without having to worry about a teammate having zero health because your twelve-year-old brother is running around the map playing “Al-Qaeda suicide bomber”.

Basically, regenerating health is a reset button.  It works in those games because they’re built for it.  It does not work in Bulletstorm.  Let me explain it this way: What if your enemies had regenerating health?  What would be the first thought in your head?  You know, other than “Who thought this was a good idea?”  Think logically.  You couldn’t have monsters with gargantuan health totals.  They’d take way too much damage.  Then they’d hide behind a corner and get all their health back and it would ruin your day.  It’d be frustrating.  What would be the point of a crappy machine gun?  Fuck that.  You need guns that can dispose of the opposition in one or two hits.  That is, “I need to make sure that the enemy’s regenerating health doesn’t become a factor.”  Regenerating enemy health would standardize your weapon roster because it would standardized the enemies you would face.  It would tether enemy design to that formula.  “But Borderlands had enemies with regenerating shields!”  It did.  And in that game, your ability to kill those monsters was bound to your character level, no matter what class, armaments, and skills you were using.  Borderlands standardized damage output to make it work.  So what happens when the player has regenerating health?  It standardizes enemy damage.  Regenerating health is simply not capable of a diverse enemy roster.  Sure, they can take a hell of a lot of punishment.  But regenerating health is not conducive to a diversity of damage.  Enemies can’t one-hit you with rockets because that would be bullshit.  They also can’t chip damage you because “Why bother?”  And if you played Doom, you would know that the enemies had no problem doing both of those and everything inbetween.  The regenerating health system in Bulletstorm is good for just about one thing: The machine gun kind of opposition.  That is, middle-of-the-road damage and rapid-fire.   Just about everything hits that hard, even the bosses. And even that’s got its kinks, because the use of “hitscan weapons” (bullets that travel directly from the barrel to the target) by artificial intelligence has never worked in any shooter ever.  Bulletstorm is now the 653rd shooter to neglect that lesson.  Regenerating health does not work in games built for diverse enemy rosters.  And it would have been an exceptional benefit to the player in a game built on the basis of “grading your performance”, where the player could have been judged by his ability to see how good he is at not getting hit.  It’s lazy design that absolves the developer of having to properly place item pickups for the right place and the right time.

Ain’t it amusing?  Bulletstorm is flawed.  It has a ton of notable flaws.  But you know what?  Bulletstorm plays half as well as the Quake and Unreal Tournament that inspired the Gears of War that Bulletstorm sets out to parody.  That immediately makes it one of the best shooters of 2011.  See, console fanboys?  The genre can still be fun when it’s not called Halo, Killzone, or Call of Duty!  Oh, and consider your victory won for a single day, Mr. Cliff Bleszinski.  Your studio’s name is on a game that finally got the taste of Unreal Tournament 3 out of my mouth.

Just kidding, dicktits.

4 out of 5

(Games rated four-out-of-five are very good. In a slow twelve months, they’re dark horses for Game of the Year. Even if you don’t care for the genre, you won’t feel like your money is going to waste.)

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Special Thanks To:

Destructoid, for the pretty pictars.

IGN, for the pretty pictar that became the pretty header.