BULLETSTORM

"I'm not interested in quantifying how much abuse your ass was built for."

That is an actual line from the game.


Short Review: RAD


Long Review: REALLY FUCKING RAD


Bullestorm is a love letter to me. It's true. Grayson Hunt was completely designed from the ground up to be appealing to people like me. His entire personality is just like mine. He's constantly making jokes, and always has a witty comment whenever something happens in the game. His partner, Ishi, plays a perfect straight man to go along with Gray's outlandish behavior. Trishka is cool as hell as well.

Anyway on to Bulletstorm the videogame. Best game I have played in a while. The most important thing that Bulletstrom does, is be fun. More videogames should be more concerned about being fun rather than exciting (although Bulletstrom has its exciting moments as well). Everything about Bulletstorm says VIDEOGAME. Nothing is taken very serious at all, even the gimmick of score points is worked into the game as a function of the game (they actually do explain it, and it's kind of cool). The object of the game is to rack up points from your skillshots. A skillshot is a method of killing an enemy, and whenever you do one, an indicator pops up on the screen and informs you of what skillshot you did and how many points it was worth. To assist in these, you get the Leash, which grabs a distant enemy and pulls them towards you and puts that enemy in slow motion. You also have a kick which knocks a nearby enemy away from in slow motion, and a slide which pops the enemy upwards into slow motion. The skillshots are an awesome feature. I haven't had this much fun picking apart enemies since the first Medal of Honor, which was the first time I saw an enemy react to getting shot in the nuts. Now I leash someone and kick them away and shoot them in the butthole and get a little popup that says "REAR ENTRY." It makes me smile every single time too. I'm having more fun trying to shoot enemies in different methods with different guns in an attempt to get different skillshots, and that provides a whole different type of challenge rather than just survive or make it to the next waypoint.

Other than the campaign (which is very entertaining), you get two other modes. Echoes and Multiplayer. Echoes takes small parts of some of the levels and you play them with the goal of getting the highest possible score. There is a 3 star rating on how you do in Echo, which gives you a goal to reach. It's very evocative of older games where the challenge was always getting a higher score than your friends. Multiplayer (which people are calling Anarchy Mode, even though it doesn't say that anywhere in the game itself) is similar to the Horde Mode in Gears of War where you and up to 3 other people online take on waves of enemies in an attempt to get higher scores. In between rounds you can purchase upgrades for your weapons and character with the points that you have been earning. As you level up, you will acquire cosmetic changes to your character to customize they way that you look. It starts off very easy and then the challenge increases each round as you take on different types and combinations of enemies.

The game is not perfect though, it has two noticable flaws. The campaign's story has two twists that are completely predictable even before the twist comes. One of them was very unnecessary and the other was kind of neat (I'm not going to spoil it for people that care). There are also long load times. This has never been a dealbreaker for me, and it is not starting now. Even with these two minor flaws, Bulletstorm provides the most fun I've had in a game this generation. Anyone who plays games not just for entertainment but for fun would not be disappointed in their purchase of this game. If you can play through this game and not laugh a single time you're better off not playing a videogame ever again and watching stupid shit like Woody Allen movies anyway.