Bulletstorm: Min Wage Review

Do you remember that scene from Wayne’s World where Wayne first sees Cassandra Wong? We’ve all had a similar moment where we’ve seen a girl and announced silently to the world, “she will be mine, oh yes, she will be mine!” We’ll pursue this girl to the ends of the Earth until she is indeed ours. However, have you ever pursued this girl and underneath her physical beauty lies a shallow, boring, stupid person? Playing Bulletstorm is just like that, it’s like dating a bimbo.

Bulletstorm is the baby of People Can Fly (Painkiller) and Epic Games and tries to give Epic’s Gears of War style a kick in the ass. The Incredible Hulk sized alpha males are back but the snaillike movements have been replaced with sprints and Sonic the Hedgehog style baseball slides. The speed and fluidity of the controls should make other shooters take notice and think outside the basic ‘run, aim and shoot’ repertoire.

The environments are carnival playgrounds of mayhem constructed out of jagged concrete, sharpened metal, live explosives and vicious local flora. Combined with your arsenal of weapons and abilities, Bulletstorm hosts a buffet of different kills. Bulletstorm plays a lot like Epic Games version of Platinum Games’ MadWorld for the Wii. MadWorld was a brutal beat ‘em up that had you accumulate points by murdering thugs in the cruelest ways possible and relied heavily on humor to offset its cartoonish super violence. Bulletstorm functions similarly with the most complex kills earning huge amounts of points. Except where MadWorld gives you a playground and a score quota to progress, Bulletstorm plays like a typical corridor shooter with the skill points used to buy weapons and ammo rather than advance the game.

Both games suffer from the same problem, the emphasis on over-the-top kills and dirty jokes just isn’t entertaining for very long. For the first couple of hours Bulletstorm is quite fun but after you’ve smashed a thug into a wall of spikes for the hundredth time it loses its edge. The humor in Bulletstorm is lacking due to poorly written dialogue with foul language sprinkled in to try and hide it. For a game that’s supposed to be a light hearted romp the serious, generic redemption and revenge based plot is a real turnoff. The inconsistency in tone is a total buzz kill and there’s no satisfying payoff either for those who stay to the end. The dialogue was written for the Beavis & Butt-Head kids out there who giggle uncontrollably at the mention of anything remotely suggestive or dirty. For those kids this game is a wet dream, for the rest of us it’s just annoying and downright embarrassing to the medium. The opening sequence to Ratchet & Clank: A Crack In Time is funnier than the entirety of Bulletstorm and there’s not one dirty word in Ratchet. For the record I actually found Duke Nukem Forever pretty funny so it’s not like Bulletstorm is too low brow for me, it’s just poorly written.

Bulletstorm is mind-numbingly repetitive and far too easy. Most of the skillshots (as they’re called) are too complicated to pull off consistently if at all. A lot of skillshots and abilities involve enemies huddling but they rarely do that. Instead they scatter about the room cowering behind chest high walls waiting to get killed effortlessly. The rest of the skillshots are either simple things like ‘headshots’ or rely on environmental props which tend to stick out like beacons and are almost always the fastest, easiest and most lucrative option to clear a room when available. Since most skillshots rarely present themselves as feasible the enemies tend to move to precarious locations where one melee attack will send them to a gruesome death and a decent payoff rather than moving to a tactical position. In addition, you can take a lot of punishment before having to take cover and the enemies can’t hit the broadside of a barn unless you’re standing still or they’re wielding a grenade launcher. Even then it takes several hits for you to be taken down on Normal difficulty. The only situations that become remotely dangerous are when large swarms of melee enemies try to dog pile you in close quarters. In that case you can always sit back and wait for them to charge you one at a time like lemmings while you kick them into spike traps. Meanwhile, if you were a bit more fragile you’d spend more time staring at a rock than killing so either way the game was going to be boring.

The AI isn’t just bad at shooting, it’s bad in general. Bulletstorm relies heavily on scripted events to move the action forward which means killing every enemy in one room before being allowed to move on to the next one. This is all well and good but more often than not I’ve been running around a room without any enemies but the game won’t let me progress. Then a minute later I’ll find the one remaining enemy, cowering behind a rock, refusing to shoot at me at all. Perhaps it’s a smart move seeing as I just booted a dozen of his buddies to death and maybe he’s having second thoughts. Perhaps he’s praying to his god for salvation. Another thing, you usually have one or two squad mates with you to lay down cover fire and trade insults. However, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of them actually kill any enemies outright. Your squad mates are largely ornamental and serve no purpose other than to spew bad dialogue and open doors and paths you’re not allowed to open for whatever reason. Often your squad will just sit behind the first chest high wall in a room and don’t move or shoot until you’ve finished killing everything. I didn’t expect Bulletstorm to have the squad sophistication of Mass Effect or anything but this is pathetic by comparison.

Let’s talk more about the boring factor. Half of your arsenal is traditional and the other half is terrible and impractical. Your default weapon, which is always equipped, is an assault rifle and you can add two sub weapons at any drop kit which are generously spread through the game. You’ve got an overpowered shotgun, a revolver that can shoot flares, a sniper rifle with remote controlled bullets, the Flail Gun which shoots chain-linked grenades that wrap around necks, the Bouncer which shoots explosive, bouncing cannonballs, a gun that shoots drills, and occasionally you can use a minigun. A few of the guns are fun for a few minutes but mostly impractical. There are very few enemy types and their abilities are limited to your own arsenal which I described except they don’t have your speed or a Leash which you can use to effortlessly toss enemies around like a Final Fantasy boss. Despite the size and scale of the set pieces and creatures you’ll see there’s only one true boss fight in the game and it’s not at the end either. In other words, you’re never going to encounter any surprises unless you consider disappointment a surprise.

Bulletstorm shows a lot of promise at first but once you get deep in the game you realize how shallow, repetitive and boring it is. The controls are a lot better and faster than I’d have expected from Epic but it doesn’t make up for the rest of the game. There are no redeeming qualities about this game beyond that. I actually question whether a pure shooter is viable after playing Bulletstorm. Bulletstorm’s plot sets itself up for a sequel and I hope it never gets one. It doesn’t deserve it and I don’t think anything can save this game from the fundamental problems it faces. Only play this game if you’re starving for another shooter which at this point should be pretty unlikely.

I asked Homer to play Bulletstorm and here's what he had to say.