Bullet Storm, An overall ..meh

[Kopikatsu]

Sorry if im a tad high-speed and already beat the game ill try to keep it spoiler free. The game in general seems to fall so very short of the amount of trash talking it has been doing. Its "kill with skill" amounts to nothing more than a check list of "ok now i have to line this guy up like this .. and shoot that..". I found myself literally pausing the game mid combat to check the list to see what it was to do next on the laundry list of "skill shots". That and considering how much trash talk they did to modern-warfare im surprised how many scenes it nearly deliberately rips off from it. The games pace is literally nothing short of "shoot/stop and supply/highlighted puzzle/shoot and repeat".

Edit: Also another thing, the sheer amount of sexual term usage just gets a bit weird and unnecessary. There is one character in the game who just about every time he speaks a sentence it contains some form of unnecessary sexual joke/slur/ or sexual adjective. Its so excessive its just weird.


Im not sure its really spoilers if i say this so if your afraid look away...


The ending is SUCH trash. For the love of god do game designers know what the word closure is anymore? %#*&in squealitis.

Well, that would be exactly what I predicted the issues with Bulletstorm would be. Nice to know that they didn't pull a fast one and make a fun game, God forbid.

That would be the problem with FPSes, though. The core mechanics for all of them are exactly the same unless they add some kind of gimmick...but pretty much any gimmick you add to a FPS is unnecessary and...gimmicky. Like bullet time.

Edit: Maybe they should try giving you some freedom. I can't think of a single FPS (Fallout 3 doesn't count) that doesn't just set you on a linear path and constantly dish out objectives for you...which happen to be straight ahead! Yay!

 

[Dogstile]

There is one. It's called "not caring about the points".

Are you honestly complaining because its asking you to be creative about your kills?

Now, I don't know about you, but judging by the escapist review of top ten "skill kills" -

Kick a dude over a ledge
Kick something against a dude
Shoot a dude in the head

Snipped to keep it short

Play the demo, there are more ways to kill people. The review was his preference of skill shots, which weren't all that varied.

Tell you what, here's an actual list

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/7776822/bulletstorm_skill_shot_list_complete.html

Judge for yourself.

 

[archvile93]

I'll have to just take your word for it. I'd like to form my own opinion, but GFWL makes that quite impossible.

 

[Netrigan]

I'm really not trying to troll here since this is an honest question from an outsider (aka, not a FPS player) but what can a FPS do that hasn't been done? Other than the guns, settings and enemy types aren't they pretty much the same no matter if it's a WWII or Sci-fi FPS? I mean really, what did you expect to be different this time? (That last question was a real question and not a "Duh, what'd you expect, dumbass" type statement. Sometimes that type of question is read wrong when typed. Like I said, not trolling just curious.)

I'd go even further. What can a platformer do that hasn't been done before? What can a fighting game do that hasn't been done before? What can a sandbox game do that hasn't been done before?

It's long been hard to come up with a fresh hook... and when someone does come up with one, you can rest assure it will spread like a rash. Remember when Mirror's Edge came out and parkour was new and exciting. Now it's in every other game.

 

[Krylock]

Sorry if im a tad high-speed and already beat the game ill try to keep it spoiler free. The game in general seems to fall so very short of the amount of trash talking it has been doing. Its "kill with skill" amounts to nothing more than a check list of "ok now i have to line this guy up like this .. and shoot that..". I found myself literally pausing the game mid combat to check the list to see what it was to do next on the laundry list of "skill shots". That and considering how much trash talk they did to modern-warfare im surprised how many scenes it nearly deliberately rips off from it. The games pace is literally nothing short of "shoot/stop and supply/highlighted puzzle/shoot and repeat".

Edit: Also another thing, the sheer amount of sexual term usage just gets a bit weird and unnecessary. There is one character in the game who just about every time he speaks a sentence it contains some form of unnecessary sexual joke/slur/ or sexual adjective. Its so excessive its just weird.


Im not sure its really spoilers if i say this so if your afraid look away...


The ending is SUCH trash. For the love of god do game designers know what the word closure is anymore? %#*&in squealitis.

Wait, you're joking right?

If this guy just ruined a bulletstorm purchase for you, then slap your self. Don't listen to this guy.

 

[Atmos Duality]

The demo looked reasonably fun as a sort of "Go at your own pace rail-shooter". Though I do concur with the excessive amount of sexual-innuendo. It's not shocking or offensive, just annoying and repetitive.
Unreal Tournament immortalized itself with catchphrases for feats of skill, but it did so because said feats (in a real game) were not all that common, apart from maybe "Headshot".

With Bulletstorm, it looks like you can combo-kill everything, which kind of subtracts from the special accomplishment of using a combo.

 

[jpoon]

Can't say I didn't see this coming, this game looked like shit.

 

[Cowabungaa]

How did you ever expect it to be anything else than a crazy, immature shoot-'em-up with a nice little scoring system that rewards creative murdering?

And why did you even play it like that? The kill-score thingies aren't an achievement list. I think I'm joining the "ur doin it wrong" crowd here, you seem to have expected the wrong thing and didn't play it as intentioned.

I was looking at Bulletstorm as the spiritual successor to Unreal Tournament. Without the "Tournament" aspect, this is really going to suck balls.

How did that happen? I don't think they ever even remotely advertised it as such.

At least UT99 is still alive and kicking.

If you stay too long to get a good look at it, you will realize you just paid $60 for an arcade shooter.

And this is a bad thing...how, exactly? Why is there anything wrong with an arcade shooter? I long for an arcade shooter. It's also a lot cheaper here.

 

[Cowabungaa]

If you stay too long to get a good look at it, you will realize you just paid $60 for an arcade shooter.

And this is a bad thing...how, exactly? Why is there anything wrong with an arcade shooter? I long for an arcade shooter. It's also a lot cheaper here.

Nothing is wrong with an Arcade Shooter, hell, I actually think Bulletstorm and DNF might breath some life back into the FPS corpse.

Dont expect me to pay full price for Bulletstorm though.....

Why not? Since when does an arcade shooter equal a cheap game? DNF is a definite arcade shooter and is rumored to have around 16 to 18 hours of campaign gameplay [http://www.computerandvideogames.com/288892/news/duke-nukem-forever-campaign-is-16-18-hours-long-has-glory-hole/], would that not be worth the full price? I doubt Bulletstorm will be that long, but with the multiple gamemodes I'd say you can get plenty of gameplay time from it.

 

[Nomanslander]

The game in general seems to fall so very short of the amount of trash talking it has been doing. Its "kill with skill" amounts to nothing more than a check list of "ok now i have to line this guy up like this .. and shoot that..". I found myself literally pausing the game mid combat to check the list to see what it was to do next on the laundry list of "skill shots".

You know, this kinda reminds me of another FPS that had trashed talked its audience, and the game became one of the biggest and most destructive fiascoes to ever hit gaming.

No one seems to be calling out Cliffy B for this game like they did with Johnny and his stinker..=P

Must be the sign of the times.

Of course that game wanted to make "us" its *****, and it bankrupt a company...lol

 

[Halo Fanboy]

snip

Bulletstorm would have to be an arcade game to be considered an arcade shooter. There are very few arcade FPS games. I can only think of Counterstrike and Half Life 2.

As for your opinion. You should reconsider it.

 

[Netrigan]

Just got in the mail today.

Over-all I'm enjoying it, but I wish they had ditched a lot of the story. Don't think there's a cut-scene yet that has improved the gameplay even slightly.

I also would have preferred they started with the over-the-top action stuff instead of slowly introducing it. The prologue is the standard tutorial crap. Here's how you look around, here's how you aim, here's how you crouch... and it's attached to a completely nothing of a story. There is a flash-back action sequence which should have been expanded upon. It's a glorified cut-scene when it could have been a really fucking cool fight.

They even throw a few change-up things early on, like a space battle and a turret battle on the back of a train. This is the sort of stuff you want to toss in once you properly introduce your core game play to give the player a small break from repetition. Seems weird they tossed it in while you're still getting a feel for the basic combat. Worse, it's really basic stuff, so all I want to do is get back to straight combat, not deal with rail shooter sequences.

But the new game mechanics are quite a bit of fun.

 

[Zechnophobe]

Flame all you like.. I will enjoy one of the few shooters that's not another Call of Duty clone... mmm tastey... it's good to still enjoy things.

These kind of comments confuse me. And then I'm like "Oh, right, not a PC gamer."

 

[lee1287]

Yeah i was gonna get it but then i read some reviews, it just looked OTT.

 

[PurplePlatypus]

Sounds like it lost a lot of its fun when you were reduced to following a list so you could tick all the skills off. A much better way to have done it would be to only show the ones you had so far found and at the most showing how many there where in total. At least then you get the fun of discovering them for yourself as you go about the obsessive process of trying to get them all.

 

[Normandyfoxtrot]

I'm not going to get or play bullet storm this isn't a slight against the game, I've not even read a review, I just don't care it doesn't have a solid story, I don't want anything to do with it.

 

[Andrew_Mac]

OT: expecting Bulletstorm to be any good was like expecting the internet to NOT make a single cat image macro for an entire minute, it would never work. Its one of those games you play just to have fun and then move on. If you stay too long to get a good look at it, you will realize you just paid $60 for an arcade shooter.

And I think that's exactly what many of us were looking for in Bulletstorm. A shooter that we can just play for fun, and replay for the score. I don't think I'll ever get tired of explosions raining limbs down on me. It's a hell of a lot more entertaining than stopping a group of terrorists from destroying the world for the twentieth time, or some bullshit like that. Give me a ton of bad guys, some awesome and over the top weapons, and the ability to kill using the environment, and I'm happy.

I have to agree with you there. I live in england so the full game isn't out yet obviously, but i did get the demo a few weeks ago and I've been playing it alot just to see if i can beat my high score. I've never found a game that makes me want to do that before. (My high score before today was 14630. A few hours ago i got 16285! I was SOOO happy about it, I've never been so excited to beat a score on a game that I set myself...)

 

[Gralian]

I haven't played the full game, only the demo, but it's not my sort of thing at all. It's nice they were trying to have a bash at something new, but i honestly couldn't stand the concept, premise or characters. Having to feel required to "kill with skill" is such a massive drag. I don't want to have to piss about switching between various weapons i wouldn't otherwise use and wait for the exact right moment with the exact right setup before i kill something. I just want to use the guns i'm most comfortable with, killing the enemies how i find the most natural. The whip is awkward to use and the slow-mo effect is just as awkward. There's something incredibly stupid about going to kick a guy off a bridge, only to watch him sloooowly start to fall down the chasm, before finally speeding up and dropping to his death. I don't want to stand there waiting for that. I want to punt that bastard all the way down the chasm in one clean solid movement. Maybe i'm just "doing it wrong", but this Tony Hawk's style point system for killing enemies in a variety of ways just feels forced, pointless, and irritating. I really don't like it.

Then there's the ridiculous hypermasculinisation and Americanisation in the characters themselves. I can't help but feel that the game is trying to be a celebration of all things western, but it just feels too gratuitous and ridiculous. I can't stand any of the cast, and while that's not that important for an FPS, it's important enough to the point of not actually wanting to play the game. The amount of swearing and 'FUCK YEAH, BRO' attitudes displayed really turns me off. Another thing, i'm getting sick of seeing the Unreal Engine being used so often. I know it's Epic's "thing", but the last thing i want is another Gears clone, as if those games weren't bad enough already. Seeing this engine everywhere is almost as bad as seeing the same CoD engine being used for every single rehash of the series. Considering how bloody basic the thing is to use and give the impression the graphics are "impressive" with minimal strain on the hardware, it's also a bit irksome that games using the Unreal Engine get such high praise for graphics and presentation, but that's a different rant entirely.

I don't know. It's just not for me. Maybe the game appeals more to American audiences than European ones. Maybe it "offends my sensibilities" because i'm British, and we tend to be rather more conservative about this sort of thing compared to our American friends across the pond.

 

[Zechnophobe]

Flame all you like.. I will enjoy one of the few shooters that's not another Call of Duty clone... mmm tastey... it's good to still enjoy things.

These kind of comments confuse me. And then I'm like "Oh, right, not a PC gamer."

I have a hard time believing that even the typical console gamer considers the new CoD games to be the standard for what should constitute an excellent shooter. The genre has really been done to death at this point, and it's my personal opinion that the industry should put its focus elsewhere, but there should still be some consensus that we've moved backwards from great games like Timesplitters.

Well it's just that on the PC we have... lots more FPS' than on the console. We often get ports from consoles, and a whole bunch of our own ( a lot pretty mediocre). The idea that there are 'soo many clones' of these games just seems a bit weird.

 

[Pyrokinesis]

Justa follow up after reading the replys:

Im a little surprised how much people hate on Cod for it "simplistic gameplay" when it MW2 pulled out the all the stops to try and make the story interesting and deep for a topic so bland and overused. Ill admit that Cods gameplay follows the ropes when it come to your FPS'es and doesnt deviate to far but for what it lacks in new and exciting gameplay it makes up for in an interesting story.

And a btw i disown any cod that isnt modernwarefare... especially black ops.

Bulletstorm.. on the other hand, would be a mirror opposite to Cods idea. Would be if its gameplay was actually a good deal different from your standard shooter. The toys are different but you find your self using the same chest high wall strategy 9/10 times. I would be happy with the skill shots if things a simple as vodoo doll "impale an enemy on environment" werent worth so much and so easy to spam. Later on in the game there is a segment where enemys just line up after you and there is 3 vodoo spots right infront of you. Just kick, impale,kick, impale, kick, impale and the game wont fault you for it, in-fact it rewards that behavior. You make alot more money doing that than say something more difficult like shooting an enemy in the balls and kicking their head off. Or the ever elusive steer a bullet into an enemy balls with the sniper (seriously why can they dodge bullets that fast in slow time?). If the game did something like lower your points for doing the same thing again and again then id be more sympathetic.