Review: Bulletstorm

[Levethian]

Maybe I'm too old? But I find the frenzied violence of Painkiller far more satisfying than Bulletstorm. I think I even found Borderlands more fun, in terms of prolonged playability - more weapons, more enemies, more reward for growth. I've played through the BS Campaign and spent some time on Echo. Enjoyed it well enough, but I can't see myself touching it again...

 

[Mutak]

Maybe I'm too old? But I find the frenzied violence of Painkiller far more satisfying than Bulletstorm. I think I even found Borderlands more fun, in terms of prolonged playability - more weapons, more enemies, more reward for growth. I've played through the BS Campaign and spent some time on Echo. Enjoyed it well enough, but I can't see myself touching it again...

I can totally understand that. If you're really into shooters then the echo/anarchy mode probably isn't going to give you a lot replay value because those aspects of the game are actually strategy games with a veneer of shooter on top. They're really all about resource management. What do you call that - an fprts?

 

[maddawg IAJI]

The sad thing is, I hate Anarchy mode. I loved the gameplay and the guns and the skillshots, but Anarchy mode just sucks, especially if you're playing it on a console. People will actually fight over enemies to rack up their own skill points and they never stop. Even when the enemy has a team challenge placed on their head, your teammates will still fight over who gets to kick the poor bastard off the edge to complete the challenge, usually ending in someone accidentally killing him with the leash and forcing you to replay the entire round....again. Plus, you don't get experience toward your character if you fail the round, so you could spend hours playing one round and not earn a single point to that next unlock able gun skin you wanted.

 

[Rigs83]

This was the game I played the most at PAX East, because I don't want to wait four hours in a line, and it was awesomeness.

 

[Pikey Mikey]

One of the things that I think would have made the game so much better is if Rell had been your companion/sidekick instead of Ishi. He's basically Gray's drinking buddy and the few times you see him is better than Ishi's (except when his AI goes nuts and wants to kill everyone)

 

[KarlMonster]

I bought Bulletstorm cheap on Steam. The PC version is a port of the console version, damnit. GFWL is required to play the game, or multiplayer. I have an obsolete version of GFWL, but it lets me play even though I will never upgrade it.

The game has a vicious head-bob when you move and run which makes my head hurt. The head bob might even be worse than STALKER Shadow of Chernobyl, because in SoC you could edit the code in the game files to stop it. There is no possibility of turning it off in Bulletstorm.

Yes, the story is stupid. That wouldn't be so bad, but the story is moved along in cutscenes. There are too damn many cutscenes. Why can't your companions move up to you and deliver exposition without a cutscene? Normal people do this! I can see what Yahtzee means about the strange character attitudes, and I think that Gray's dialogue was written by committee. I'll side with him on the principle that the alcohol and adbot-mashing are purely gratuitous and serve no valid purpose in the game. While the game seems to take pains to explain everything - with very flimsy rationales - it never quite explains Gray's Kick of Doom, though I'll let that slide since it is a core gameplay mechanic, albeit a strange one.

There is no jumping. Heck, you cannot even walk off the edge of something when there is a walkway two feet below you. This is most annoying in exposed terraced areas, where you have to go find stairs to get to better cover. There are so many invisible walls that it reminded me of other games that had a beautiful landscape that I couldn't interact with. In Painkiller you could fall to your death if you pleased, but Bulletstorm won't allow it.

Its not a dirt-shaded game, which is nice. The targets du jour are varied and colorful, which is also good. When I first stopped playing the game, about 20 minutes had elapsed. I had to stop because I had a massive headache from the head bob, and because I was having difficulty telling the vibrant hostiles from the vibrant landscape. Painkiller had colorful hostiles, but used subdued colors for the backgrounds. I think that better foreground/background contrast would have done the trick.

Its true that when I started playing again a few days later, I kept on playing til about 4am. Usually that's a check-mark in the "FUN" column, but I disagree. There is fun to be had in here, but I was caught up in the excitement. The game creates artificial excitement with quicktime events, timed escapes, and so many Drake's-esque catastrophic set pieces that its a wonder that the planet didn't explode during the opening cutscene. The whole time I was playing, I was comparing it unfavorably to other games like Batman:AA and Half-Life 2. [Edit: In retrospect, even though I don't rank B:AA highly, its not fair to make those comparisons, my apologies.] Also there were things in the game that starkly reminded me of Bioshock. There are some really good elements in this game, and I can definitely see the influence from Painkiller and PCF, but mostly I want my $10 back.