Laser guided mutant ass simulator

Full disclosure: The last shooter I actually played through is Crysis 2, which I really like. In fact, pardoning my enjoyment of Doom I think Crysis is pretty much what I like in terms of single player shooting. I bought Hard Reset over the sale as well, but that game didn't seem as good so I went with Bulletstorm first. This, by the way, is how back logs grow into mighty forests of games.

Bulletstorm when compared to Crysis has a worse engine, shorter single player and a worse story. It's also got straight up worse gunplay, with a weird melee element that sort of trips you up when enemies magically get into melee and start pushing you around. I say magically because it's either an issue with how they spawn in or I'm not sure, but often I'd suddenly be getting kicked in the side by a mutant you'd think you'd notice running screaming at you.

That's pretty unfair though. Bulletstorm isn't necessarily an attempt at producing a serious shooter, rather a more slapstick goofy gunplay engine wrapped around a basic and simple story that works. You play a guy out for revenge on some jerk off, and you crash land a resort planet that didn't run its logistics so well and was overrun with mutants. It's heavily implied that the one faction of mutants you fight are the remaining tourists.

The game's resource system is uniquely structured around how you fuck enemies up. If you kill enemies with generic bulleting into the gut, you actually run out of ammo. On the other hand if you do fun trickshots, of which I think I explored maybe half the hundreds of them, you get bonus points. This helps encourage weapon variety, since different munitions have different costs and plus it's cool to laser guide an explosive sniper round into a mutant's ass, explode it and kill his friends for bonus points. They probably could have built more of the game around this as its fundamentally enjoyable and doesn't need a great deal of exposition to cover for.

The game's weapons are, however, woefully shitty and a major problem even on normal is that the guns basically don't feel like they do anything. I think I killed about 75% of all enemies with the sniper rifle, with some other limited amount going to the shotgun. The shotgun is terrible, with an effective range of about two feet and almost no damage dealing capacity. In this sense the "Trickshots" become something you absolutely have to do all the time, which takes the wind out of them. Half the time you're better of just booting enemies repeatedly into things, which seems a little ridiculous and gets tedious. There's also a sort of plasma leash weapon that you can pull enemies in and boot them out with, except it doesn't reliably work on half the enemies in the game so I just stopped bothering with it.

Enemy variety isn't great and enemy design isn't especially satisfying. There's a breed of Skull that can soak up regular gunfire without flinching, which is just moronic. I can't wrap my head around this design decision at all. I died to this several times simply because I can't tell them apart from the other enemies, or more likely because I was getting bored of spamming headshots off the sniper rifle. The bosses are, again, something you repeatedly shoot with the sniper rifle. If other weapons work well for them, I don't know, since you're only allowed 3 weapon slots and you need the sniper rifle to kill most everything and then something to switch to in melee when you get swarmed. Which is the shotgun, even though it sucks.

In normal games this isn't quite an issue, but in this you find yourself irritated without guns to do those jobs. You can boot enemies in melee, of course, but it isn't effective on multiple targets and is pretty wimpy unless you have something to kill them into.

On the plus side all the guns have an alternate fire mode that opens up some additional sweet options. The sniper rifle can switch to explosive rounds while the shot gun has some sort of powered up flame blast. Both of these options make them better at their existing jobs, though, so it's not really as exciting as it should be.

What does surprise me is just how good the 'vehicle sections' if you will, are. There's a couple arenas where the game switches it up a bit and I'm surprised at how much better they are than say, every vehicle segment in every fps ever. They're easy and simple, but the point of mixing up a game's variety isn't to brutally challenge the player, rather to break up the set pieces so you don't start to find the tedium.

So all of that is a little mediocre and probably why the game didn't go so well. On the other hand, the game is wonderfully immature in just the right way. The protagonist knows he's mostly fucked and voices his opinion in such a manner, a constant stream of goofy dick jokes and other high school levelbits. It's a sort of modern gallows humor that works exceedingly well within the game's setting. The planet you're on has been fucked sideways by human error and the story explaining what happened is actually much better than expected. There's some good development there and I actually found myself interested in the explanation of how everything got to go mad max style.

My favorite part is probably the female protagonist, simply because in a sea of immaturity, dick jokes and 'your robot side likes how I look in these pants' she isn't written as some goofball bimbo or shrieking nancy. The fact she didn't end up as sex object beyond being attractively drawn (but then so is the male lead) was really satisfying and helped keep the immaturity in the right quarter, but moreover the fact she's an important element to the progression of the story and the main character's "sort of" redemption works really well. Mostly because it is absolutely and completely unexpected.

She introduces herself by punching you in the face. Fresh!

For $5 I'm pretty satisfied with Bulletstorm. I don't know how the multiplayer is, since I'll never bother with it, but the campaign was fine for the five dollars. You can tell they put a ton of good honest effort in trying to keep the arenas fresh and interesting, with the bizarre ass resort world and its myriad of death traps properly varied.

I am going to have trouble watching Transformers Prime after hearing Blum make all those dick jokes, but oh well, Starscream is pretty goofy like that anyway.