Review: Bulletstorm (360/PS3)

Blood. Guts. And shooting baddies in the face while intoxicated? You guessed it, Epic Games, creator of the legendary Gears of War series, is back to blow your mind. This time we call it Bulletstorm, and they’ve come to deliver with another, dare I say it, Epic game. It may be ridiculous and unnecessary but that’s one of the aspects that makes it unique from the average shooter.

You find yourself as Grayson Hunt, a space pirate mercenary with an interesting vocabulary. The story is definitely not anything to get excited about by the fact that its nothing new and would be called “cliché” by many. Basically, you’re an angry meat head fueled by whiskey and vengeance when you and your squad find out you were tricked into killing thousands of innocents by a tyrannical general. Don’t expect any crazy surprises in the end because you won’t find them in Bulletstorm. The story is not one of the reasons it’s a game to pick up. The characters may be a little one dimensional but overtime I became interested in the interactions with them. It was cool seeing your partner, Ishi, battle the AI in his head causing almost a split personality. He can either be an impulsive angry terminator or a grave monotonous killer. The characters were interesting to keep track of but the highlight of story mode elements was definitely the environment. Your placed on a surprisingly deadly planet called Stygia, where the inhabitants are as nice as the environment. Unnaturally sized cacti, raging rapids, and scorching deserts are just some of the joys found on the planet. Beautiful as it is dangerous, its even more pretty when there is blood and guts flying around in the air.

Now your asking, what makes it different from other shooters? Bulletstorm is the first game in the genre to introduce the idea of killing with skill. The premise of the game is to gain points by leashing, kicking, and spraying lead through hordes of enemies mixing and matching the three up to get a variety of different ways to kill. Over a 100 different ways to deliver pain kept me coming back to try and get that skillshot I couldn’t get on the first play-through, and some of them do get challenging. After getting these points you can then spend them on equipment like guns which you can upgrade to kill in even more outrageous ways. It’s the cycle of gaining points and spending that surprisingly stays refreshing through the game. Bulletstorm comes with 3 game modes: Story Mode, Echoes, and Anarchy. Since I already covered story mode, I’ll explain echoes. Echoes is divided into 14 submissions from the campaign in which your supposed to use guns of your choice to try to get highscores by getting different skillshots and chaining them together but also finishing the mission quickly. Anarchy is Bulletstorm’s version of horde where you and your friends use team skillshots to get to the required score and finish the 20 rounds. It is fairly easy to level up and get to the capped level of 65 but it is still fun to brag to your friends about getting a quadruple shiskebab into not in Kansas skillshot.

In conclusion I found Bulletstorm to be a refreshing and joyful experience that took me around 10 hours to complete the first time around but add on 20 or so hours of getting high-scores and playing with friends to add some replayability. The quirky cheesy jokes and sadistic gore-filled gameplay told me Bulletstorm was made by some maniacle people who new this game would be eye candy to a FPS junkie like me and anyone else looking for a energizing game to keep us company while waiting for long-awaited titles. Until then, like Grayson Hunt says, “Quit fartin’ around and go kill with some skill!

Submitted by: Nolan Abreu (Customer)