PS3 Review: BULLETSTORM

Bulletstorm is a game with some fairly low ambitions, simply to return to the easy-going, unpretentious fun of the shooters of old, such as Serious Sam and basically every Duke Nukem game ever made. In this world, where ammo quantities aren't so much a concern as how many baddies you can kick in the face, Epic Games and People Can Fly have certainly achieved their dream. Taking place in the 26th century, Bulletstorm has you play Grayson Hunt, a space pirate who works for a secret Black Ops force called Dead Echo, who are tasked with protecting the Confederation of Planets from all manner of chaos that inevitably ensues. However, having been double-crossed by the treacherous General Serrano - who informs him, in fact, that Dead Echo aren't really that nice after all - Grayson plots revenge alongside his cyborg teammate Ishi, while trying to escape the planet they have crash-landed on, Stygia, which is overrun with supernatural beasts. Yes, the plot's a blended paste of clichés, but in a sense that's the fun of Bulletstorm; something of a postmodern shoot 'em up, it features the insane action and vast scale of the aforementioned shooters, while also boasting a witty, self-aware tone, parodying the conventions of the genre while still in itself being an extremely good example of it. That it achieves this without seeming schizophrenic, hypocritical or mean-spirited is phenomenal, and very simply, this is one of the best recent outings for video games as pure visceral entertainment, keen to keep itself at an arm's length from the increasingly cinematic style of most FPS games these days (not that we're complaining about them now). From minute one, the pacing is utterly break-neck; you run, you gun, and you have fun. Punctuating the gratuity, however, is one of the finest enhancements to grace the FPS genre in quite some time; the ability, nay, the privilege, to kick the enemy into the sky, while the game slows down their flight through their air so as to give you ample time to dismember and destroy them in the most imaginative way you can think of; the best include booting an enemy into a cactus, kicking a heavy door so as to squash the enemy, and hurling them into a giant mechanical cog. That's not all, either; you quickly gain access to a leash (stolen from a fallen soldier, funnily enough), which allows you to grab enemies from afar and drag them towards you, either to simply shoot them or have some fun and start kicking them around. The leash is also massively important in terms of interacting with your environment; it can be used to open doors and reach areas you otherwise would be unable to. In truly retro style, Bulletstorm not only awards you points for the stylishness of your kills (or "killshots" as the game calls them), but it will also display the resulting achievement in colourful, arcade-style text across the screen, prompting you to discover the countless methods of murder available. An in-game menu keeps track of the kills you have found, certainly providing motivation for a second playthrough. Why else you'd want to play through it more than once is simply that the variety of gameplay on offer is surprising and indeed quite remarkable; while the bulk of the game is spray-and-pray shooter fare, there are sections where you have to mount various vehicular mini-guns, and best of all, one in which you gain control of a mechanical dinosaur, which can be remotely controlled to devastate the enemy. It follows that any game in which a character calls another a "fungal rimjob" isn't taking itself too seriously, and indeed, much of Bulletstorm's appeal is its reaction to the self-seriousness - compelling though it is - of contemporary shooters like Call of Duty. Ammo seems to appear pretty much out of nowhere when you think you have none, deaths are portrayed as unrealistically as possible, and any sense of the humanity or value for life that the Call of Duty series has imbued into gaming is hastily thrown - or kicked, in fact - straight out of the window. It has its head screwed on alright - an eleventh-hour save is actually referred to by the protagonist as deus ex machina! - but it just so happens that the fellas at People Can Fly are more interested in the funny way a bad guy falls over after being shot in the testicles rather than what kind of insignia a soldier would accurately wear. It's a breezy run and won't keep you occupied for too long - the single player can be rinsed through in 6-7 hours easily - but had it been much longer, the novelty factor would have been in danger of running dry, and so the developers have smartly kept it on the short side. You get plenty of lightning-fast bang for your buck, however, so few will feel short-changed by it. The multiplayer component consists of two modes; the first is Anarchy, in which you team up with other players to fend off waves of computer enemies, much like Call of Duty's Zombies mode. Here, however, there is the incentive of levelling up - beginning as a Level 1 "Skidmark" - and also some snazzy power-ups, such as Blood Symphony, which temporarily turns you into basically a demi-God. The pacing, however, is surprisingly slack, and it appears that player ability has perhaps been underestimated, for the downtime spent just looking for enemies is a bore. Echoes mode, meanwhile, is essentially an online time trial, in which you try to battle through various segments of the single-player game in the quickest time while scoring the most points. It won't mean much to anyone but completionists and obsessive fans of the game, and one wonders if the developers could not have focused more time on building a deathmatch mode for the game instead, as the omission of this - which would presumably have allowed you to leash and kick your buddies online - is astonishing. From a visual perspective, this is one of the least consistent games in recent memory; vast vistas in the distance frequently look stunning, and the grand scale of the fight is always well-conveyed, yet textures up close are beguilingly bland, and character models in cut-scenes wouldn't pass muster as a PS3 launch title. Fortunately the game has enough sheer charm that it isn't a problem, but the low-fi environments will make your HDTV cry. Aurally, while the rote dialogue and corny one-liners provide plenty of laughs, there is the very genuine hope that the ropey performances from the voice cast are also an intentional part of the fun. The soundtrack is meanwhile absolutely forgettable, weapon sounds are decent if unremarkable, but the various agonised screams of your dying enemies are spirited and often very hilarious. While it's easy to get caught up in the airiness of it all, the game is not without a few misgivings, minor though they are; not being able to jump over things is more a nuisance than a loving throwback to the shooters of yesteryear, while having to wait for arbitrary screen prompts to perform certain actions is also fairly redundant in this day and age. More despairingly, the glitch count is rather high, with some particularly strange ones including recently bought ammo disappearing (along with the money you just spent on them), a gun becoming stuck to Grayson's head, AI teleporting across the map to your position to trigger the next set-piece, and more frustratingly, having to replay an entire chapter because the AI teammates disappeared, meaning a set-piece was not triggered. Disappointingly, plenty of the cut-scenes are also pre-rendered, lacking the refined finish of the in-game equivalent and resultantly not quite having the same gravitas either. The loading times are also surprisingly long, and while you won't have to sit through many by dying, there are a ton sandwiched between cutscenes and chapters. Ultimately, though, Bulletstorm is a whole lot of fun, albeit one probably not worth slamming down the full asking price for. No, we're not saying steal it, but rent it or wait until it's cheaper, because the lean multiplayer won't have you coming back to this once you're onto the next game. The single-player, however, may well do; it's fast, violent, funny, and extremely entertaining. This review is based off a full play-through of the single-player mode on Normal difficulty (clear time: 6 hours, 45 minutes), and a brief test of the online modes. A copy of the game was provided by Electronic Arts for review after the game was released last Friday. You can buy it, HERE.