Since this will be my first review for this blog let me go over really quickly how I am going to do a review. The concept for my reviews will be the same for movies and television as it is for video games. I've done a lot of thinking about how to rate something and gone from extreme to extreme. I wrote out a detailed point based system that rates something out of 100 points. Ultimately I realized that on the most basic level a review does one thing; help you decide whether to watch/play something or not. Working with that in mind I will start my reviews with a simple statement reflecting that. That isn't to say that I wont also start using the point system later on. It still needs some work before I'll be happy with it. I'm not going to let it get in the way of getting out the ultimate point of the review though. Overall the concept of the reviews will be simple. I wont make you jump through hoops to find out my opinion. I'll state it up front and if you want to stop reading there, go for it. After that I'll get into a rough plot summary and a more detailed critique where I'll dive a little deeper into my original conclusion.
Play Bulletstorm
The first thing that you need to know about Bulletstorm is that it comes off like a 9th Grader who has decided that now he’s in high school and its going to curse his head off because it’ll make him cool; it tries to hard. Also it curses a lot. Come to think of it, that metaphor was more literal than it was figurative. To say that Bulletstorm has a lot of profanity doesn’t really emphasize how much profanity is in the game. I’m not someone who is really bothered by profanity. It’s not even the amount of profanity that is the problem, its that it just seems like it’s trying too hard to be cool.
Bulletstorm tells the story of an elite special ops group working as a special branch of the military. We find out through a flashback that they were ordered to kill people. They thought these people were militants and war criminals but really they are reporters and political opponents to the military regime. Understandably displeased with this realization, they go rogue and make it their new life goal to kill the General who lied to them. After that long bit of exposition we rejoin the crew years later as they are about to make an attack run on a new ship of the line that is being commanded by the very General they set out to kill. Ultimately they both crash and end up on a paradise resort planet that has been overrun by mutants. As the surviving members of the crew fight for their lives on the hostile planet the real game play starts.For all of its back story, the actual game play of Bulletstorm seems disconnected. The plot events seem contrived and arbitrary. The back story could have been a number of other archetypes without requiring much change to the game play. Most missions are in the style of get from Point A to Point B kicking down doors and killing everything in between. The story of Bulletstorm is unfortunately a lot like the level design for the game. Simplistic and set on a backdrop of something much more interesting.
The game play is based around your electronic “leash”. This is both a literal leash that you can use to pull and throw enemies around the field of battle and a HUD/upgrade system. The idea of the leash is this. The messed up military places their elite units on the planet and grades each of their kills as they fight for their lives amongst the mutant population. The most creative killers are rewarded with new weapons and ammo and the uncreative killers are left ammo-less to die. The story doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense but the bottom line is that you are graded on how creatively you kill the various mutants. Back story aside this is actually a pretty decent system. Although it does seem forced at times, the list of creative kills you get bonus points for is pretty long and most are simple to pull off.
Where the game really shines is the weapons themselves. You start off with a basic assault rifle. The game includes standard FPS (First Person Shooter) weapons such as a sniper rifle, a shotgun, and a pistol. The highlights are that you also get what boils down to a cannon ball gun, a drill launcher, and a “flail gun” that turns enemies into impromptu suicide bombers by latching explosives onto them. In combination with the leash that lets you pull enemies toward you and your ability to kick them in different directions the game-play offers quite a variety of ways to dispatch your enemies. This is good because the level design is pretty bland and once you’ve seen 4 or 5 different areas you’ve pretty much seen them all.
A strangely flat feature of the game are your allies. Throughout the bulk of the game you are followed by Ishi, the only member of your crew to survive the crash. Although your allies do seem to fire at the enemies I routinely felt like I was fighting alone. The upside to this is that your allies to not seem to take damage. This is another case of the back story overshadowing the game play. Ishi, for example, is critically injured during the crash and is rebuilt with robot parts. This causes a lot of story issues, but doesn’t seem to affect the way he fights during the game.
The game has a lot of flaws. Its story is weak and frequently doesn’t stay within the rules of the universe that it has created. The level design, which initially interesting, becomes highly repetitive. The final battle is incredibly anticlimactic. On the other hand where the game shines it really shines bright. The voice acting is fantastic. It features Jennifer Hale of Mass Effect fame as well as blast-from-the-past Steve Blum who was the voice of Tom, the robot host of Toonami on Cartoon Network back in the day. The weapons are creative and even the standard FPS fare weapons have been twisted to make them very interesting. I recommend taking the game not as an overly vulgar Gears of War knock off, but rather as a reasonably well executed tongue-in-cheek poke critics of the level of profanity and violence in video games. While the game is certainly far from perfect I do recommend playing it. For all of its flaws I enjoyed it quite a bit.
Did I mention that there is a section where you get to play a giant robot dinosaur and stomp around a miniature city?
2 comments:
I think that the one thing this game tried to do was elevate the standard Doom style standard FPS with the kill shot system. However, as you pointed out in trying to add some new flavor they forgot about the basics. The levels, enemies, bosses, and story are exactly the same for the entire game. Definitely worth a play through, but I hope the sequel (which the ending almost demands to finish the story) learns a little from the flaws and polishes this game.
Another thing that I'm not sure if I liked or not was that at no point in the game did I ever felt like I HAD to make the skillshots. I never really ran out of ammo. I never felt like I couldn't fully upgrade a weapon I wanted to use. I picked the three weapons I like the most and upgraded them. Sure most of the skill shots were simple enough to make that I did so without even meaning to. But I never really felt like I had to sit down and really put effort into making the more complicated skillshots to earn the larger number of points. I would have liked to see the list be more finite. For example; you could do each skill shot only once and then you'd have to do different ones to earn the bonus points. There would have to be many more and they would have to be more location specific to make it really work as easily, but it would also force you to use different weapons that you wouldn't normally. I did find myself switching up which weapons I used every chapter, but that was mostly cause I felt like I should be doing that to get some variation in my gameplay style. Never did I feel like the game actively encouraged that, it was just something I decided to do on my own. Ultimately I did keep coming back to the same three weapons so even that didn't really stick for long.
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