Culture

Platforms: Playstation 3, Xbox 360, PC. (5/5).
"In the new video game Bulletstorm, players are rewarded for shooting enemies in the private parts (such as the buttocks).”
 

My worry is that no matter what I write in this review, no matter how much I ache and strain to articulate how good Bulletstorm is, it will be superfluous fluff compared to the priceless extract (above) from the Fox News article “Is Bulletstorm the Worst Video Game in the World?”. I think it's the brackets that make it; it's as though the author is providing an optional example in case you're pondering which body parts Epic Games and People Can Fly specifically target.
 

I'd be okay with the groin, sure, but leave my flocculent, mellifluous buttocks out of it. Never did a soft buttock harm you, they are a simple folk, the purest of the naughty bits.
 

Yes it's immature, yes it's exploitative, you could call it dumb, but, unlike so many similar games that try to pretend they aren't, Bulletstorm is so over-the-top, so unapologetically bombastic that it becomes like coal placed under enormous pressure. You play as Grayson Hunt, a heavy-drinking space-pirate who strings together profanity with Shakespearean loquacious gymnastics, a talent that every character in the universe shares. Normally, I’m apathetic to, or a touch annoyed by, the cookie-cutter characters in these big action games, but he's just so energetically gruff and childishly-manly that I can't help but like him.

 
Bulletstorm might have the most the viscerally rewarding combat of any first-person shooter I have ever played and, to top it off, maybe some of the most strategic and nuanced mechanics as well. Shooters have been tending away from the nonsensical prancing around of old towards more stop-and-pop cover mechanics for half a decade. Bulletstorm breaks the mould by including the ability to kick your enemies and send them flying, leash them towards you from a distance, or slide towards them swiftly and knock them down. It's obviously and completely unrealistic, but these mechanics make the combat far more frantic and skillful agility based, diametrically opposed to the “shooting gallery” of cover shooters.
 

The game's second innovation is the skillshot system, which assigns points to creative ways of dispatching your foes. Ordinarily, I find points floating off enemies' heads to be a cheap and manipulative achievement surrogate but in Bulletstorm there is such an astonishing number of ways your kick, slide, leash and brilliantly conceived armory can be used together that the points genuinely encourage you to strategise. Skillshots serve as an incentive to experience everything the game has to offer and by its conclusion there will be plenty left untried. The combat is just that deep. Did I mention that they have names like gang-bang, rear-entry and gag-reflex? Oh Bulletstorm, you’re so offensive.
 

It's sort of gorgeous as well. I don't mean the technical, if steroid fueled, impressiveness of the Unreal 3 engine - that I can take or leave - but the design of the characters and the environments. So many of these gruff shooters have, in a faux “gritty” seriousness I guess, chosen an entirely grey colour palate. Bulletstorm isn't afraid to be bright and colourful, to wow you with stunningly varied vistas and breathtaking architecture, unsettlingly enemy designs and monsters the size of suburbs. More than once I laughed audibly at the sheer bigness of the events I saw taking place on the screen, the game has an eye for set pieces and you'll be witness to some pretty crazy things from your first-person window.

 
If you wanted to be elected to public office, just plant a copy of Bulletstorm in your competitor's hotel room. That's why I'm so surprised that I ended up loving it so much. See, I want emotional breadth in videogames, and I want forward momentum and experimentation in the quest to find that emotion. Nothing terrifies me more than the prospect that in the future, because of the vast coffers required to develop videogames, the only full-priced products we will see will be intellectually bankrupt, shallow, empowerment-fantasy, bro-shooters like Gears of War and Killzone because of their guaranteed profitability.
 

But Bulletstorm, despite its made-up-word-about-fighting title, is nothing like those games. Gears of War chained itself down because it held up a facade of maturity, when everyone knows that you played Gears of War 2 because your gun had a chainsaw, not because of the emotional subplot between a character and his missing wife. Bulletstorm wallows gleefully in its immaturity and it soars because it isn't held back by a meaningless pretence. It doesn't pay lip service to anything to try and get politicians off its back. It's honest.