| 14 March 2011
Overview
Normally when I do the overview for a new review, I try – emphasis on the word “try” – to do it in a manner consistent with the tone of the series or game or what have you that I’m reviewing. I’m not going to try doing that for Bulletstorm, though, for two reasons. First, while I’m all too aware that my language isn’t among the cleanest out there, I’m just not quite crass and rude enough to pull it off for this one. Second, the game’s obsession with a particular portion of the human male anatomy is one of my complaints for this title, and I don’t really want to fall into the same trap. So, with that said…
| USA Info | Japanese Info | Image | |
| Title | Bulletstorm | Bulletstorm |  |
| Dates | Feb 22, 2011 | ||
| Companies | Epic Games, People Can Fly, Electronic Arts | ||
| Creator | Cliff Blezinski | ||
| Genre | Sci-Fi, First Person Shooter, Action, Military, Pirates, Hardcore | ||
| Related | |||
Review
What do you do when you’re just minding your business, flying along through space on your stolen pirate cruiser, and some dingbat bounty hunter comes along after you, seeking the price on your head? The one that reads “preferably dead,” that is. If you’re former black-ops squad leader Grayson Hunt, you let him watch you get very, very drunk and then start to sight down an assault rifle with sights that are off just a bit to shoot the bottle you’ve just placed on their head. For fun and entertainment, you understand – and a little information. Of course, once you get that information you can safely flush him out the nearest airlock… you did remember to check him for anything particularly explosive, like the grenade your bounty-hunter-space-icicle just primed against the observation port window, right?
It’s meant to be an over the top introduction for a game that doesn’t do anything below the rim, folks. I think the conversation when they came up with the idea for Bulletstorm must have gone something about like this: “How can we make the most absurd possible, over the top, insane mental space case of a main character seem well-adjusted compared to the gameplay and storyline around him?” Well, considering that I’m about to tell you that Grayson Hunt actually turned out to have some surprisingly deep characterization and that the story, insane as it is, is actually coherent and plausible… I’d say they pulled it off. But, I’m getting ahead of myself a bit here…
So, basically the storyline is that, ten years prior to the events in Bulletstorm, Grayson Hunt was the leader of Dead Echo, a massively covert black-ops squad employed by the Confederation of Planets as a wet-works assassination crew. They’re under the command of one General Sarrano, who’s been sending them all over the Confederation to kill drug dealers and mass murderers and crime lords that are threatening the stability of the Confederation. Except that he hasn’t, and they’ve actually been unknowingly murdering innocent people who’s only crime has been to question the government. Understandably miffed when they learned the truth, they went rogue and have been hunting Sarrano ever since.
Back in the present day, shortly after Hunt’s little grenade gag, their ship warps out only to find the Ulysses, General Sarrano’s personal warship, right in front of them. Caught up in a drunken haze, Hunt and his crew engage the much larger and better armed war cruiser, and predictably get shot out of the sky, though not before doing severe enough damage to the Ulysses to take her down too. They crash land on the planet that the Ulysses was orbiting. Unfortunately for the survivors of the wreck, the natives are restless…
For a collection of characters that are just about as cliché as they can possibly get, I have to give People Can Fly their due respect. Through the course of the series, the characters are tried, tested, and wrung through a ringer. They’re stranded on a planet populated by titanic monsters, man-eating plants, and mutated homicidal maniacs, and that’s just the first couple levels. Yet despite their cliché as can be beginnings, that wringer actually manages to squeeze something other than cheesy one liners and testosterone out of them. Quite to the contrary, there’s something that very suspiciously resembles character development here, and enough that you can blink once or twice and still not miss it. They went into this game with an actual story to tell, and it’s not half bad.
It comes as a surprise to see Grayson Hunt’s slow journey from what he is at the beginning of the game to what he becomes toward the end, and I have to admit that I was impressed by how well it was handled. The Gray that you’re presented at the beginning of Bulletstorm is the epitome of a washed up, alcoholic piece of human shit that just won’t take that final swirl down the toilet bowl. Most of the other former Dead Echo squad members are in the same sorry state, too, and the one who isn’t is starting to lose his commitment to the cause. Really, the best thing that could have happened to them would have been the Ulysses blowing them clear out of the sky, but Gray, like all characters of his type, is just too damn stubborn to roll over and die. It doesn’t look like there’s anything redeemable here, not in the slightest – not until the flashback scene that explains how they came to be pirates, anyway. Then you get just the tiniest flicker out of him. I missed it, at first, wrote it off to dramatic cliché. The trouble is, the story kept working at it, sort of like a dog gnawing on a bone that’s too big for him. There’s not the first damn redeemable thing about Grayson Hunt when you first meet him – and they went out and wrote a story that found a few none the less. He’s not a hero, but he’s also not an anti-hero. For all that he’s a crass, rude, ass-kicking dude, Gray remains consistent in trying to do the right thing throughout the course of the game. The trouble is that he’s got so much baggage that it’s easy to mistake that for just being that over the top insane mental space case main character I mentioned earlier.
Then, on the other hand, we have General Sarrano. They couldn’t have made this guy any more of a walking used douche-sucker if they’d have had him carrying a sign reading “Fuck you, player!” I mean, we’ve got the full treatment here. Thin face, broken nose, bad teeth, horribly abusive to his subordinates, foul mouthed, cruel. This is the kind of character you’d expect to learn screwed his mother’s corpse in her grave just because she grounded him when he was five. Even the accent, the “suthun” revolutionary slave owner confederate cliché type accent just SCREAMS bad guy. Just once, I want this type of character to have a proper upper British society accent. Or French. Or Rus… no, I take that back, Russian would be cliché for this role too. I mean, really guys, I understand that you’re trying to draw comparisons of the in-game Confederation to the historical Confederate States, but could you have picked a bigger sledgehammer to use for the character of Sarrano? This sort of allusion has already been done by a big name game out there, and even then it was a tired one. I’d have expected better after the rest of the story writing, though to be fair I wasn’t expecting there to be all that much story when I bought the game.
Alright, enough about the characters, how about the gameplay? Bulletstorm is structured, really, around on very simple concept: setting up enemies and taking them out in unique and painful ways. Shoot a guy’s balls off? Put ‘em out of their mercy by shooting them in the head, and get rewarded bonus points. Bunch of nasties running toward you? Yank one close, wrap a remote detonation grenade around his head, then kick him back toward the pack as a living smart mine for bonus points. Man-eating plant ahead? Kick an enemy into its reach to set it off and get bonus points. Barbed wire between you and them? Use your leash to grab hold of them and yank them into it, turning them into mincemeat for bonus points. Are you getting the idea here? Wanna get creative? Get drunk and radiation poisoned, set a bunch of enemies on fire, put a remote detonated mine around one of them, then use your thumper to smash them all into the ceiling above, and get bonus points for being drunk, poisoned, putting out the fire, bouncing them off the ceiling, and killing the mined enemy without exploding the mine. Bulletstorm is all about setting up these skill shots in such a way as to maximize the points you get back, points which you can then turn around and use to buy more ammo, and upgrade your weapons. The more complex the kill, the more points you get. Easy, right?
Unfortunately, Bulletstorm seems to have kinda forgotten something in this: a lot of the really complex kills require multiple enemies to die, and it’s… rare that you’ll either get a clear enough shot to kill multiple enemies at once, or multiple enemies close enough to kill more than one in a single blow. Not non-existent, especially if you’re aware of the enemy mechanics and your surroundings, but not common enough. Also, the aiming system in Bulletstorm felt kinda soggy, like the sights on the guns are off a bit. This is especially true when firing the secondary mode shots of many of the weapons. The aim just feels… off. There’s been cases where I’ve had a soon-to-be crispy critter dead to rights at point blank range, and the shot has somehow missed. Also, I find myself rather annoyed by the sniper rifle, a gun that I generally love to use and that, by all rights, should be impossible to miss with. See, Bulletstorm’s sniper rifle is the steerable bullet kind. That’d be great, except that every single enemy is apparently able to react fast enough to dodge incoming sniper rifle fire every single time, meaning that if you couldn’t control the bullets, you’d miss every single time. Even worse, they tend to turn to avoid the steered bullet even if you try to aim for their head while time is slowed down!! Their success at dodging bullets takes almost all the fun out of the sniper rifle, especially when you don’t have the same ability to dodge. A bit disappointing on the weapon control all around. Aside from the weapons, though, Bulletstorm plays in a pretty snappy, reactive way. Gray can lumber along at a pretty good clip for a guy that’s gotta be pushing fifty, perform long distance slides, and kick like a mule. The controls feel responsive, aside from that strange aiming issue.
Graphics wise, all I really need to say is that it’s the same Unreal Engine used for Gears of War and many, many other modern games. I’ve never really gotten the gray/brown complaints people make about Unreal-based games – after all, much of the real world is split between shades of gray and brown, when you really look around. As for Bulletstorm, the planet that they’re marooned on, Stygia – gee, nothing prophetic about that name – is a tropical vacation planet filled with resorts, waterfalls, green trees, neon signs, disco music… Err, moving along, there’s plenty of color to be found here, and it’s sharply detailed. It’s not Crysis, mind you – but then again, what is? Regardless, though, I was more than happy with the graphics to be found, and my PS3 did a pretty good job of displaying them. I did notice a little bit of chugging on a couple of the more action-packed fight sequences, but nothing too terrible, and nothing that prevented me from enjoying the gameplay.
Moving on to the sound, I’m pretty happy all around. Grayson Hunt is voiced by Steve Blum, who the regular readers of Dragon’s Anime might recognize as Spike Spiegel of Cowboy Bebop, Tom the Robot from Cartoon Network’s Toonami, or Wolverine, among many, many, MANY other roles he’s played over the years. Remember that character development I mentioned earlier when I was talking about Gray? A big part of that development is fostered by Steve’s excellent work in the role. Another famous voice you might recognize is Jennifer Hale, who played the part of Trishka in Bulletstorm. You might know her from her work in the minor game Mass Effect, where she voiced the female Commander Shepard, or maybe as the even less known Samus Aran in the Metroid: Prime trilogy, not that she had much voice work to do in that role… Soundtrack wise, the music is nice and unobtrusive, supporting the scenes rather than ruling them. Except in the disco, which might be the closest I’ve ever come to wanting to shoot myself while playing a game.
Overall
So, here’s the thing, folks. When I decided to buy Bulletstorm – which was after I played the demo a couple times – I was really buying it for one reason, and one reason only. I wanted something absolutely over-the-top insane. I mean, I really wasn’t expecting anything much out of this game except for a good, solid FPS shooter. I bought Splatterhouse and Dante’s Inferno for the same reasons – I just wanted good, solid beat’em’up action games that I could sit down on any given day to play out my frustrations with. I got that with Bulletstorm – but that’s not all I got. Much to my surprise, I got a very well written storyline that actually made sense in the face of an utterly deranged world that by all rights shouldn’t have made any sense at all. It’s not the next great American novel, but there’s some very solid and well done character development and growth here that really caught me off guard.
However, that’s not to say that I’m willing to immediately recommend Bulletstorm to the general public. The trouble here is that that great storyline and character growth and development came at a rather steep price of blood, gore and crass, crude behavior. The main character’s no saint, the female lead could strip the paint off a tank at fifty feet, and the antagonist comes off as the guy Satan threw out for bad behavior. It’s all part of the story, and the characters are meant to be over the top psychopaths, but I can’t help but look at Bulletstorm and see a huge amount of wasted potential. For as good as the story and the game itself was, it’s horribly short, and it’s short because they were setting up – blatantly so – for a sequel. This is something that Epic Games has pulled before, and I didn’t like it in Gears of War either. The problem here is, I couldn’t burn through Gears of War in a scant five hours – including a couple stupid deaths. There needed to be a lot more game here for the money I paid, and don’t sit there and try to tell me that there’s multiplayer to be done. That’s an excuse that I’ve seen far too often, and I’m tired of it. There’s no good reason that an FPS can’t have a 12-18 hour storyline on top of multiplayer, at minimum.
Beyond how short the game is, I find myself with the opinion that People Can Fly should have taken a long step back from the game, looked at their dialog, and realized that Scarface played the profanity game and did it a lot better. As good as the story was, it could have been so much better, the characters that much deeper, if they’d spent a bit more time on actual dialog and a bit less on creative ways of insulting somebody’s dick. Sarrano’s the worst offender in this category, but all of the characters are guilty of it, and Trishka, the only character without a dick, is actually the second worst in the game! I have a sense that was meant to be irony, but it just came off as penis envy.
I dunno folks. I find myself troubled by this one. Bulletstorm came out of nowhere with its story, character development, great graphics and solid gameplay, but all of those things are tarnished by a couple little problems, a couple not so little problems, and how damned short the game is. It’s worth playing if you like FPSs, but not if you have an aversion to foul language and over the top characterizations. It’s most certainly not for children, or even young teens. On the other hand, if you like planning your moves ahead, drawing enemies into traps, and like your characters dirty, crude and rude, you’ll love Bulletstorm. I find myself on the fence with the game, though. There’s a lot of potential here, but I can’t help but feel as though it’s been squandered to no small degree.
