Geekscape Games Reviews Bulletstorm

With the dearth of differentially in the FPS market of games, People Can Fly and Epic tries to inject some fun back into our FPS games with Bulletstorm.

Bulletstorm’s story is pretty cut and dry. A squad of assassins known as Dead Echo are lead to believe that they are doing a just cause in their killings. On one mission, you find out details that you have been duped and the Captain of Dead Echo, Grayson Hunt, goes on a revenge hunt for the General that betrayed them all. Things, of course, go sour when you do find General Sorrano and take his warship down…along with your ship. Now stuck on the planet Stygia, you must trudge through the unknown dangers to find Sorrano and exact your revenge.

I like that the story doesn’t get in the way of all the action of the game but in turn gives some life to an otherwise fast paced “Gears of War” game. The main game changing mechanic People Can Fly put into Bulletstorm is the skill shot points system. What that entails is the more creative you are with your kills using various weapons as well as the enviroment, you get points to use to either upgrade, buy ammo, or unlock a secondary fire for your weapons.

For most of the game, I had tons of fun with the various ways I could kill people but soon realized that I was doing a handful of skillshots repeatedly since it was the easiest way to get past most of the enemies. Of course if you want to get every skillshot in Bulletstorm (reported to be in the hundreds), you can use the handy skillshot guide in the menu system. Shooting in the game feels good enough to give the player a sense of power with each shot. I do have to say that once you get the Penetrator (a gun that shoots drill missles), you will fall in love instantly. By far my favorite gun in the whole game.

Besides the skillshots and unique weapons, the dialouge in the game is charming, if you are into the crass humor it projects every minute in the game. I would love to know how someone was approached for the task of writing the dialouge for the game. The foul mouthed curses they come up with is downright hilarious. Sure, there are some lines that replace common curse phrases with the word dick but when you hear things like “Kill your dick”, “Sushi-Dick”, and my favorite “I’ve seen things that will turn your asshole purple” you can’t help but wonder what the meeting was like when the script was reviewed by the voice actors. i know this may seem childish that I find this humorous but I feel that this on top of the story gives Bulletstorm a sense of charm that makes it a lot of fun to play.

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There are other modes in the game if you want to get more out of Bulletstorm, which I didn’t feel like it helped. Echoes is a mode where you can play sections of the main story over and try to get the highest score in a certain time limit. Echoes does have a leaderboard so you can compare yourself to your friends list and see who the best is. Multiplayer mode is kinda misleading since it’s really Co-op. In a different take on Horde mode that was made famous in Gears of War 2, multiplayer has Anarchy. Same concept applies to Anarchy as they do in Horde mode. Fight wave after waves of enemies as a team. The one difference being you have to work together to get enough points by doing skillshots (by yourself or as a team) to unlock the next wave. You probably want to play with people you know and have headsets on so you can communicate properly to effectively win.

My experiences with Bulletstorm left me feeling satisfied and I picked up some new phrases to boot! Who says videogames can’t teach you new things? I only had a few sour moments with Bulletstorm (I’m looking at you train level!) and I think this game has its moments where it can look dull and ugly to amazing and gorgeous which is attributed to Epic lending a hand on the game since they are the people to go to when it comes to the Unreal Engine. Although there is not much replay value in the game, unless you are a high score junkie, I feel there is enough here for gamers to enjoy a playthrough of Bulletstorm. So all you assmaggots go out and buy this dickhole of a game!