Best of The PS+ Bunch: November 2018 – Bulletstorm

If you're coming to Bulletstorm for a thoughtful and emotive game, you're gonna have a bad time.

bulletstorm

Given the never-ending stream of first-person-shooters released each year, shooters have to provide a substantially unique experience to stand out from their peers. At first glance, you wouldn’t be wrong for assuming Bulletstorm from developer People Can Fly is anything but a generic sci-fi FPS. With an excessive emphasis on brawn and lacking anything remotely resembling a brain.

It is impossible to discuss Bulletstorm without offering up a massive caveat: its narrative offers absolutely nothing of worth. It’s crass for the sake of being crass, and fails to make anyone other than prepubescent boys giggle at its liberal use of “fucks” and dick jokes. Characters have as much charisma as a frat boy at last call. The story is a thinly veiled revenge plot that follows an elite band of space marines, led by Grayson Hunt, who have been manipulated into becoming assassins for the power-hungry General Sarrano. Did you fall asleep reading that? Because I almost did writing it.

So far, nothing I have said is exactly screaming go out and download Bulletstorm, right? As mind-numbingly dumb as Bulletstorm’s characters are, the game’s excessive testosterone aesthetic finds a home in its batshit insane gameplay. Bulletstorm does an exceptional job of combining visceral FPS mayhem with the addictive trick scoring nature of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.

For each kill earned in Bulletstorm, the player earns skill points for completing skillshot challenges. These are weapon and environment specific kills that give the player increased skill points based on their difficulty. These challenges begin simple enough such as “Kill an enemy with a shot to the throat,” or “Kill an enemy by shooting him in the ass.”

Very nuanced stuff.

When a skillshot is completed, neon flashing points and a title for the skillshot appear on the player’s hud. Each multiplier and visual cue acknowledging a skillshot had been achieved was a mini reward in and of itself. Stringing together the most gruesome and explosive skillshots in conjunction with one another makes for an egregiously gory time. It doesn’t take long for these challenges to become quite complex, calling on a player’s keen reflexes and thinking about environments more tactically.

While many of the challenges are weapon specific, the environmental challenges ultimately fuel the game’s most robust gameplay feature. Bulletstorm’s weaponizing of its world shows how environments are built with death in mind. The player’s kick ability becomes crucial in exploring these death traps. Kicking and launching enemies into the air, placing them in a momentary stasis field, allows you a split second to launch them into hazards scattered throughout environments. Spiked walls, electrical cables, lava pits, exploding hot dog stands: You name it and Bulletstorm will let you eviscerate enemies with it.

Then there’s the leash, a range extension of the kick’s stasis that allows the player to latch onto enemies and items from afar and reel them in. This is useful for pulling enemies from atop watchtowers, as well as manipulating environments to score more significant and more destructive kills. Leashing an explosive barrel from another part of the map and kicking it at a nearby squad and turning them into gory gibs results in both an abundance of skill points and provides immense satisfaction.

Time and time again, I found myself running into hails of gunfire to correctly position myself to ensure I could execute an environmental kill. Sure, kicking enemies off cliffs is fun, but what’s an FPS without an arsenal of memorable firearms? A triple-barreled shotgun, explosive flail launcher, and sniper rifle that lets the player maneuver the bullet’s path are all adequate tools of destruction. While on the surface these seem relatively tame, the guns’ alternative fire styles, a la Unreal Tournament, make for even greater variety of insane approaches to combat. Lodging a flare from the revolver into an enemy’s head only to kick them into a swarm of electric flies never failed to put a smile on my face. To play Bulletstorm without utilizing the skillshot system or to try to play it as a standard FPS would miss the point. It doesn’t stand up well as a traditional FPS, but when you factor in its challenging skillshots, it becomes an experience all its own.

Listen, I’m not trying to claim that Bulletstorm is the pinnacle FPS of this console generation. It is dumb as hell in every way, sometimes to its detriment. But just because its high octane chaos doesn’t translate well into a narrative, doesn’t dismiss its ability to provide satisfying arcade FPS hijinks. The skillshot system adds a welcome metagame of bizzare kill challenges that result in more memorable moments than anything the game tries to accomplish narrative-wise. If we were to see a sequel, big emphasis on the “if,” more focus on the skillshot system and varied environmental kills should overshadow any attempts at continuing its frat boy persona.

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