Bulletstorm: The Game That Could Have Been

I’m about halfway through Bulletstorm and decided to post a little piece about it (considering I also wanted a new entry lodged in between two reviews [since I’m posting my Killzone 3 one tomorrow]), I didn’t come into the game with high expectations. I remember playing the demo a few weeks ago and going: “Yeah, that ain’t bad. I don’t know if it can support a full game though.”

Here I am a few weeks later plugging away at a friend’s copy of the game and I’m reflecting upon my earlier statement, from what I’ve played so far I may have been right. Now hear me out, I’m not condemning the direction that Bulletstorm has chosen to go. The Skillshot is a neat concept, even if I’d seen similar things in Mad World a few years ago, and I have had a decent amount of fun with it. I just feel that it needed to be blown open a lot more than it has been so far. Environment kills are fun, as are charge kills but sometimes you are just in plain corridors (which I’ve noticed is happening occasionally) with nothing but you and your gun. The best you can really hope for is “Headshot” or “Mercy”, now my question is: why didn’t add in specific bonuses as per other body-parts? Surely it wouldn’t have been too hard to add in little Skillshots for shooting killing someone while blowing their hands off or something? Maybe this is something that they plan to implement in the inevitable sequel but I think it could have been added in here.

My other semi-gripe is the humour. Again, I’m not some up-myself pretentious git who doesn’t laugh at something stupid. I thoroughly enjoy the likes of South Park and Drawn Together (both based off very crude humour) and it just seems that Bulletstorm isn’t always tickling my funny bone. The trailer had me in some sort of a fit originally, perhaps it is just too little stretched over too much? I have heard the word “dick” used so much that it surely must be going out of fashion. It is funny, sure, just not as funny as it wants to be. I think occasionally it is trying to hard to keep up with its own crude nature at times.

I don’t really have many regrets about picking Killzone 3 over Bulletstorm purely based on what I’ve played so far. I think there is a lot of potential in Bulletstorm as a franchise though, and maybe Bulletstorm 2 will fix up these annoyances. At the moment I think Epic / People Can Fly have put something decent together as far as first efforts go but the gaping holes are still noticeable and at times hard to forgive.

When I bowl the game over you look forward to my review hopefully sometime before Dragon Age II and Pokémon White hit next week. As I said earlier, my Killzone 3 review will be live tomorrow morning at this rate.