"Size Matters" - Bulletstorm Review

The saturation of serious shooters is starting to induce yawns. Scripted cinematic FPS games have already dulled the eyes down to the optic nerve. The dominance is held by Battlefield Bad Company 2, Call of Duty, and Medal of Honor. Now, the guys from People Can Fly timely step in. Backed by Epic Games, they return to the video game market with their new game – the crazy Bulletstorm. A shooter it is, just like the ones in Africa, but damn, where else can you literally shoot enemies' balls off?

A bit of history. The development of Bulletstorm actually began back in 2006. The developers did not spend much time thinking about the concept of their future game – they succeeded with Painkiller, why deviate from the beaten path? The process of choosing an engine was also not lengthy – at that time (and even today), Unreal Engine 3 was performing excellently, compatible not only with PCs but also with the new generation of consoles. Having composed a demo version of whatever they had, People Can Fly decided not to carry it directly to a publisher but to demonstrate it to the engine owner – the Epic Games team. Cliff Bleszinski duly appreciated the work of the Poles and at the same time formed a plan in his mind for the further 'utilization' of the talented developers. Thus, on August 20, 2007, a controlling stake in People Can Fly passed into the hands of Epic, and Cliff began testing the new colleagues' resilience, entrusting them with creating maps for Gears of War and porting the same game to PC. The result: excellent quality of the port of the popular action game to personal computers and a free license for the game engine from Epic. Inspired by success, the flying people began to gather a new demo (in which, imagine, the action unfolded from a third-person perspective), which in 2008 caught the attention of Electronic Arts itself. Thus, one of the largest gaming companies became the publisher of the upcoming hit.

This is how cool guys use a keyboard

We Were Deceived

Bulletstorm starts off on the right foot. From the very first minutes, we are gradually introduced to the personalities of some characters, not hesitating with the dialogue. And we immediately find ourselves in the theme: we won't be playing as a bespectacled intellectual who somehow got hold of a gun, but as a drunkard and a slacker. We’ll be surrounded by similar drunks. The exception, perhaps, is our partner Ishi. The crux of the matter is that we are brutally framed by our employer. Let’s go step by step.

This is what we will be watching on our monitor throughout the game

The main character, Grayson Hunt, is a cold-blooded leader of a team of professionals working for the Confederation. The team’s task is to eliminate important people who have been implicated in criminal activities in one way or another. At one fine moment, it becomes clear that reality is deceptive, and all this time we have been used shamelessly. General Sarrano, who will be Grayson’s main target for the next ten hours of gameplay, refers to all team members as sugary faggots, simultaneously promising brutal revenge and destruction for each of them. There’s nothing to be done – to survive, one must lie low.

First, but not the last acquaintance with the 'Wheel'

Thus, we find the main character among his friends aboard a small spaceship of their own. The guys, as expected, don’t give a damn about the law, they don’t care about morality. Robbing 'caravans' and simultaneously catching bounty hunters (Sarrano promised a reward for the heads of the criminals), Grayson and his friends drink hard and wear out their pants. Circumstances turned out so favorably that, being drunk, Hunt stumbles upon a Confederation ship, which presumably might contain Sarrano. Said and done. In a fit of rage, the bearded commander gives the order to ram the enemy ship. What came out of it, we will know from our own experience.

There are different kinds of balls

Planet of Madness

Bulletstorm, let the haters throw dung at me, is a Shooter with a capital S. The game is so dynamic, so epic (despite the fact that this epicness manifests itself only in certain episodes), that one forgets the existing plot, which can overshadow the storylines of some Call of Duty games, and remembers it only during specially prepared scenes by the authors. They don't just tell us the story of the search for the general, which Grayson covers with attempts to escape the planet. The planet itself has its own mystery, its own secret, which we can uncover to some extent. Where did a large city come from on this seemingly abandoned planet inhabited by bloodthirsty cannibal tribes? Where did all the inhabitants go, why is everything crumbling, what is the point of the metropolis, after all? The full picture of what’s happening will not be revealed in just dialogues, so we need to carefully look around and study the environment.

Waggleton P. Tallylicker in person. And yes, that’s what Grayson named him

Moreover, during the game, we will endure the foul character of the cyborg Ishi Sato, who constantly snaps back or interrupts the main character's jokes. And Grayson tolerates it understandingly since he is the one to blame for the ship’s wreck, the death of some crew members, and the “robotization” of his, so to speak, best friend. Upon arriving on the planet, it will turn out that there are somewhat human creatures present – at least, the radar is picking up some radio signals. It turns out a girl has landed on the planet and urgently needs our help. Or is it we who need her? Her name is Trishka. Her strong and free character is evident from the very first seconds of acquaintance. The girl’s dark past will constantly trouble the heroes, but there is no choice – she is the one who can help the guys escape this cursed planet.

The sniper rifle here is a cheat weapon

The presence of partners, by the way, is justified only by the plot. They will not help much in battles, you cannot control your companions, and the enemies will only know to attack the hulking Hunt. And this is, in fact, not news – the developers made it clear from the start that they were not inclined towards cooperation. Another thing is that alone, would the extermination of the inhospitable planet's inhabitants be that much fun? After all, what about the dialogues that the heroes manage to conduct in a minute of calm? Trishka constantly yells at Grayson, calling him a monkey, while Grayson, for his part, takes the moment to poke fun at his friend. And Ishi merely shrugs, frowns, and repeatedly criticizes his friend’s actions.

Weapon upgrade menu

Let's Make the Poor Guy Happy

The “kill with skill” system, which is the main feature of the gameplay in Bulletstorm, is explained, by the way, by the plot. That is, we didn’t just get all this interface, the ability to buy and upgrade weapons for nothing. Moreover, in principle, weapons do not need to be upgraded, relying solely on regular bullets for the assault rifle or shotgun. Everything lies in the boot – in Bulletstorm, this thing is as versatile as one can imagine. First of all, they (the boots) have the property of magnetism to surfaces, which we learn at the very beginning of the game. Secondly, a boot is a boot, we wouldn’t want to run around in socks, would we? And thirdly, this very boot will effectively bash a couple of hundred meaty behinds throughout the single-player campaign that the People Can Fly team has prepared for us. This type of footwear looks especially effective when coupled with an energy whip. Pull the enemy, kick him, and using slow motion, aim your firearm at the interesting places. There are usually two of those: the head (headshots give a decent amount of points) and the groin (there was also something interesting here: “anal sex” for shooting the buttocks and “mercy” for taking out the balls with the next bullet to the head). Besides this, the authors did not shy away from placing spikes, barbed wire, and various carnivorous plants here and there. What to come up with regarding them? The most mundane: with the Flail Gun, attach grenades to the enemy and kick him toward a toothy flower.

"Look - there, on the horizon, Crysis 2 is already looming"

So why is this Kill with skill system needed? Simply put: with the points accrued during furious (and fun) shootouts, we not only buy ammo for our guns but also upgrade this very weapon. How about a mass destruction bullet for the sniper rifle? Or a special incendiary round for a seemingly ordinary assault rifle? In this way, using their system, the developers skillfully arranged a cycle of points and weapons in Bulletstorm. Want to stock up on a large number of special rounds for your favorite weapon? Kill thoughtfully and diversely. Although, what 'thoughtfully,' after an hour of playing your brain will already be automatically catching the whip on the nearest poor guy and sending him flying onto the nearest spikes.

No, no one here can kick cars like Alcatraz does

If Only…

This is where the Poles could have received an “A” and started boasting about the “best shooter of the year” and the like. Bulletstorm's rating of “excellent” is hindered by several shortcomings. The most obvious of them all are checkpoints. Upon death, be prepared to reappear at the very beginning of the episode when a target is still set to kill a dozen or two enemies. Autosavings will not allow you to create your save whenever you wish, so try not to die and play carefully. The second downside is bugs. They occur rarely, but still do happen. There’s either a corpse hanging in the air or another script freezes ( I had such an experience: a cutscene script turned on when the hero couldn’t run, and his weapon was pointed down, while I was surrounded by five or six “Igniters”; the result - my protagonist died, and I became an eyewitness of the events through which I had been making my way for about 15–20 minutes; very pleasant). The third downside (completely subjective) is this 'console-ness,' where the jump key as such is absent, and the spacebar (which I personally moved to shift) is tied both to sprint/sliding and to jumping over obstacles. I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel very comfortable without the ability to jump when I want. Such is the character. I won’t talk about missing textures and 'poor' graphics; on my setup, Bulletstorm looked wonderful. But I will mention Games for Windows Live – I didn’t have problems with it either, but the system from Microsoft just annoys me. And no arguments are needed here.

This is not a flying monster. It is the Magnificence Bug

Meat Kaleidoscope

Eliminating enemies in bunches is something we can do in every second shooter, but it is precisely Bulletstorm that presents this act so spectacularly and amusingly. At the same time, what surprise, People Can Fly managed to create not a stupid FPS about superheros with their busty partners but a full-fledged game with its intriguing plot. Of course, one can criticize the developers for the lack of cooperativeness (and the arenas, as practice shows, are somewhat boring) and for the not-so-exciting multiplayer (four players try to score as many points as possible on a small map – also boring), as we expected, but still Bulletstorm and its creators deserve high ratings and praise. And soon we will finally find out who has more: Duke or Hunt.