Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition (PS4, 2017)
Here's a depressing insight into my life.
Or here's an insight into my depressing life.
In October 2012, about two months after I started subscribing to PlayStation Plus suddenly giving me access to more free games than I think I'd ever played on the PS3 in the four years I'd had it, I started playing a game called Bulletstorm, a first person shooter set on a planet of some sort where you got points for killing the enemies in various interesting ways. To start the year 2022 I played Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition, the PS4 version which also includes the game's DLC. Am I functionally any different than I was ten years ago? Probably not.
Bulletstorm is the story of Grayson Hunt, an impossibly proportioned man on a spaceship who along with his friends have annoyed some other men on a spaceship and they all crash land on a planet somewhere. It turns out the planet was a giant theme park and some bad things have happened and there are now a combination of savage, deformed gangs running around along with mutated creatures who are also very eager to kill you. Your mission is to get off the planet and if you can kill General Serrano who double-crossed Gray and his men in the past, all the better.
What sets Bulletstorm apart from the other first person shooters of the early 2010s is the Skillshot mechanic. Loosely tied into the game's plot you get points for killing enemies in certain ways, with the points being redeemed for ammo and new weapons you can unlock as you progress through the story. On the surface this sounds like a good idea for adding some variety to the formula and there are some mechanics besides guns which make this more enjoyable. You can kick enemies with an impossibly proportioned boot to make them hang in the air, lining up a shot to the head or allowing them to be redirected into a handily placed cactus, broken wall or explosive object. You also have a Leash which does much the same thing, only to enemies at a distance.
If I'm being honest, the points don't really make a difference. You can pick up ammo from dead enemies and even if you somehow ran out, leashing and kicking would more than do you until you picked up some more. That said, there's something instinctive about playing a video game and doing stuff to make numbers appear on the screen, knowing you're responsible for it. Why shoot a guy in the chest and get +10 when you get drunk, set him on fire, kick him into some other guys and blow them up? Whether through pressure or natural enthusiasm you really do try and vary your kills as you go through the game, so I suppose it works. There are a range of weapons too, although some are a lot more effective and a lot more fun than others.
It's a good thing this is the case because in terms of plot, woof. For a short game with only a few characters (there's Gray, his half-robot mate Ishi and a impossibly proportioned girl in a tanktop called Trishka) it's surprisingly shallow. It does a good trade in one-liners, and Serrano in particular is enjoyable for how relentlessly over the top he is. Considering that's the point of the game and the gameplay though it all still feels a bit limp. There are different types of enemy and there's some effort made to explain why they're on the planet but you're so focused on killing them in flashy ways it barely registers when they show up. I just don't care about anyone or what's going on.
I remember enjoying this when I played it on the PS3 but there's something about it now that just doesn't feel as engaging. It's a game that's supposed to be completely over the top in its gameplay and dialogue, and this is successful. It is. There's always just something that stops it being completely satisfying to play. Each weapon has a 'charged' mode which fires an extra powerful version of itself but pressing this sets up an animation which takes up a noticeable amount of time, not very helpful in a firefight when you've got three guys shooting at you and another three on fire running straight at you. The dialogue tries to be self-aware in how over the top it is but it doesn't manage this, while also managing to not be legitimately terrible. The result is something which isn't obviously enough to be overly cynical but still not quite anarchic enough to be properly engaging.
This frustration extends from the gunplay into basic movement and level design. Although you can interact with the world to kill enemies or to progress in certain areas, all the levels are linear and largely funnel you and enemies into combat arenas for you to shoot them in interesting ways. This is functional, but it makes the world itself less engaging. Giant man-eating plants have mutated and appeared here and I'm somehow not interested. This isn't helped by what I'm pretty sure is a terrible field of view. There were occasions in the game where I just felt like I wasn't seeing as much of the screen as I needed to. I don't know if I'm getting old or what but in large, open areas this definitely felt like a problem.
This sense of a small world isn't helped by the movement controls which honestly feel like something from the last century. You can't jump. You have to hold X to run. You crouch by holding L3. If you've ever played an FPS you'll read those three things and weep but if not, I need to focus on those last two. When you get shot in an FPS nowadays the screen goes red until you're able to hide and wait for it to go away. This game rewards you for facing enemies and killing them in precise, creative ways. This means you'll often have to be open to them firing on you. This means you'll get damaged and occasionally need to hide. If you need to run, you can't move the camera with the right stick to change direction because your right hand is holding down the run button. If you need to hide behind cover you need to hold down the least pressable button on the controller, which is also connected to the joystick that moves your character around. No. Please, no.
I'll let the PC players finish laughing before I carry on.
Actually no, there's nothing else. There are two other game modes - Echoes splits the game up into small, quickfire sections and has scores for you to beat. This seems to fit with the gameplay more naturally than anything else, often forcing you to be varied and quick to beat the high score. There's also an online mode where you and up to three others face waves of increasingly difficult enemies with the usual scoring system. Outside of the new locations and trying to set a score there's very little point in this though, you'll probably have had your fill of the concept by the time you get to it. It's not bad, and I actually think regular multiplayer in this game could have worked well, but it's just more of the same without the ability to pause.
I'm glad I went back to a more polished version of this game and finished it. I actually redownloaded and played the PS3 version the other day and my god, the framerate. I'll not even try to describe it. I like that a game like this was released in 2012 at the real peak of modern military shooters. It's an antidote to them and a love letter to the over the top origins of the genre like Doom, where gore and killing impossibly large and violent enemies was all you had to do. While functional in this regard, it's also somehow forgettable. It's honestly impressive how middle of the road Bulletstorm ends up being. It's not bad by any measure, but it's also just... there.
. I must have leveled up my armor or health or something.
