“I’m not like the other girls,” she said, exactly like the other girls.

Bulletstorm is ass, but it’s a certain kind of ass that we don’t really get too often anymore. Slow, plodding, juvenile, desperate to be proven, but just not having the technical nor narrative chops to differentiate itself from its contemporaries. For all of its attempts at grit and bombast, it just comes off as being pathetic.

The successes of Halo as a franchise ruined shooters for years, but its impact left a smoking crater in the libraries of every home console. Regardless of whether or not you actually like the series, it’s impossible to deny that developers for the sixth and seventh gens of consoles were falling over themselves to Xerox their own version in the hopes that they’d get a sliver of Bungie’s billion-dollar pie. Halo standardized systems in console shooters the way that Mario standardized holding the B button to run: two-weapon limits, regenerating health/shields, slow movement. If you played a console shooter between the years 2001 and 2016, they were almost literally all like this. When you’ve got a standard that’s been in place for a decade and a half, people will inevitably start getting antsy. It’ll start small, at first, but they’re gonna want something new.

Bulletstorm promised innovation.

It’s quaint, looking back on the marketing surrounding this game from twelve years ago. Epic Games went on the attack against Call of Duty — of all things — with the release of Duty Calls, a five-minute gag game that mocks the aforementioned series for being sluggish, filling itself with unnecessary cutscenes, giving the player a uselessly short jump, constantly overusing slow-motion, and having paper-thin characterization. It certainly wasn’t the most clever takedown, but it got the broader Internet's attention, and that meant a lot more in 2011 than it does in 2023. If People Can Fly could deliver on their promise of a title that actively refuted all of these factors, it was going to be a shoo-in for shooter of the year.

Bulletstorm released about three weeks later, and it was sluggish, full of unnecessary cutscenes, lacked a jump button entirely, constantly overused slow-motion, and had paper-thin characterization. It had a hard three-weapon limit (though one of them had to be your starting assault rifle), regenerating health, and slow movement.

Perhaps the greatest crime of Bulletstorm is not that it failed to deliver on virtually any of its promises, but rather the fact that the strongest peaks it can hit are still no better than boring. The skillshot system is genuinely interesting and by rights should have been enough to carry the experience on its back by itself, but it’s a) incredibly restrictive due to the weapon limit and the inability to swap to new ones outside of shops, and; b) nowhere near rewarding enough. The point of the points is that they allow you to purchase upgrades, but most of them are strictly boring number bonuses. Higher ammo caps, additional leash charges, not much else. The bulk of your points are actually just going to wind up being spent on ammunition, because enemies scarcely drop fucking anything.

If Bulletstorm had skipped the upgrade purchasing system entirely and made trickshots provide the player with health and ammo (ala nu-DOOM glory kills or Ultrakill blood showers), there would have been significantly more of an incentive to actually bother. As it stands, setting up these clever kills is both harder to do than just popping the enemies with your default rifle and doesn’t provide enough of a mechanical reward to make up for it. If you’re relying on the act alone being enough to entice players into doing it, you need to be very confident that they won’t start feeling like it’s routine the hundredth time they fling a guy into the air and shoot him with a firework.

You've got a narrative here that's equal measures "ha ha, who cares about video game stories" constantly warring with its other half that won't stop screaming "please take me seriously". Characters won't stop yelling about dicks and balls and farts in a way that I suppose is meant to be ironic, and then it brings the action to a screeching halt to pretend as though there's an emotional core that the player ought to be invested in. There's a lady here whose entire raison d'etre is that she's hot and she swears. Your co-op buddy is pulled back from the brink of becoming a remorseless killing machine with a teary "I love you, man" monologue and then a power door fails to open because it got the Xbox 360 red ring of death. It ultimately doesn't work, and the game ends with him saying "God...is...dead." to show that he's truly become the Joker. Roll credits, we're ending on a cliffhanger. Buy the new version for forty dollars to play as Duke Nukem, just in case you thought this wasn't a contender for Epic's most creatively bankrupt product.

The first of many, many falls from grace for People Can Fly. It's sad to see the creative team behind Painkiller — a game which isn't outstanding, but is certainly still good — lower themselves to this, both mechanically and narratively. I know they're capable of doing better, but they just can't seem to rekindle their very first spark. It's a shame.

Games for Windows Live died and made it so I couldn't play this game on PC anymore. It's the first time I've ever been glad to have someone steal from me.

Bulletstorm has aged worse for me than any other game. I first played Bulletstorm back when I was a high school freshman and loved it. At the time, it was everything I wanted in a shooter. A decade passes and I decide to buy the remaster, thinking it’d be fun to revisit one of my favorite 7th gen shooters, only to feel nothing but utter betrayal. The game I remembered being colorful, fast-paced, charming, and unique was actually this ugly, boring slog with godawful dialogue. I felt betrayed by my own memories, I couldn’t believe there had been a point in my life where I had actually liked this game.

One of Bulletstorm’s biggest sins is how it absolutely wastes the voice talents of Steve Blum and Jennifer Hale. Both actors have done extensive work in children’s media, yet Bulletstorm’s script might be the single most juvenile thing either of them have ever recorded. It’s nothing but ‘shit fuck ass balls’ from the moment the game starts to the moment the credits roll. This shit makes Borderlands dialogue look like Disco Elysium.

Above all else, Bulletstorm is just lacking in any real creativity. The skillshot system seems fun at first, until you realize just how little opportunity you’re given to experiment with them so you’ll just be doing the same basic ones over and over and over again. Aside from that, It’s the same basic 7th gen shooter you’ve played a million of that Bulletstorm promoted itself as the ‘wild and crazy’ alternative to.

Needed something kind of easy to play and had a dim memory of this being pretty good: exactly the sort of big, dumb action game to help me recenter myself.

The aspect that really took me off guard starting it up again was the really strict ammo economy- In order to encourage you to play more stylishly, most of the ammo and all the weapon upgrades are bought rather than found- with the secondary fire modes in particular ending up feeling like honest-to-god investments, costing anything from a few hundred to few thousand points, and are used so sparingly that you have to ready them before firing them, so you don’t end up accidentally firing the last arena’s worth of currency into the air. Definitely makes a big difference in the pace of fights, trying to maximize the value in an arsenal where you’re very conscious of each inefficient kill and wasted shot.

Runs into a problem where it rewards collateral over finesse, so a weapon like the sniper rifle ends up being left in the lurch, whereas the late-game drill practically pays for itself- despite the fact that getting use out of the former is far more difficult than the latter. Add to this a lack of score decay and an extremely limited weapon capacity (you can only carry two weapons alongside the standard rifle) and it’s very easy to fall into the same few cost-effective strategies, tossing goons into the same spike wall again and again and again, instead getting more experimental with the options available to you.

Matters less as the game goes on though- not because the design of the encounters changes or anything- but because the game goes out of its way to provide extra currency for the player, with some of 7th gen staples like overzealous QTE’s and overlong turret sections being made slightly more palatable by the fact that they provide so many points for the player. Definitely feels patronizing to get more of a reward for hitting the “look” button at the right time than for some combat encounters, but I can appreciate it as a way to make sure you’re never completely out of options, and in how it frees you up to mess around in the later encounters, finally walking around with enough extra cash to get wild with your arsenal.

For all its issues, that push and pull of the shop, of gambling the last of your points on a few charge shots to try and get a decent return on investment is a unique tension- the one part of the game that's really endured when so many other titles have outpaced it in their grindhouse tone, speed, and agency.

A couple of stray thoughts on the story/setting: Think the backdrop of vacation resort turned apocalyptic hell-world is pretty great, and compliments the action really well- I imagine that for anyone playing this now, the sense of complete corporate apathy to disaster is going to feel a lot sharper now than it did at release. I’d also say that the treatment of your partner, Ishi, is far worse than I remember- he gets a lot of pointedly racist shit thrown his way, but is the one character who doesn’t get the satisfaction of a great comeback; feels like he’s at the brunt of a much crueler joke than the rest of the cast. (Trishka isn’t treated much better)

I don’t know, add to this list of “interesting but flawed” action games I seem forever drawn to.

Ação e Adrenalina!

Bulletstorm pra mim é um marco da sétima geração de videogames, gráficos bonitos e ação do início ao fim, é o que resume esse título da People Can Fly, mesma empresa que lançou o Gears of War e hoje em dia o Fortnai

Apesar de todos elogios que tenho a citar desse jogo como sua direção de arte e seus personagens, eu não consegui la gostar tanto desse jogo quanto eu achei que gostaria, a ação dele mesmo sendo bem feita, se torna um tanto enjoativa e me deu uma canseira danada, o jogo é curto mas eu joguei ele pouco tempo em cada dia e isso pode ter ajudado pra eu enjoar bastante do jogo, acredito que esse aqui seja bom jogar em uma tacada só.

Ao decorrer dele você consegue armas novas mas você só pode usar 3 do arsenal inteiro, isso também ajudou MUITO a me fazer cansar de bulletstorm, mesmo que eu pudesse trocar era como se as outras armas não colassem direito comigo.

Se não fosse o chicote e as explosões malucas, esse aqui seria só mais um FPS genérico pronto pra te deixar enjoado em menos de 2 horas, então se for jogar, use muito tudo o que o jogo te oferece, se for só pra dar alguns tiros talvez não seja muito a tua praia, já que a pira desse aqui é sair quebrando tudo pela frente.

Bulletstorm has extremely fun and robust gameplay with a lot of potential bogged down by the typical quirks you see in a 7th gen FPS. I had so much fun flinging and kicking enemies into hazards and seeing my points go up. However the campaign is just another shallow call of duty hallway shooter where you go from point A to B in a straight line with no room for explorarion or experimentation. The campaign is only 8 hours long and when you're done with it, there's really nothing else to do. The writing and story is also very 2009 GAMER if you know what I mean. To note, I played the new version of the game where it replaces the main character with Duke Nukem and makes the dialogue 100% funnier. The story is exactly the same but Duke is just himself in the main character's position and has no idea why he's in this game. One of the funnest premesis I've seen in a video game. That alone brings it up from a 6 to a 7.

beneath the snarky, smart-assholery, buried inside of this generic PS3 era campaign there is some pretty on-the-nose but nevertheless knowing commentary about the carelessness of the rogue-ish video game archetype's casual warpath (not only is Grayson, bulletstorm's lead, a pawn for a psychopathic war general in his life before the game, his quest for revenge essentially leads to the destruction of all life he encounters).

but while the game can step up to the line and have its lead character admit his sins, it ultimately falls somewhat short by having supporting characters let him off the hook in the bluntest ways, revealing, unfortunately, the shallow writing propping up wat is mostly an excuse for some creative gameplay and fun video game set-pieces.

the game is maybe the most ps3-ass game i've played since vanquish, which was also a seemingly generic game on the outside, that, too, was hiding some actually pretty fun gameplay that ultimately didn't quite live up to its full potential.

pretty fun overall, i'd say.