“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 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.