Bulletstorm

Bulletstorm isn’t really a bad game in its own right. As a first-person shooter, it’s competent and actually has a nice pacing to it, subsidized by some average to beautiful environments. Despite all that the game does right however, the entire experience is mired in self-loathing and overzealous he-manisms. The problem here is not the idiocy of the interactions that occur so much as the actual inability to not take itself seriously. The game feels a desire to explain things that clearly have no good logical explanation. The reality is that for a long time, players were perfectly happy simply accepting what a game gave to the players to work with. They didn’t really need to be told why a sword only swung downward. That was its purpose, love it, live it, embrace it.

While Bulletstorm certainly loves the inexplicable, it doesn’t really seem to follow the other tenets, spending a great deal of time attempting to drag along incongruously mashed together elements, none of which has any purpose or importance, given that shooting things that appear on screen is the only thing that’s ever important. There’s an entire line of thought around the “kill with skill” idea that the game actually gets mired down in the system that aims to give the player more freedom when thinking about killing enemies. The reality is that the system actually just forces them to continually use the same ability which guarantees a certain number of points. The reason for this largely relates to terrain, particularly in that terrain provides some of the higher point-based kills with minimal effort. The other problem is that the skill system actually limits thinking.

The “skill” based system is really just based on what the game wants you to do. It’s not actually calculating anything like how far you kicked a target, or how much you juggled them via kicks, or how many times you “leashed” the enemy in a row. There’s nothing really interesting that the system is doing, despite a scoring system being something that really could encourage doing interesting things. For example, kicking one enemy into another was something that often happened, and that also didn’t seem to elicit much response from the system. The problem lies in that points are based around how you kill the enemy, not everything you do up until that point, which is where your freedom and control lies. Lastly, the set pieces are contrived and, at times, almost mimic a classically inspired cover shooter.

Unfortunately, the game itself is also one that gives rise to juvenile objectification and abuse of women, Bulletstorm clearly empowering the problem. The game oozes racism, sexism, and probably any other kind of hateful rhetoric one could think of. What’s worse is that even if it doesn’t wear off on the player, it certainly empowers them to act without thought of consequence. This is a legitimate problem that games like these would probably curl up in a fetal position if forced to address.

Recommended: No