Our semi-regular (the bran hasn’t quite kicked in yet) feature, in which (another) grumpy old guy is supposed to complain about something… but completely surprises us all.
Bulletstorm? No! FUNSTORM!
I recently bought into the PSN Plus “movement” and even though I am not 100% sure how it works, it means I pay +- R450 a year and I get to download free games, legally. Seems legit to me?
One of the first games I downloaded was a little title called Bulletstorm made by People Can Fly from Gears and Painkiller fame. Now this is not the newest game and I am sure you can find a review somewhere if you look hard enough. But my basic opinion of it is this. Crappy game, Great fun.
I say crappy game because I doubt I would have ever bought this game at full price. Also I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone to play as I don’t think they might find the same amusement out of it that I did. There is no real cover system which means I got shot up a lot. Ammo didn’t really grow on trees so I got shot up a lot. My AI team mates kept getting in my way and didn’t really do any damage so I got shot up a lot. I am really bad at first person shooters so I got shot up a lot. However I pushed through and persevered and before long I completed the campaign.
Why would any sane person even go through all that you ask? Bulletstorm has something I feel gets overlooked from time to time and that is the game entertained me from beginning to end. The main character has a mouth on him that will make any sailor blush. He throws out the most of the cuff insults that makes you wonder what the writer was smoking while writing his script. Then you have a thousand (probably less) methods of killing the fowl beasts that dare get in your way. I mainly just used the machine gun through the whole campaign but I loved playing around with the whip/boot combo as much as I can. See you get this whip which you can use to bring enemies closer to you, and if a Cactus happens to be in the way, well the enemy is going to have a bad day. Basically there is a lot of ways to inflict pain.
It was just great to see that a game doesn’t have to be smooth as glass to be enjoyable. If you have a great original premise and you implement it in a way where people can have fun then you might still have a winner on your hands. I say might since Bulletstorm didn’t exactly win enough and there will most likely never be another one. Not sure if that is a good thing or not.
You can read more of this author’s ramblings on High on Reviews (they review stuff) or follow the (in)human on Twitter. We’re sure he’ll like it.
