Hands On: Bulletstorm

Sadly I never got round to People Can Fly’s first title, Painkiller. I’ve actually heard pretty good things about the game, but I never connected it to the developers of the ridiculously named Bulletstorm. Ridiculous as the title may be the E3 demo made it clear the that gameplay would live up to the over the top moniker. The buzz around the game seemed to explode as soon as it appeared at EA’s E3 presentation, so the appearence of the game at the Eurogamer Expo lead to a great deal of excitement at TSA.

After a brief wait to get onto one of the four machines showing the game it was time to enter a world of ridiculous killing and typically Unreal Engine graphics. The initial feel you get is one that’s very similar to Gears of War. The way you move and shoot feels close to the blockbuster title, and the voice work certainly has a lot in common with the overly masculine lines that Gears tends to deliver.

However, once you’re past the initial feeling of familiarity you realise that the game actually plays quite differently. As was shown at E3 you have a psychic whip that allows you to grab hold of enemies and parts of the environment to pull towards you. The range is actually quite impressive, letting you grab hold of enemies hiding at the top of stairs or behind distant cover.

Once you’ve got hold of your enemy you seem to have three basic choices right now, shoot them, boot them or toss them into the environment. Whilst there is a lot of satisfaction in whipping an enemy towards you, kicking them backwards and then blasting them; using the environment for kills is where it looks like the game will really shine. The campaign map available in the demo is littered with cactuses and finding the angle to whip or kick the enemies into them was easily the demo’s highpoint. If this is fleshed out with more hazards in the full game I could see the game becoming something truly amazing.

Whilst environmental kills do look like they’ll be the title’s signature piece, the guns look like they have potential. The demo only features two weapons; a very cool looking assault rifle and a gun that seems to fire exploding bolas. Pretty much every shooter these days has some kind of weapon with exploding ammunition, but firing a bolas at your enemy just looks great. On top of that it seems that a second pull of the trigger is needed to set off the explosion, adding the potential for tactical uses. Hopefully other weapons in the full game will be just as original, rather than the fairly standard shooter fair.

With a variety of ways to kill your enemies, a scoring system in the very arcade feeling title is only natural, but the ability to combo together moves looks like it could be interesting. Sadly the demo was too short and limited to get a real feel for how this will pan out over a full game experience, but if the variety of ways you can kill an enemy and chain together kills is expanded upon I can see many hours being happily spent trying to climb up leaderboards.

There was only one thing in the demo that seemed slightly odd. Whilst it was nice to see kicking introduced as a melee attack, and very nice to see melee that actually pushes enemies backwards, the lack of punches just seemed strange. That’s probably being overly fussy for a highly impressive demo but for a game that seems to be priding itself on a variety of emergent ways to attack, the lack of punches seemed a little limiting.

Lack of punching aside Bulletstorm has quickly pushed aside a variety of established triple-A titles with something that seems genuinely fresh. It is completely over the top, but so are the Die Hard and Bad Boys films. Games don’t all have to be epic stories with deep dialogue, some of them can just be completely ridiculous.