Gunning For Fun With Bulletstorm Full Clip Edition

Ever since the start of this generation, developers and publishers have been taking the opportunity to have a second bite of the apple. For some people it meant being able to catch up on the exclusives they missed last generation, for others it’s a fantastic chance to catch up on a series ahead of a sequel.

Visually, it’s pretty much what you’d expect for a game remaster, bumping the game resolution all the way up to 4K on PS4 Pro and running at 60 frames per second. It’s a marked improvement over the game on PS3 and Xbox 360, but you wouldn’t expect anything less. That bump does absolutely help the game’s visual styles to come to the fore, though. The draw distance stretches off much further now, the lighting is greatly improved and colours and details seem to pop more, helping to break past some of the generic Unreal Engine 3 game feeling the original had.

The core to Bulletstorm’s appeal lies in its inventively playful take on the first person shooter. You’ve got a great selection of weapons, ranging from your fairly standard assault rifle and pistol through to sniper rifles with player guided bullets, the drill-like Penetrator and Screamer rocket-propelled flare gun. All of them also have a secondary fire that soups up their power and adds to the unapologetically bombastic gunplay.

An energy leash allows you to grab enemies and pull them towards you, slowing them down just as they get close enough that you might kick them away with your boot – preferably into something that will net you an environmental kill – shoot them while they’re vulnerable, or even keep the leash powered up as you grab them, which explosively slams them back down to the ground.

You’re earning Skillshot points throughout all of this, with the various stupidly named kinds of kills popping up on screen. Shoot a guy in the head with the Penetrator gun and up pops “Root Canal +100” or if you kick a guy into a cactus, they get “Pricked”. The skill comes in being able to always pull things off in quick succession, or going from some of the more outlandish Skillshots, such as leashing an enemy and then killing someone else before you kill them.

Bulletstorm wasn’t a game that I picked up the first time around, but even from just playing two short sections of the game, it’s basically a perfect fit for Gearbox and People Can Fly to be adding and letting you play as Duke Nukem – currently only a pre-order bonus. Grayson Hunt is constantly chattering away with schlocky one liners, while the script’s sense of humour and the names of many things in the game is certainly rather puerile and immature.

In steps Duke, with Jon St. John adding a bevy of new lines. There’s bound to be some of his classic one liners in there, but there’s also a knowing sense of humour, as Duke breaks the fourth wall, questions what the hell is going on, and asks why the hell everyone calling him “Grayson”? There’s a bit of work still to do on the jury-rigged way Duke’s been dropped into the game, but that won’t stop this being the best Duke shooter this millennium.

It must be said that Bulletstorm isn’t the first game that springs to mind when you’re thinking of prospective game remasters. So why are we seeing Bulletstorm being remastered? Well, the answer’s pretty simple: People Can Fly would love to make a sequel to their well received by poorly selling original. Outside of heading over to Kickstarter, the best way to try and, well, kickstart interest in the game again is to put it in front of more people as much as possible.

In that regard, perhaps the world of gaming is a little bit more ready for Bulletstorm. The once cottage industry of Twitch streaming and YouTube video making has boomed in the years since Bulletstorm’s 2011 release, and with that, there’s a demand for more games that are as fun to watch as they are to play. Seeing the outlandish kills, combos and skillful shots of Bulletstorm’s sensationalist combat feels like it’s a great fit for that audience, and if it grabs a hold of a decently sized audience, People Can Fly and Gearbox hope it can build enough momentum to warrant that full on sequel.

To that end, the Full Clip Edition comes with all the original DLC content, a selection of six new maps for the score challenge Echo Mode, and a new Overkill campaign mode that lets you play with out limits to your arsenal and Skillshots. And, of course, Duke Nukem’s Bulletstorm Tour if you pre-order.

Its tone and writing might be considered even more outmoded now than it did in 2011, but Bulletstorm is just a great game to mess around with. There’s a feeling of nonsensical fun to the combat that you really grow into over the first few minutes, whether you’re stringing together a series of fantastic shots and kills, or simply grabbing someone with your energy leash and then deciding how you feel like dealing with them.