User Review : Bulletstorm

an adult fun shooting experience that will appeal to any Action games fans

First Person Shooters have been available since the beginning of the gaming industry.
Who does not remember that good old days where Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, Blood, Half-Life, etc... (and all these retro FPS) were pure fun.
Little changes has been made in the genre but still the FPS shooters in their vast variety (Tactical, Action, RPG, historic etc...) provided the fun that it did 12 or 13 years ago.
In 2004 a company called "People Can Fly" did bring us a game called "Painkiller" it was retrospective action First Person Shooter but was brutal, crass, and best of all sinfully fun!
After 6 years (2010 to be precise) the same company that has been quiet for so long announced a game that will revolutionize the First Person Shooters with a new system that will reward you for your kills, the game were simply called Bulletstorm.
So did Bulletstorm really revolutionized the genre?
at the first glimpse we can tell that Bulletstorm is a game that only cares about ripping enemies apart, by decapitating them even kick them to a cactus, but the best part of all these above is that you earn skill points doing so!
First, The game's story is one of those stories that you will quickly forget, Grayson (The Protagonist) who was a member of a peacekeeping force discovered that the targets he and his crew were killing, were all innocents, so we want to take revenge from the man that gives the order, General Serrano, a man that swears a lot and uses the "D" and the "F" word more than you breathe in a minute!
When we was in his space ship, Grayson saw G. Serrano's ship so he ordered his men (that are a bunch of mercenaries now) to shoot Serrano's ship, so what happens is that the crew involves in a suicide mission that damages the ship a lot, so Grayson sends the ship to crash into Serrano's ship and hell went loose, both ships went down into a planet that was occupied by pirates and flesh eating gangs, ! so you have to fight your way through!
That's approx. the game's story. But really who cares about that!
What you need to care about is how you are going to fight those filthy pirates,
The game has lots of available weapons at your disposal unlocked one at a time, but Grayson can only carry three weapons.
The coolest addition to the weapons is the leash. You receive the leash at the beginning of the game and you discover it's awesome powers.
you can grab anything with it and throw it away, and anything means enemies as well.
just grab enemies with the leash and see them come towards you in slow motion just to blow their head off or simply shoot them.
But the fun really begins when the game starts awarding you with skill points for every kill, you can just kick an enemy sending him flying to a cactus, to an electic wire or maybe more ridiculously using swarms of killer flies, that what makes the game always fresh by trying to kill enemies in new ways to earn extra points where you spend them to upgrade your gear and buy ammunitions.
The weapons are varied starting with a regular machine gun (your fixed weapon) plus two more weapons that you can constantly change. But one of the coolest weapons that can be found is indeed the sniper, where you can aim at a certain enemy with your scope, shoot him and controlling the bullet all the way till it slows down before hitting its target scoring a skill shot
The Skill shot system gives the game a sense of humor where the developers uses words to describe the killings. some if the words used: GAG Reflex (when you shoot someone in the throat) Rear Entry when you shoot someone from behind, Topless when you cut enemies in half.
Those expressions made some people angry and EA apologized about using them and promised to fix its doings by using more children friendly words in the next game's patch. But clearly the people that were complaining did not realize that the game is meant for Mature audience!
One of the next coolest elements in the game, is the character Ishi, he is your game companion but with one flaw: He is with constant battle with his half AI brain, and that gives the character a great personality that will influence positively on the game.
Putting aside the cool Leash and amazing Skill points system, the game have its own epic moments, why not contolling a Robot Dinosor using a remote control and doing the killing for you? or maybe traveling on a train avoiding a very large Wheel.
These moments gives the game a real sense of action and intense.
a Cover system would have been a great addition but the devs decided to avoid it, maybe to not make this game very serious.

The game's graphics looks breath taking in some areas, where the game features an amazing scenery, the island looks fantastic, despite some solid textures that can be found in a lot of places. The face animation is good but not one of the best.
Unfortunately the PC version of the game suffers a bit when it comes to performance where players can encounter slowdowns in some vast areas and a bit of stuttering.
Being an Action Comedy game, Bulletstorm features a some what funny dialogs accompanied with adult themed words, try the "F" word, the exessive use of the "d" word, it could be funny sometimes, but unfortunately that fun becomes old fast,
The game's AI can be problematic some time, ranging from average to stupid, starting with your own companions standing against a wall and running infinitely, and the enemies that all they do is running towards you shooting or trying to fill you with explosives, but that does not mean you won't have fun killing them!
When you'll finish the 6 hours campaign you can play Online, the multiplayer is fun at first but unfortunately it won't last long and you will get bored fast. The idea of mutiplayer is to play in coop with a team killing pirates but trying to collect skillshot using team efforts, that could be sometimes frustrating.
In the end, Bulletstorm is a "just for fun" game where lots of swearing, brutality and sarcism play a tremendous role. this game is a Retrospective First person shooter with a great touch of innovation, so If you enjoy FPS games just for the heck of it, if you enjoy brutality in games, Bullestorm is definitely the game for you.