I'll be back: Bulletstorm revisited

In the past weeks, I have gotten to play Echoes and Anarchy in Bulletstorm.  Here are my takes:

Echoes: It's Bulletstorm without the dialog, cinematics, and walk long walks between battlefields.  Hooray!
Also, you start out with full ammo in your loadout with three charge shots and three thumpers.  All of these get set back to full whenever you link into a dropkit.  What's not to like?

Anarchy: Just what I expected.  The Bulletstorm formula holds up surprisingly well in a smash-tv sort of arena brawl.  This good style of gameplay comes with a high discipline requirement in stark contrast to the game's generally chaotic gameplay.  In order to make any meaningful progression through the constant waves of enemies, you are asked- nay required- to listen to your teammates; a surprising concept coming from a game that could have been designed by orks.

Gork and Mork help you if even one person on your team is mucking about.

At this point I have played a mixture of styles on each of the maps.  Here is what I have learned about the possible team compositions assuming that you do not have any means to communicate verbally with anonymous teammates (because of the madness-inducing chatter coming from the other end of that mic):

You + someone you know and trust --> Nirvana:
The way the game was meant to be played.  You work together to pull off the team skillshots when necessary, and sometimes you'll just happen to make some awesome flukes.  It's especially good if you can coordinate when to activate the thumper or blood symphony as these actions are time-sensitive and have the potential for high point yields. Having said that, my advice to newcomers to this mode is to make sure that you have at least one person with you who has beaten the campaign and to whom you will all defer (at least a little bit).  Everything in anarchy is time-sensitive, so you lose your rhythm and it breaks up the pace if you have to look up how to perform certain kills in the skillshot database.  Therefore, it helps to have one dedicated lexicon of murder variety to explain what a certain kill is and/or tell someone to stand in a certain spot and leash an enemy while he teaches by murder-example.  In this situation, however, it is imperative that you listen to a) when someone notices that there's an enemy with the team skillshot icon over his head and b) when the murder-lexicon explains the plan.  This strategy has worked with a number of different people, is easy to pick up, and makes a two person party completely viable in this game mode.  When you have four people who can all communicate, hilarity will ensue, but everybody'd better make sure that each individual knows what he or she is doing and to hold off when someone announces the intention to use the thumper or blood symphony.

You + someone you know and trust + 2 anonymous punks --> Semi-Heretical:
You've got a good thing going, but then someone has to go and mess it up.  While you and your teammate are executing your precisely coordinated executions, the biggest challenge is getting to the kills before your pair of lone wolves do and try to take all the apples for themselves.  The enemy is the least of your worries.


You + 3 anonymous punks -->  Do not attempt:

Lead for the lead god: my take on Bulletstorm

Those of you who know me know that I'm a fan of things that are over the top.  Epic and People Can Fly recently released the game Bulletstorm, which I felt would tickle my fancy.  This game is heavily based on style and aesthetic.  For those of you who have not been following it, consult the following hastily-made chart:

Any questions?

Having said all this, I shudder to call this a true review of Bulletstorm rather than just my personal take on it.

In recent years, shoot-'em-up games (or sh'mups as some call them) have taken two different directions:

1. Realistic - e.g. Call of Duty, Tom Clancy Games.  You are a soldier who is equipped with weapons that existed in the last century or are likely to exist in the next ten years.  You can take more than a normal person could before going down and you heal unbelievably quickly from bullet wounds, but that's just the nature of the video game beast.

2. Superpowered - e.g. Gears of War, Far Cry: Instincts, Halo, Red Faction.  You are a fighting machine (literal or otherwise) who does things that a realistic soldier can do, but better (e.g. somersaulting in combat), you have super weaponry (e.g. lasers from space), and you may be given superpowers (energy shields, super speed).

Each has its pros and each has its bros who support the games heatedly.  As time has progressed, the challenge has gone out to developers to do something ULTRA-REALISTIC while still building on video game styles of fun  in shooters.  In contrast, while the pursuit of realism in a simulation is a worthy effort, developers making games designed to be ultra-superpowered has been surprisingly lacking.  

Enter Bulletstorm.

I'm pretty confident that when Gears of War was released, Epic Games was pretty pleased with itself.  Sure cover mechanics had been used in shooters before (see PsyOps, Kill.Switch, etc.), but Gears did it with style, polish, and a chainsaw on a gun.  Way to raise the bar, Epic!  Now to top it...

Too much is never enough.

So then People Can Fly said, "We see what you did there," and took Gears to its logical conclusion (sans the iconic chainsaw gun).  Reductio ad absurdum at its finest.

In Bulletstorm, you take the role of a space pirate voiced by Steve Blum as he takes on hordes of crazies, monsters, cannibals, and other kinds of monsters with his freshly cyborgified friend, Ishi (which means "man").  Your ultimate goal is to take revenge on your foul-mouthed former boss.  Five minutes into the game, you drunkenly fly your space ship through the big-bad's space ship.  The rest of the story is framework for set pieces and ridiculous situations in exotic, deadly environments.  The story is ass, the characters are archetypes, the environments are scenery gorn.  You play Bulletstorm 1% for "witty banter" and "marvelous views" and 99% for gameplay.

Your options in gameplay are guns on normal fire, guns on charged fire, the boot, and the leash.

- Guns generally fire bullets or explosives.  Good times.

- Alt-fire guns usually just do more damage and have a special effect (e.g. setting something on fire).  Therefore they can be used to kill things quickly to get points quickly.

- The boot (straight out of Duke Nukem) can be used to launch enemies (including by using the slide, which is essentially a sprint-kick).

- The leash is a take on Nero's demon arm from Devil May Cry 4.  It's a means to pop guys into the air en masse or bring guys from out of cover to right in front of you (the pull to the boot's push).

The guns are fitting.  Sure you've got your basic assault rifle, but it's alt-fire fires 100 bullets at once and flays all the skin off a guy's body. Another popular one is a bola gun with a grenade on either end.  It wraps around an enemy, immobilizing him and turning him into a bomb that can be kicked, leashed, or just plain blown up.  Or you could not blow him up, toss him into an industrial fan, and get the "sadist" skill shot for 100 points (he blows up once he's dead anyway).  I don't want to spoil how the other weapons work, but suffice it to say they are plenty cool and plenty manly:

Who the hell do you think I am?!

These are what you have to work with.  The trick with Bulletstorm is making them work together, which is something that most shooters don't make you do.  In Call of Duty, for example, you have a go-to gun and a secondary gun for special situations.  This leads to most combat activities being straightforward shootouts while you hide behind cover to reload or heal.  The difference with Bulletstorm is the skill shot system.

My favorite game ever is Devil May Cry.  Its plot is so bad and inconsequential that you can just ignore it, it establishes a cocky, badass protagonist, the enemies are big, ugly monsters.  It's a pretty standard third-person action game where you fight demons and .  What is non-standard about it is that it implemented the "style" system which rewards you with points (which can be used to purchase items and upgrades) and the satisfaction of pulling of bitchin' combos.  A complaint that will be levied at button mashers such as fighting and action/adventure games (e.g. God of War) is that there will be one combination of moves that will just dominate all others, so why would you ever use a different one?  The style meter creatively deals with this problem and opens up the imagination of the gamer not just to play the game, but to play with the game.

This is what Bulletstorm does by implementing the skill shot system (more on this later).  With its approach to combat, it is a cross between Devil May Cry and Gears of Awesome.  No enemy is difficult to kill in this game.  Everything can be dealt with handily just by unloading bullets into it.  But where's the fun in that?  Bulletstorm borrows core concepts from a lot of other places and integrates them in a very satisfyingly tongue-in-cheek manner.  Not only are you rewarded with flashing lights and funny titles for your kills, skillshots are how you fuel your destruction.  Ammo dumps are frequent in this game, but you need to complete skill shots in order to use them to buy your ammo and upgrade your guns.  If you don't play this game like a normal shooter, then you'll be stuck running and gunning with the assault rifle all the time.  If you play this game like a stylish badass, you will have flail grenades and canon balls coming out your ears and the mayhem will not cease.  The boot and the leash are essential for skill shots.  They allow you to arrange the battlefield the way you want it, and they also give you some breathing room.  The great thing about this pair of tools is that they each put a time distortion field around their target when used (no, they never justify why your boot slows down time).  

Za warudo!

It's the interplay between all of your options and the coaxing that you are given to utilize all of your options that makes this game so great.  As the developers say, "Stop playing a shooter, and start playing Bulletstorm."

Apart from the single-player mode, there are two others: echoes and anarchy.  Echoes takes you to different spots in the campaign, gives you a set of weapons and makes ammo dumps automatically refill your ammo but take away your ability to upgrade gear.  You are then promptly sent on your way to make as big a mess as you can in the shortest time possible.  Your scores are posted online and you can compare them with friends.  It's fun and arcade-style, good for a short romp doesn't bother with plot.  Anarchy is a mode in which you and three other players try to get the highest score you can in wave after wave of enemies.  I haven't played much in this mode, but if you die in it before wave 9, you either suck or have a bad connection.  The hard part isn't the enemies, it's getting enough points to get to the next wave.  Each round, you get a chance to use your points to upgrade your gear, buy new weapons, or buy ammo.  You level up with play, but the only things that stay with you from game to game are your outfit options.  The fun thing about anarchy is that it unlocks new skill shots that are team-based.  These are essential to progressing through the match as some enemies will indicate that they will yield more points if you work together in a certain way to dipatch them (e.g. kicked them to your partner so he can shotgun blast them off a cliff).  While fun in concept, there is a trick to its execution: lone wolves don't work.  This is a game mode that (like Left 4 Dead) is MUCH better when played with people you know and can talk to.

Long story short: Bulletstorm is a fantastic game that satisfies your craving for things that are ridicu-awesome.   In my eyes, it breathes life into shooters as a genre by forming a cunning hybrid with beat-'em-up games.  Reviewers have claimed that this game is a good first step, that there is something shining beneath a gritty exterior and the game needs to be polished to a shine.  I agree.  Bulletstorm is a great first step and I fully endorse the trend that it heralds.  Not to spoil the ending (like it matters), but it leaves the franchise wide open for a sequel.  I anticipate this sequel eagerly.