Bulletstorm Review

 

Bulletstorm is a high action FPS from Polish based developer “People Can Fly”, perhaps best known for its old school shooter Painkiller and the work they did on the PC version of Gears of War. Bulletstorm takes more after the Painkiller school of gameplay than Microsoft’s cover based shooter, bringing a frantic energy to the increasingly stale conventions of the modern linear, cinematic shooter. The game is a lively, gore-spattered, obscenity riddled thrill ride with tremendously satisfying combat mechanics and a breakneck pace that rarely lets up. 

Made for TV

Bulletstorm’s story is straight from a Sci-Fi channel movie, but the strength is in the telling rather than what’s being told. You play as Grayson Hunt, member of a futuristic and morally suspect special-ops team called Dead Echo. The game doesn’t just tell you these things however. It doesn’t even show you. It has you do.

When sent to kill a man who turns out to be an innocent reporter documenting Dead Echo atrocities the game doesn’t just show via passive cut-scene. The game has you, the player, walking down the side of a skyscraper in gravity boots and pulling the trigger yourself. Flashing forward 10 years to Grayson as a drunken pirate the game doesn’t just tell you that Grayson is now a hunted man, but has you physically booting a bounty hunter into the airlock and flushing the luckless lowlife out into space. 

This game has really pretty backdrops.

When Grayson spots the much more powerful ship of his former commander, the deliciously foul mouthed and repugnant general Sarrano, you don’t just watch a cinematic space battle. You get an up close view manning the turrets as Grayson’s suicidal attack run cripples both ships and sends them crashing to the desolate planet below. 

The strength of games as a medium has always been their level of immersion and interactivity. This goes double for FPS games, which can achieve a level of direct intimacy that’s hard to beat. Like the Half-Life series before it Bulletstorm recognizes this and capitalizes on it to plunge you neck deep into the action. After all, why just show the player something when you can let them do it themselves?

I mean flat-out gorgeous.

The planet Grayson finds himself stranded on proves to have once been a holiday resort for the rich and powerful.  Today it’s a hellish but still beautiful place crawling with murderous gangs, feral mutants, and giant carnivorous plants battling one another through the gaudy ruins. Fortunately combat is one of Bulletstorm’s greatest strengths.

Whipping it good

This is the kind of game where simply shooting your enemies to death in center mass is not only ineffective but creatively bankrupt. Grayson, while not able to leap or climb outside of scripted sequences, is fast, resilient, and highly mobile. Success in combat comes from capitalizing on your abilities and weapons to move yourself out of harm’s way while flinging your enemies into it. 

Grayson’s a formidable man without even needing to pull a trigger, possessing a powerful melee kick that sends enemies hurtling backwards and a ridiculously fun ground-eating slide maneuver. Early on you also gain access to a sort of “energy whip” that can grab people and objects and yank them through the air towards you. Anyone hit by whip, boot, or slide becomes trapped in slow motion and surrounded by a distinctive blue glow for several seconds, giving plenty of time to line up precision shots or redirect them into one of the many, many hazards that litter Bulletstorm’s battlefields.

He'll be fine. The ground will break his fall.

And what hazards they are, from the classic explosive barrels and lethal falls to impaling cacti and spores whose fumes trigger indiscriminant berserker rage. The world around you is easily as lethal a weapon as the gun in your hand, if not more so. Combat is not a deliberate, tactical skirmish but a savage, highly kinetic brawl. Using the environment and your abilities to creatively and messily dispose of enemies is immensely satisfying, and a good way to save ammo too. 

Grayson is such amobile, and resilient character that hiding behind cover feels like a waste. It’s more effective to slide around dodging fire, especially if most of your enemies are flying through the air themselves from a case of boot-to-the-face. Health regeneration feels just right, allowing you to throw yourself into the thick of combat but not to be careless.

Fwzaaapppp!

The gloriously destructive “Thumper” ability deserves special mention, snapping every nearby enemy into the air to splatter against the ceiling or hang helplessly suspended. It’s tremendous fun to use and a great way to even the odds in the larger and more frantic fights. Thumper charges are appropriately expensive for their power, but have the potential to earn back their cost and more if used skillfully.

Skill Kill Kult

You see Bulletstorm awards points on every kill. These points are then spent at “Dropkits” scattered across the planet on an assortment of ammo types and weapon unlocks. Simply shooting an enemy to death provides a piddling bonus but performing a “Skillshot”, or killing an enemy in a challenging or creative way, earns you significant rewards. The game encourages you to continuously try new weapons, tactics, and techniques in combat, rewarding you for being awesome and skillful.

Some Skillshots are environmental based, like kicking an enemy into a fire or off a cliff. Impaling a thug on a giant cactus spine nets you the “Pricked” Skillshot. Others are dependent on stunts with a particular weapon, firing mode, or enemy. Shooting a howling mutant in the groin and then the head earns you the “Mercy” Skillshot. (And gives you an idea of Bulletstorm’s juvenile but still entertaining humor.) 

Skillshots pay the bills.

Not every Skillpoint comes from combat. First person games have grappled with getting the player to look where they want them for ages. There’s no point in putting a lot of effort into a detailed set piece if you can’t guarantee the player won’t be off in the corner grubbing for ammo when it plays out. That’s why so many FPS games just use cutscenes or lock your view in place for certain sequences. 

Bulletstorm deals with this particular problem in a clever and rewarding way. When something dramatic is about to happen the game gives you a quicktime prompt. Hitting the button locks your view onto whatever is exploding, on fire, or coming to kill you (or all three). The faster you react, the more free Skillpoints you’re awarded. Bulletstorm literally pays you to pay attention.

There are dozens of possible Skillshots, ranging from the very easy to the highly tricky and situational. You’ll discover a lot of them just through luck and chance but the reward for pulling off a new one makes them well worthwhile. You don’t need to obsessively try to unlock every single Skillshot to succeed, (indeed you can generally scrape by with the ammo enemies drop and the rare supply crate) but most of the really fun alternate fire ammo charges require a steady stream of points to afford. In turn they allow for some lucrative Skillshots themselves, making for a gory positive feedback loop.

Why yes, that is a giant Murdersaw bearing down on us.

The weapons you’ll use to make those Skillshots are powerful and a cut more exotic than the classic FPS load-out, firing bouncing bombs, explosive bolos, and heat-seeking drills. Even the traditional shotgun has a ridiculous four barrels, sawing mutants in half at point blank range. As mentioned above all weapons have an explosive and deadly alternate fire mode that can clear a room and rack up some serious Skillshots to justify their cost. You’re restricted to only three guns at a time, including the default assault rifle, but you can change your load out at any of the ubiquitous Dropkits. A few weapons are introduced so late you don’t get to spend much time with them, but they’re all fun to use. 

Ain’t got time to breath

Bulletstorm sets a breakneck pace. Grayson and company move from one precarious scenario to the next with barely a pause for breath. Set piece after set piece places you in increasingly improbably and hilariously dangerous situations and balls remain firmly attached to the wall for the entire game. You’re continually crashing, fleeing, and watching everything explode around you.

One moment you’re fighting atop a massive hydroelectric dam as battle damage and millions of tons of water pressure tear it apart. The next you’re sprinting through a fallen skyscraper that bridges a bottomless chasm, trying to cross before the building gives way and slides into the abyss. A particularly memorable segment has you aboard a train trying to outrun a giant spinning buzz-saw of doom. Many sections include a visible timer counting down to horrific death and destruction, spurring you to fight harder and move faster to stay alive. These sections are frantic, but when you’re inevitably a hair too slow you needn’t replay too much content.

Other set pieces are just bizarre fun. Bulletstorm is packed with awesome moments, from mowing down gyrocopters with a mini-gun to battling gangers on the dance floor of a still functioning disco. One of the highlights puts you briefly in control of a death-spewing robot dinosaur and lets you turn it loose of a mob of hapless mutants. There’s almost always something cool and memorable going on. There is one oddly out of place traditional boss fight against a giant plant, but it’s quickly out of the way.

Always nice to see Piranha Plant is still getting work outside the Mario series.

The graphics are sharp and solid design keeps most levels feeling a lot larger and more open than they actually are. What really stand out are the backdrops. Bulletstorm has gorgeous backgrounds that also give you a great sense of progression and place in the world. A city glimpsed in the distance during the early levels grows steadily larger and more detailed as you fight your way towards it. 

Worst Family Fun Vacation Ever

Bulletstorm’s tone is that of constant giddy hyperkinetic violence, with traces of seriousness whenever there’s a pause for air. The game has a juvenile but genuinely funny sense of humor. Much of it comes from the interplay between Grayson and his grimly serious cyberneticly enhanced buddy Ishi, who acts as the straight man to Grayson’s clowning and the ongoing carnage filled lunacy constantly erupting around the duo. 

Grayson himself comes across as a not particularly mature or clever but fundamentally good natured fighting man. His constant stream of expletives feels less out of malice and more simply his default mode of expression. By contrast everything the relentlessly hateful antagonist Sarrano says seems calculated to tick off and hurt whomever he’s talking too as much as possible.

A motley and foul mouthed crew, but no babysitting required.

You’re never without at least one ally fighting alongside, usually Ishi. Their constant chatter adds flavor and humor and they’re quick to point out the way forward if your progress stalls. Bulletstorm avoids some of the cardinal sins of game design in that your companions can’t be killed, never get lost, and are useful in combat but not enough to upstage you. I point these things out because companion AI can be done wrong so many ways it deserves a mention whenever a developer makes it painless. 

 As goofy and juvenile as a lot of Bulletstorm is it manages the occasional clever moment. One escape sequence cuts you off repeatedly, toying with the player’s expectation that the game won’t leave them to die. One of the last encounters in the game pits you against an opponent equipped with the same energy whip and gravity boots as you, forcing you to experience first-hand what you’ve already done to scores of enemies.

Final Echoes

For all its many strengths Bulletstorm is still as linear and highly scripted as the Call of Duty and Halo series that it mocks in its commercials. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfLDz6Y31rc) There’s very little in the way of exploration, and most of the few puzzles actually solve themselves via explosion if you don’t figure them out fast enough. You just don’t get the Skillpoint reward.  That’s fine, because a linear and cinematic thrill ride is clearly what the designers set out to create and succeeded brilliantly in doing. 

Walking's fer sissies. Real men power-slide to get around.

Aside from the more than satisfactory single player campaign Bulletstorm features “Anarchy Mode” as its sole multiplayer option. Anarchy Mode takes the now ubiquitous Gears-of-War style Horde mode and adds the welcome twist of team based Skillshots. Leashing, kicking, and blasting mooks back and forth between players is the best way to keep the points rolling in and secure a high score. There’s no deathmatch style gameplay to be found, which is unsurprising because trying to balance elements like the whip and slide-boot for PvP gameplay would have been tricky and distracting at best.

Finally “Echo” mode lets you enjoy Bulletstorm in its purest form, replaying five minute sections of the best of the single-player campaign without any story or dialog to get in the way of the carnage. You can chase online leader-board scores if that’s your idea of a good time, but for the most part it’s just a great way to get a quick adrenalin booster shot of action.

It’s impossible not to recommend Bulletstorm to anyone who even remotely enjoys action and shooter games. It’s a welcome break from trudging through dreary realistic settings, shooting people from other countries with the same handful of real world weapons. 

Reasons to Play: Unrelenting onslaught of awesome set pieces. Creative weapons and over the top combat mechanics. Rewarding Skillshot system. Everything on fire, exploding, or both.

Reasons to Pass: Highly linear and scripted. Lack of a traditional multiplayer shooter mode. Some may find the constant swearing excessively and goofy. You possess a strong aversion to fun. 

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.

RAGE Review

 

A History of Violence

Id Software has a well deserved reputation as an industry leading FPS developer. After all, these are the guys who brought us Doom and Quake, as the box of their latest offering is quick to remind us. RAGE takes the bold step of moving away from the established design of Id’s previous games and adding elements like a more open world, vehicles for racing and combat, and crafting. Let's take a look at how it comes together.

RAGE suffers from a weak beginning. There’s nothing wrong with the setup. Post-Apocalyptic is a gaming staple, and at least it’s not another nuclear war. A giant asteroid is about to hammer the earth and your character is one of the select elites stashed underground in cryogenic “Arks” to wait out the worst of the impact. 

The trains no longer run on time. Or at all really.

The problem is that the game never really gives you any sort of involvement or investment. Your character’s Ark is damaged somehow and so wakes you up early, but it’s never explained what did so or what killed everyone else inside. You stumble outside and are menaced by hobos bandits, who are in turn shot by a passing stranger. He then hands you a moderately dangerous pistol and asks you, a man he’s never seen before with no idea what’s going on, to please go kill more people he dislikes. That’s pretty much it. Taken individually the game’s missions are enjoyable, but they’re connected by the very flimsiest of narrative threads. 

After the Boom

On a macro level the game is looks good. The skyscapes and outdoor horizons are impressive, and stuff blows up real good when blowing up is called for. When seen from a reasonable distance objects and environments look convincingly battered and worn. My computer is mid-range these days, but performance was smooth and load times were reasonable.

Do comet strikes create mesas or are we in Utah? Good looking sky though.

Up close many textures have an unfortunate muddy appearance. By far the strangest graphical quirk is that RAGE seems to load in textures on a second by second basis, unloading them the moment you look away. Simply look to the side and you’ll watch textures fill in on the fly. Perhaps it was done for performance reasons, but it’s visually distracting at best and just plain weird given ID’s normally rock solid reputation for engine performance and graphical pizzazz.

This is a world with a lot of trash, rubble, and dust. Armor and vehicles have the cobbled together Mad Max look you would expect. There are a lot of guys wandering around looking for a matching shoulder-pad. Some of the junk art the various bandit tribes leave around to mark their territory is downright fascinating.

The "Talk to the hand" tribe is justly feared across the wasteland.

  

RAGE draws from the school of level design that builds an intact structure, and then knocks out enough walls and doors to force you to take a long winding path through the place. The levels are quite linear, but most manage to be visually interesting; especially the ones that take place outdoors. Even the usual run of underground subway tunnels and bunkers avoid looking sterile or dull.

Dangerous Toys

It’s fortunate that the environments aren’t dull, because you’ll want to comb them thoroughly for loot. There’s ammo and junk to sell, but more importantly you can find all sorts of components and spare parts that can be taped together into useful stuff. This just consists of going to the appropriate screen and hitting a button, but it’s the only reliable source of some of the most fun and powerful items. Crafting makes exploration and secret hunting worthwhile and adds some welcome character and a bit of depth. 

I'm just a boy and his murderbot. And his shotgun. I've love enough for both.

It’s entirely possible to slug through RAGE with just the stock shotgun/machine gun, but that would be a waste. The wealth of ammo types and auxiliary items mean you have some cool tactical options at your disposal. Many of these, like the signature head seeking boomerangs and remote control bomb cars, can end a fight in a hurry. Turrets and spider bots help even the odds in larger fights.  Some of the more exotic items, like the mind control and dynamite bolts for the crossbow, are just fun to play around with. 

Places to Go, People to Kill

RAGE’s missions are self-contained 20-30 minute shots of high quality FPS action, and definitely the game’s strongest point. Weapons feel solid and sound satisfyingly powerful. Enemies buckle and thrash when shot, losing helmets and limbs and falling back in panic when enough of them perish. Combat is generally forgiving, especially if you’re willing to make basic use of cover, but still a lot of fun. Shooter veterans should consider choosing hard for their first play-through. 

Health regenerates and you can always instantly heal yourself by slapping on a cheap and plentiful bandage. A bladed boomerang will handily decapitate the bulk of enemy types if you feel seriously threatened. For those moments when you do take too many bullets your character has a sort of high tech defibrillator that triggers a quicktime event. Success sees you springing back to your feet with full health and nearby enemies convulsing from electric shock. The defibrillator takes some time to recharge so you can’t be careless, but it’s still a lot more interesting than hammering the quick-load key. 

I have no idea what this is but I intend to punch it.

Human opponents mostly make use of cover nodes, popping out to take shots at you and flinging the odd grenade. Rare heavier troopers stomp relentlessly forward, trying to bring massive weapons to bear on you until you finally blast off enough of their armor to put them down for good. As mentioned before, enemies give a satisfying amount of feedback in combat. Better protected foes even sound different when shot with weaker ammo types, hinting the need to switch to something more armor piercing or explosive.

Humans are willing to fall back and give ground, but the swarming goblinoid mutants simply rush you in an ill tempered pack. They’re not particularly smart, but they are nicely animated and give you an excuse to break out the shotgun. Occasional bigger specimens provide more of a threat and serve as mini-boss fights.

While the individual maps and missions are fun the game gets a LOT of use out of them. Almost every optional mission sends you back to an area you’ve already cleared to do much the same thing all over again. Most of the co-op multiplayer levels are heavily recycled maps as well.  If you ignore all the extra racing and side missions and mini-games RAGE isn’t that long of a game. Perhaps five or six hours at most. A bit disconcerting for a game that takes three DVDs to install. 

For the Discerning Gunman

It’s worth noting that the special “Anarchy” edition includes some content that changes the early game. The damage upgrade to the basic fists makes them so effective that many encounters become another exciting tale in the Adventures of Doc Punchington and his Marvelous Fisticuffs. (Which would make a great game, but we’re veering off track.) RAGE isn’t a melee-centric game, but when a single blow to the face drops any mutant or unarmored bandit it’s hard to justify plinking around with the pistol. 

Mutant crawling out of the sewers. While already in the sewers.

There’s an armor upgrade that’s powerful and useful, but by its own superiority removes the single interesting character choice found in the game. Aside from a double barreled shotgun and a more durable car the Anarchy edition has a set of bonus missions located in that most scenic of FPS locations, post-apocalyptic sewers. These generally offer about ten minutes of uninspired mutant punching and some decent loot for compulsive scavengers and collectors. As bonus content goes it’s not actually bad, but you’re not missing anything particularly memorable. I did like the spiked knuckle fists though. 

Driving While Angry

Racing and vehicular combat is a major gameplay element, but feels sectioned off from the rest of RAGE. You need a vehicle to get from place to place as the distances between towns and missions are quite far. Facing bandit patrols on foot is suicide. There’s little reason to hop out of the car in any area where you can drive, and no way bring a car inside a mission. If you were hoping for a fluid combination of driving and fighting, a la Halo or Red Faction: Guerilla, you’ll be disappointed. Driving and FPS shooting are discrete experiences with very little crossover between them.

You need a vehicle to get around in post-apocalyptia.

You queue up for races inside major cities, and victory is the major source of vehicle upgrade currency. No items, ammo, or health carry over but the destruction of your vehicle just sets you back a few seconds. The vehicles themselves are forgiving and enjoyably arcady. Racing is an amusing enough diversion, though I found the “rally” mode where everyone races for checkpoints that appear all over the map frustratingly random. Out in the wasteland vehicular combat mostly boils down to firing off homing missiles while moving continuously and popping a shield or repair item when the enemy returns fire. 

Stuff to do When Everyone’s Dead

There’s a lot of peripheral content to be found here. The towns are crammed with mini-games and side missions. Most of its pretty simple luck or reflex based gambling, but I found the Magic-esc collectable card game surprisingly fun. The timed delivery missions were annoying, but the self contained sniper sequences that had you defending distant targets were a nice change of pace. The only reward for most of this is cash, which is certainly handy for kitting yourself out but not indispensable. If the extra content doesn’t interest you it’s entirely possible to get by with what you loot and scavenge during missions. 

Just to clear any possible confusion, RAGE isn’t an RPG like Fallout or Deus Ex. Anyone expecting an experience along those lines will be disappointed. RAGE is a nugget of pure FPS with a lot of garnish. You manage an inventory (with thankfully unlimited space) accept side missions and buy stuff at venders, but there are no character development choices, leveling up, or dialog trees. At one point you get to choose from a few different types of armor that offer various perks, but as mentioned the collector’s edition just says to heck with it and gives you a suit that has all the advantages combined.

Frothing at the Mouth

(This turns into a bit of a rant and a digression from actual gameplay, so feel free to jump ahead)

John Carmack, ID’s tech director and a man I have nothing but respect for, is famously quoted as saying: “Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.” That’s fine, but even in pornography there’s usually what can loosely be termed a buildup and a climax to the action. (You in the back of the class, stop giggling.)   

This is the only real boss. You shoot him three times in the brain to win.

RAGE’s story has little direction, little buildup, and absolutely no payoff. You move from mission to mission with barely a hint of a central narrative and no real objective to guide you for most of the game. As I said before the individual missions are good, but you’re rarely given the sense that anything is at stake beyond the few hundred bucks you’ve been promised for killing this bunch of squatters or mutants. 

This problem extends to the game’s ending. There’s a bit of a buildup to an attack on the bad guy main base, but once you finally get there nothing actually happens. You fight a marginally interesting new enemy type, hit some switches, and the credits roll. I didn’t even realize I was in the middle of the final encounter until I’d completed it. There’s no showdown, no conclusion, and no sense of resolution.  The game just sputters to a halt.

Fear and Loathing

The characters play up the vaguely techo-fascist Authority, but they take a long time to actually make an appearance and don’t make much of an impression when they do. As much as the game tells you they’re a terrible threat you never really actually see them doing anything evil. We hear a lot about it, but we never actually see anything worth mentioning. When they finally make an appearance they come off more as moderately incompetent Fun Police, loitering around town warning you to keep your distance when you’ve just gotten back from blowing up their prison and murdering dozens of them. 

It’s not that hard to make entertaining villains, even if all you have to work with is yet another bunch of futuristic mooks/mercenaries/soldiers. At the very least they should be someone or something I can love to hate, especially if I’m going to be shooting them in the face for hours on end.  People muttering about folks going missing and complaining that the Authority wants to shut down racing and gambling isn’t going to cut it.

"Derp."

At the beginning of the game have the Authority break into my Ark and mow down the character who’s frantically trying to revive me from stasis while I watch helplessly. Have their little spy drones call in a deadly artillery barrage or dangerous patrol when they spot my car tooling around in the wastes. When I get back from a mission, show them executing people in the street, because the town was helping me. When one character tries to sell me out to save his friends and family have them shoot the poor bastard anyway. Make me feel like they, as the plot weakly hints, are out to get me personally. Make me want to hurt them.

Nothing of this nature happens. At least the different bandit clans have traces of personality, though most of it comes down to different silly costumes and accents. Even the little mutants manage a certain surly defiance as they rush you, clubs waving. For what are supposed to be primary antagonists and the driving force behind the plot the Authority couldn’t be more tepid and nonthreatening.

Least it seem like I’m laying into Id for what has never been their strength or the focus of their games, well, they’ve proven they can do better. DOOM 3, while hardly Shakespeare, had a gripping outbreak sequence, a constant level of tension, and a climax against an iconic and memorable foe. The story wasn’t deep or smart, but it managed to invest you in your own fight to not get eaten by demons if nothing else. 

Head to Head, Back to Back

Once you polish off the single player campaign you’re left with some very strange choices for multiplayer. There are a few vehicular racing and combat modes, which play like simplified versions of games like the Twisted Metal series. They’re fine for a bit of aracdy fun, but not really deep enough to hold interest for an extended time.  

On the FPS end of the spectrum there are about a dozen short two-player co-op missions. I’m a fan of co-op games myself, and enjoyed blasting through the missions, but they don’t have a lot of replay-value. It’s truly puzzling that the company that arguably put multiplayer PC gaming on the map didn’t include at least a basic deathmatch mode.

There's not really a stealth mechanic, but you can still catch people by surprise occasionally.

On one hand I feel like Id should be applauded for trying to broaden and deepen their stock gameplay. On the other it really shows when they try to step outside their core strengths, and not necessarily for the better. I can’t help but wonder what RAGE would have been like if they’d focused on the pure shooter aspects and at least taken another pass at the story and flow.

At the end of the day we’re forced to ask the all important question: Is this game worth $60? Well… no. There’s just not enough of RAGE’s strongest ingredient, the entertaining FPS missions, to justify that kind of a beefy price tag. If you’re a single player FPS fan with a powerful machine, and spot it for $30 or even $40, I’d say snap it up. Otherwise you may be disappointed.

Reasons to Play: Attractive landscapes and macro level graphics. Satisfying FPS shooting. Plenty of fun items and ammo types to play with. 

Reasons to Pass: Weak story and dull ending. Weird and distracting texture loading issue. Lack of a deathmatch option or Multiplayer mode with real longevity.

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners