Bulletstorm is an astonishingly clever game folded up inside an exquisitely stupid one.
On the surface, People Can Fly has delivered a sustained rumination on what it feels like to really boot somebody in the nuts. Yet beneath all that is a design built on years of watching audiences play outside of the rules in other shooters. It’s a lightning-fingered restructuring of the genre which borrows smartly from puzzle games, racers and even, in its score-attack modes, time-limited social games.
It’s a game filled with tricks and gimmicks, but its best trick is this: it manages to combine both sides of itself – the brainless rollercoaster and the intricately course-tuned leaderboard-chaser – into one harmonious package. In the process, the developer mints gold from a single, shimmering contradiction. This is a shooter in which merely shooting somebody will leave you feeling like you’re playing it wrong.
You’re a swashbuckling space moron and you’ve crash-landed on a hostile alien planet. Your mission is to blast your way back to the man whose betrayal landed you here and put your boot neatly through his ears. This makes for a simple narrative filled with imaginative (often gynaecological) swearing; the biggest twist its plot can offer is that it’s actually strangely involving.