Date Completed: 5.12.2011
Thoughts: I've been asked if I stopped this list after the year ended. A reasonable question since it's May and I haven't had a single post. Well, the reason I haven't posted since then is that I haven't finished any games until now. That's kind of funny to think about when you consider that I had finished 9 games by this time last year. A few things happened to make that happen. The first was just good old fashioned burnout. Anything you make yourself do becomes tiring after a while, and I was pretty 'video-gamed out' by the end of it. I was also dating a lot in that stretch, and studying. But I always knew I'd get back to games and blog about them when I did.
Bulletstorm is kind of like 2011's version of Crackdown. Both games were heavily hyped but ultimately overshadowed by very prominent beta demos that came with them: Halo 3 for Crackdown and now Gears of War 3 for Bulletstorm. Like Crackdown, Bulletstorm was well received for the game that it was, despite not getting much attention. I will admit that the Gears 3 demo played heavily into my decision to buy the game. In fact I didn't even really get around to spending time with Bulletstorm until the Gears 3 beta released. Once I got all the unlockables done with in the beta, I decided to try out the game I kept putting into my consoles to play it.
After the Gears 3 beta, the thing Bulletstorm is next most famous for is the fraternity-boy level of humor and sophistication. The game is famous for taking stupid words and having the characters say them together, like 'dicktits', or when a female character promises 'I'm going to kill your dicks'. Nothing about that appeals to me, but I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt when I see things like that. One possibility is to take the game at face value and assume it's been made for the 14-18 year old male demographic. I looked at it as more of a spoof, a tongue-in-cheek presentation where the developers are quietly laughing at the expense of the people who actually think the dialogue is awesome.
Once you finish the beta, and get past the shallowness of the presentation, there's a fun game underneath. It's set up as a third person shooter, you play Grayson Hunt, a mercenary who's hunting down his nemesis and winds up crashing them both down on a foreign planet that he has to fight through to get his revenge. You get several different weapons along the way, each with a powerup attack that you can purchase via skill points that you accumulate. You have a leash, a whip-like device that is used to grab enemies and objects and pull them towards you. The inventive part of the game is how you get skill points. If you just shoot the enemies with your guns, you can beat the game, but you won't get many skill points and you won't have a lot of fun. You are awarded skill points for different ways you think of to kill an enemy. Many of these are as immature as the dialogue, such as guiding the sniper rifle shot into an enemies groin or ass (each gives you different skill points). Fortunately the game lets you get far more creative than that and there are a lot of different combinations to find. The game even gives you a list you can access at any time, showing you the skillshots you've already unlocked, and giving you hints as how to unlock the remaining items.
The bad: Probably the most puzzling decision in a third person shooter, where the entire game is spent with at least one other character playing with your character, is the decision to forgo a co-op mode. Possibly it was decided that adding the mode to the game would delay it, and they obviously couldn't delay it since they were hitching the beta to it. It's an unfortunate decision, but one that will hopefully be remedied in the inevitable sequal.
The good: Probably the best thing about the game to me is the creativeness and the potential it has. I already mentioned the skillshot, but there were plenty of other areas where the creativity shown, such as early in the game you gain control of a robotic dinosaur that you can use to decimate your enemies for most of that chapter. It's the only time in the game you get to do it, and the dialogue about it is fun and clever. The powerups on each weapon was a nice touch, the sniper rifle took some getting used to, instead of a bam-bam trigger-t0-impact moment like we're used to, each time you pull the trigger you are treated to a minigame 0f sorts where you guide the bullet towards the target, the target will try to get out of the way and you curve the bullet towards him to get the kill. It was annoying and difficult at first, but fun and natural by the end of the game. The end of the game leaves little doubt that a sequal is in the works, and I hope they take a lot of the ideas they had in this game and expand on them: co-op in the campaign mode, more playing with the leash, there were a lot of cool moments where you leashed an object down so you could walk over something, I think the next game should have multiple paths through each level, the standard path, but if you're paying attention you can use the leash to move stuff down and make bridges or clear paths, and find different ways through the level. Implimenting some kind of swinging mechanic with the leash, or a hookshot-type mechanic where you can pull yourself towards the enemy would open up new skillshot possibilities as well.
Conclusion: Bulletstorm is a fun ride. You absolutely can't take it seriously, ignore the stuff that makes you groan, but it's an enjoyable game, and really better than it probably deserves to be. I will have to check out Echoes mode with friends later, after I beat the game those procrastinators were still trying to unlock the Gears 3 beta stuff and didn't want to play anything else, so I played around with it on my own. I look forward to making new skillshot combinations with a friend.
No comments:
Post a Comment