Bulletstorm Impressions

As I'm sure you're all aware of by now, Bulletstorm is an upcoming FPS by People Can Fly and Epic Games and contains more testosterone and all around manliness than a child fathered by Marcus Fenix and Wolverine. Having finally tried out the demo available on XBL I could think of nothing better to do than to give you the scoop. Hit the jump for something so bad-ass that it made me ashamed to be myself.

This behemoth of a title challenges players to 'kill with skill' for which players are in turn are rewarded points for the most skilful kills they can carry out, seems utterly barbaric, until you play it. The kills themselves range from dismemberment, electrocution, explosions and rectal insertion, wait, what? To fans of Epic it will come as no shock to learn that this is quite clearly going to be one of the most over the top titles of the year.

The demo takes place on the creatively named level 'Collapsed Building' a short but colourfully violent run through a mutant cannibal infested collapsed building. The level design seems solid, nothing to write home about though, the same typical environmental traps we've seen in violent games for years, spikes, electric fences, chasms etc. Not to say that it isn't fun, the environments are still wonderfully rendered and yes it may be typical but it's still damn good fun kicking someone into an electric fence, no matter how many times you do it.

Of course the real subject matter here is the gameplay.Which, dear god, really is just as bloody awesome as the trailers make it look. With fairly intuitive controls, I realised after about 60 seconds of game time just how fluidly i was moving from cover to cover and enemy to enemy. Whipping them in the air, gracefully delivering a firm kick to the chest and yes, even occasionally shyly placing a grenade betwixt some unsuspecting cannibals buttocks. These are just three of over a hundred aptly named, 'Skill Shot's' as the game likes to call them. and with a multitude of weapons with several modes of fire each, this is certainly going to prove to have some lasting appeal, even the demo leaderboards had me striving to top the scores of people I don't even like.

One thing that really spoke to me, was how brilliantly colourful this 'butthole of a planet', Stygia, really was. In this age of white male space marines wandering through a brown and grey environment with a constant scowl on their faces, making them perpetually seem as though someone had stolen the last cream slice when they returned home from murdering, a little splash of colour can go a long way.

Whilst obviously concrete is still grey and the sky is brown, every other colour seems incredibly pronounced as though someone came in and turned the contrast of your TV to full, making everything remotely colourful look like a gay peacock in comparison. For me this is a welcome change, tired am I, of browns and grey's overly used to make a game appear to be 'gritty' and 'deep'.

I'm overjoyed at the fact that a mainstream game is finally making the turn back towards mindless fun, instead of the pretentious over serious bullshit that so many developers have been leaning towards lately. I'm very interested to see the final product but so far I can think we can all agree this will be a safe purchase.