Bulletstorm is the stupidest game ever made, and also one of the cleverest shooters ever

From the archives: This article originally ran in PC Gamer #330 (UK, May 2019). You should still play Bullestorm, which is frequently 90% off on Steam.

Bulletstorm is the stupidest game ever made.

Everything about this game is stupid. Your character is stupid. Your allies are stupid. Your enemies are very stupid. The weapons are daft. The skillshot system is absurd. The script almost prides itself on how much rank idiocy it can cram into every line. Even the setting is stupid, a holiday resort built using prison labour on an alien planet so hostile that it rains gamma radiation.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Bulletstorm was developed by semi-concussed jocks during a two-year long frat party. It makes Gears of War look sensible, an impression that is probably the main reason why it sold a pitiful number of copies when it originally released in 2011. The game has such a brash and puerile exterior that it put a lot of people off playing.

That’s such a shame, because beneath the fathom-thick veneer of dumbness is one of the cleverest shooters designed this side of the millennium. Every stupid thing that Bulletstorm does has been designed with a huge amount of thought.

Take the aforementioned setting. Yes, building a luxury vacation town with a bunch of dangerous criminals on a highly irradiated planet is a terrible idea, but the result is a planet populated by hundreds of mutated psychopaths just desperate to greet your bullets with their faces.

You play Grayson Hunt, a mercenary who formerly worked as an assassin for prize interstellar scumbag General Sarrano. When Hunt realised Sarrano had been sending him to murder innocent people, he went rogue and set his sights on Sarrano himself. Bulletstorm begins as Hunt encounters Sarrano’s flagship, the Ulysses, in orbit around Planet Butlins. With his four-man crew, Hunt embarks upon a frontal assault that would form the climax of any other shooter, ending with Hunt using his own ship as a missile to punch a hole through the Ulysses, sending both vessels crashing down to the planet’s surface.

Stupid is as stupid does

One thing I’ve always admired about Bulletstorm is its sheer breakneck pace. The prologue alone gets through about four missions’ worth of content, including a flashback sequence where you use gravity boots to walk down the side of a skyscraper. By the time the game commences proper, two of Grayson’s crew are dead, while the third—Ishi—has been turned into a cyborg in an effort to save his life.

What’s even more remarkable is that Bulletstorm barely breaks its stride throughout its entire six to eight hour length. The first chapter alone has about three gargantuan set-pieces, including a level where you’re chased by a giant, motorised wheel, and another where you need to escape the nest of a Godzilla-like dinosaur. There’s a sequence where you control a robot-dinosaur and a battle across a giant dam which, naturally, bursts in the process.

Bulletstorm’s sense of scale and spectacle puts most other shooters to shame, and it’s not even the point of the game. It’s merely seasoning sprinkled into the casserole of shooting angry mutants in the most creative ways possible.

Yes, the skillshot systems was and remains Bulletstorm’s most unique feature. While you’re free to kill enemies however you like, killing them in specific ways awards you with varying numbers of points. This could be by combining a kick to the face with a spray from your assault rifle to perform a “Bullet Kick” or impaling an enemy upon some metal railings to pull off a “Voodoo Doll”.

These points can be used to buy ammo and unlock new weapons, which, alongside the ever-shifting environment, can be used to conjure even more creative kills. Like People Can Fly’s earlier game Painkiller, Bulletstorm’s weapons are delightfully eclectic. Highlights include the Flail Gun, which shoots twin explosives connected by a chain that coils around enemies before exploding, and the Driller, a ludicrous weapon that fires gigantic drill-bits at colossal speeds, impaling enemies onto any surface and spinning them around like a meaty windmill. Combine these bizarre guns with the skillshot system, and you’ve got one of the most gleefully entertaining shooters ever made. Impaling multiple enemies on one drillbit for the “Shishkebab” bonus is almost worryingly satisfying, as is kicking a flail-wrapped enemy into a man- eating plant and blowing both up in a shower of blood and chlorophyll.

Like everything else about Bulletstorm, it’s incredibly crass and incredibly silly, but it’s also a huge amount of fun. The only downside to the skillshot system is that it rewards you for set tricks, which limits the creative potential of the system (there’s no difference between kicking or sliding an enemy into spikes, for example).

Swearing up a storm

What’s interesting about Bulletstorm is that it inverts the typical way modern shooters present themselves. Most shooters try to justify their violence with a grand narrative about war and sacrifice and why all that killing is necessary and important. Bulletstorm, on the other hand, doubles down on its own gratuitousness. The script is unbelievably filthy, a cascade of swearing and toilet humour that almost completes the circle and becomes poetic.

From the archives

This Reinstall was originally published in PC Gamer #330 (UK, May 2019).

You can still subscribe to PC Gamer to get new issues of the magazine (in print!) every month.

Yet despite its crass front, Bulletstorm demonstrates more self-awareness than the majority of its peers. The game is clear on the fact that you’re not playing as a hero.

Hunt is a bad leader and a worse friend, his own arrogance and desire for revenge having cost him everything except for his life by the end of the game’s prologue. Two of his squadmates are dead, while Ish’s RoboCop-style makeover has left him in constant pain, fighting the AI system keeping him alive and taking over control of his own body.

This isn’t subtext either, its frequently pointed out by other characters in the game. Trishka, the leader of Sarrano’s special forces group, is probably the most scathing of Hunt’s critics but Grayson himself is painfully aware of his own failings. Much of his swaggering smack-talk basically amounts to overcompensation. Beneath that he’s desperate to save his last living friend, and in doing so harvest a grain of redemption from the mountain of shit he’s piled up. This is partly why the addition of Duke Nukem as a playable character in 2017’s Full Clip edition rang so hollow. Bulletstorm is ultimately only pretending to be a dumb shooter, whereas there is no pretending with Duke Nukem.

Indeed, to think of Bulletstorm as an “old-school” FPS is a mistake. It’s a thoroughly modern shooter, from the regenerating health to the aiming-down-the-sights to the fact that its characters actually have some layers. Most of the time this works, but there are a few areas where it just doesn’t come together.

No jumping allowed

Most significantly, you can’t jump. You can only mantle over certain obstacles. It’s an odd omission in a game that is essentially about performing stunts with guns, and proves somewhat limiting in play. Moreover, while the environment design of Bulletstorm is incredible – particularly its crumbling sci-fi cityscapes – the actual level design is comparatively simplistic, lots of large, straight corridors cleverly decorated to make them feel more complex.

Ultimately though, this is the only area where Bulletstorm is simpler than it appears. Beneath all the blood and cursing and toilet humour is a brilliantly imaginative shooter with a unique sci-fi setting and enough action to fill a game twice its length. Bulletstorm may be the stupidest game ever made, but boy is it clever in how it goes about that.