5 Cures to Modern FPS — Bulletstorm

By  Apr 15th, 2013 12:01 pm UTC

For many gamers, the FPS genre has become the center of the “bro culture” craze: Where everything is pumped full of testtostorone, pro military and gun culture backed with a heavy metal soundtrack. For games that try to satirize it, there is a fine line between making fun and being part of it.

Bulletstorm was one of those games that was immediately dismissed as a form of the latter and declared “just another dumb shooter”, however underneath the cursing and dick jokes, there is an above-average shooter.

BulletStorm

Gun-Fun:

As I’ve talked about in the last two entries, there are three key areas that to me make up a great FPS: gameplay, gunplay and story. Bulletstorm quickly and completely failed the latter as evident by all the negative reviews of it.

You played as Grey: A former solider turned outlaw who makes the use of his time by cursing, killing and drinking. After finding the ship of the corporal who double crossed him, he crashed both ships on an uninhabited planet and continued his plan for revenge.

The writing in Bulletstorm was juvenile to say the least and has been compared to Duke Nukem Forever. You could have a drinking game for the number of times someone says the word “dick” in a sentence. This was definitely not the game to play with the sound on when children are present.

But where Bulletstorm did get things right was with the gunplay and gameplay. Every weapon of the game had a different feel to them, with attack damage, range and accuracy. Further adding to the utility, every weapon had a super shot that was different for the weapon. These shots required you to buy charges from drop points littered throughout each level with skill-points (more on them in a minute.)

While cover was an important part of Bulletstorm, the developers made one major change to how mobile the player is. You couldn’t jump, but you could slide around environments to avoid damage.

The player could also kick enemies away either while standing or sliding causing them to fly slow-mo style through the air. An electric leash was picked up early on allowing you to pull the enemy towards Grey and once again left them vulnerable.

The feel and variety of the weapons working so well should come to no surprise for people who knew the developers. Bulletstorm was developed by People Can Fly: The studio behind the Serious Sam inspired shooter– Painkiller. But what helped elevate Bulletstorm wasn’t the act of shooting, but how you shoot.

Skill-Shot-Shooting:

Bulletstorm drew comparison to the ultra-violent game: Madworld in how the player was rated on how they kill enemies. Incidentally they both had the same voice actor (Steve Blum) play the main character. Skillshots were conditional ways of killing enemies either through the environment or with specific weapons.

Each time you pulled off a skillshot, you were awarded skill-points that were used for resupplying ammo, charge shots and upgrading weapons. Skill shots could also be combined to some extent: such as sliding into an enemy while shooting them in the right way.

Bulletstorm

The skillshots were an interesting twist on the shooting mechanic, but felt too limited in their use.

Another area where people took offense to Bulletstorm was the name of the skill shots, as they also were more juvenile then creative and not helping the game’s image.

The mechanic of challenging the player to kill creatively was a good one both in Madworld and Bulletstorm, but it didn’t come without problems.

The skillshots were too conditional, requiring the planets to align for the player to have any chance at getting some of the harder ones. I feel that the developers didn’t take this system far enough and allow for more options to combine them or different weapons for more bonuses. This also made the game very repetitive and it lacked the epic situations of Painkiller’s massive boss fights.

I think it’s interesting to compare Bulletstorm to Madworld in how both games had over-the-top dialogue, but Madworld is looked at more favorable. We talked about this on a recent podcast and we felt that the reason was that the juvenile writing was not from the main character, but the world around them.  As the main character, you could be a bad-ass while Greg Proops and John DiMaggio commented on the craziness.

One final comparison is how there is a difference between graphics and style in game design. If we put Bulletstorm next to the original Bioshock, Bulletstorm obviously looks better thanks to the more powerful engine. But the game lacked any kind of visual style and looked generic. While Bioshock had a strong visual style and stood out from other games.

If you looked at the screenshots I posted here without any knowledge of Bulletstorm, would you know what game they were from?

If Bioshock was the quiet art student in college, Bulletstorm would be the loud- mouth jock with a heart of gold. Not everyone can look past the writing, but if you can there is a competent shooter there.

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  • Charles Geringer

    I think that Bulletstorm is not given
    the due respect relating to it´s characters and it´s setting.

    You say ” But the game lacked any kind of visual style and looked generic”

    and I disagree.

    The game’s characters (all of them, the main character the sidekicks, the villain the enemies) had a very distinctive style. I very much doubt that I would mistake a bullet storm character for a character from another tittle. They also really avoided having all enemies looking the same, they were all full of minor variations due to their very modular approach in creating the meshes.

    “If you looked at the screenshots I posted here without any knowledge ofBulletstorm, would you know what game they were from?”

    And while I wouldn´t recognize the game from the setting in those shots, there are a few screenshots from Bulletstorm whose setting I would recognize, to wit:

    http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/6/62890/1726627-bulletstorm__70_.jpg

    http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/0/4340/2276978-2012_07_27_00070.jpg

    http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/0/4340/2276962-2012_07_27_00052.jpg

    http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/0/4340/2276952-2012_07_27_00039.jpg

    http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/0/4340/2276955-2012_07_27_00043.jpg

    The World of Stigya is an interesting world. It was a High-class world, that went horribly wrong, becoming a desolated wasteland run by barbaric tribes and horrible mutants. It became so dangerous that it was made into the training ground of the Final Echo Squad, a very deadly black-ops unit.

    While the access corridors and underground are bland and generic, whenever you reach the actual living quarters of the citizens, the world is colorful, it gives a nice contrast between the high-tech, high- class that it used to be, and the devastated no-man´s land it has become, especially when you find parts of still-working technology, like an elevator in a building that is now sideways.

    It is also important to note that the game, as a rule, isn´t afraid of using colors outside of the gray-brown palette, as many shooters seems to be.

    Each of the enemy faction you meet(Skulls, Creeps, Burnouts and Final Echo ) have their own identity, and the Hekaton monster encounters adds a little variety.

    You also Say:

    Not everyone can look past the writing, but if you can there is a competent shooter there.

    I don´t think you should look past the writing, I think you should pay attention. It may be shallow, but it isn´t bad.(Though it is unfortunate that it ends in a cliffhanger, and there is no sign of a sequel)

    I honestly don´t think the writing is as juvenile as people say. It has a lot of swearing yes, but if you pay attention you notice two important things about it: A lot of the swearing is very creative which makes it stand-up and makes it seem more than it actually is(though there is still a lot)

    Second the vast majority of the swearing comes from just two characters:

    Grayson Hunt and General Victor Sarrano. The main character and the main antagonist(who used to be Gray´s mentor). I feel that many people are
    dismissive of characters who say a lot of swear worlds, because swear words make them uncomfortable, or have been
    used in a lot of media(not only games, and also in real life by children the world over) to make empty characters seem “mature” or “edgy” but the swear words this characters use are a direct extension of their personalities:

    Grayson is a good man. He isn´t specially smart, but he is loyal and he fights for what he believes in. He is also very very angry. He has reasons to be angry, for years he risked his life by fighting for a better word as a
    member of “dead echo. He is a simple man, he never really questioned his orders, and suddenly he is faced with the revelation that he was working for the bad guys all along.

    He loses everything, he needs to flee to the edges of inhabited space, he is reduced to a pirate, he loses all his sense of self-worth(His life was a lie). He swears a lot, but he swears with emotion. He is fighting his demons and juvenile swear words are his battle cry. The cry of a man who refuses to simply fade into the background. He is loud, boisterous,
    and true.

    At the beginning of the game he decides to sacrifice his life and that of his crew in a kamikaze attack to atone for the sins they committed(and to achieve vengeance) by killing sarrano. It is in some ways very much a seppuku, a ritual killing for the redeeming of honor.

    On the other Hand we have Sarrano: He also swears a lot, but his swearing is different from Gray´s. Sarrano is an egotistical sociopath. He swears at everything and everyone because he has no respect he SEES everything and everyone with contempt. According to the story, he is probably the one who named all the skillshots, so it makes perfect sense
    for them to be juvenile.

    The other two main characters are also interesting in their own way, and none of them are cookie-cutter characters that are plentiful in the FPS Genre.

    Ishi Sato is a thinking man, he is smart and methodical, he follows Gray
    because Ishi knows that Gray is a good man, but Grays methods are, at the very least, idiotic to Ishi. Ishi is also the one who realized that Dead Echo were being used an lied to by Sarrano. He is the one who showed hunt they were in the wrong side, he broke Gray´s life, and set him on the path of both revenge and redemption. But he saw there was a wrong and a right side, he is a thinking man, but he uses his head to do what his heart tells him is right.

    He is not all brain. But at the beginning, he becomes half-machine, and the man and the machine start fighting for control, he gradually loses his feelings, becoming more and more mechanical in his thoughts and actions, the very thing that made him special is being subverted and he can delay it, but can´t stop it.

    For the last character, we have Trishka. From the wiki:

    Trishka “Lovely Bitter” Novak (voiced
    by Jennifer Hale) is the daughter of a human rights leader who was coldlyassassinated and the tritagonist of Bulletstorm. Even though she doesn’t remember it, she was saved by Gray and his men when the police stormed the building after they had assassinated her father, she dedicated her life to becoming an elite assassin herself, so that she might one day find her father’s killers and pay them the hell back. To this end, she joined Final Echo, the première covert squad in all the colonies, led by General Sarrano. Trishka is a Final Echo Squadron Commander and one of the most deadly assassins in the universe.

    With all the talk going around lately of sexism in games, I am surprised more people don´t pay attention at Trishka. Yes she is pretty, and yes her clothing shows some skin, but she is no damsel in distress, her father was killed and witch is a horrible thing, and she used that to become stronger, she is a high ranking member of Final Echo, she is literally among the best of the best, she has personality.

    I also don´t think her clothing is all that more revealing than Gray´s or Ishi´s, and don´t think she is as objectified as many women in videogames(and movies, and TV) seem to be. Gray and Ishi do save her in the beginning, but she is a valuable part of the team.

    What do you say?

    • You make a lot of good points, which I wish that more people would have seen during all the negative press around it.

      Regarding the graphics I think Bulletstorm looked amazing as well, when you get into areas like the ruined amusement park or destroyed city the game is impressive.

      The screenshots you posted also show off Bulletstorm’s graphical splendor. I’m curious as to what you think about the visual style seen in a game like Bioshock Infinite, where the whole world adopted an unique art style to make it stand out.

      I like the characters as well for the reasons you mentioned and I bet a lot of people dismissed Grey early on. But he does go through his own story arc through the game as he tries to better himself.

      With Trishka she was one of my favorites and as you mentioned an example of a strong character without having to sexualized her. I’m also curious to see if she will be mentioned in any of the tropes vs women series either has a positive or negative role model.

      BulletStorm, like Madworld is one of those games that I would really like to see a sequel, not just to continue the storyline but to see where the developers could take the design further.

      • Charles Geringer

        I can´t comment specifically on bio
        shock infinite, since I didn´t play it, but for me it is a lot about coherence
        of style and world.

        For Example, if you look at fable, the
        lost chapters, it had a very characteristic style, and any shot you saw of a
        fable location had a very real fable feel, it is very hard to mistake it for
        any other game. But at the same time, each people had it´s own look, Knothole
        glade, is very different from Bowerstone, which is very different from Snowspire
        and so on, and this is improved by the fact that the people who live in this
        places are also different from each other(e.g.:the tattoos you get in each of
        this locations have very distinct art styles).

        Other good examples are Dark Souls(and
        Demon´s Souls) as it has it´s own style, but each place has it´s own
        personality, and Warcraft 3, where the whole world shares a look, but each tile
        set is very distinctive in it´s own way.

        The
        same Can be said about Dragon Age Origins, the older ruins, human buildings,
        Elf Buildings, a dDwarvish building all
        have their own personality, and they fit well with their inhabitants(e.g.:Angular,
        practical buildings for the dwarves)

        One example I did not like as much, is fallout 3, where the whole world shared
        the same look, and the majority of the places looked very similar to each
        other, it made them lack personality.

        My personal approach is to try and treat the setting and each of it´s parts as
        characters.

      • Charles Geringer

        I can´t comment specifically on bio
        shock infinite, since I didn´t play it, but for me it is a lot about coherence
        of style and world.

        For Example, if you look at fable, the
        lost chapters, it had a very characteristic style, and any shot you saw of a
        fable location had a very real fable feel, it is very hard to mistake it for
        any other game. But at the same time, each people had it´s own look, Knothole
        glade, is very different from Bowerstone, which is very different from Snowspire
        and so on, and this is improved by the fact that the people who live in this
        places are also different from each other(e.g.:the tattoos you get in each of
        this locations have very distinct art styles).

        Other good examples are Dark Souls(and
        Demon´s Souls) as it has it´s own style, but each place has it´s own
        personality, and Warcraft 3, where the whole world shares a look, but each tile
        set is very distinctive in it´s own way.

        The
        same Can be said about Dragon Age Origins, the older ruins, human buildings,
        Elf Buildings, a dDwarvish building all
        have their own personality, and they fit well with their inhabitants(e.g.:Angular,
        practical buildings for the dwarves)

        One example I did not like as much, is fallout 3, where the whole world shared
        the same look, and the majority of the places looked very similar to each
        other, it made them lack personality.

        My personal approach is to try and treat the setting and each of it´s parts as
        characters.

  • Charles Geringer

    I also think the second “Bulletstorm in this paragraph should read “painkiller”:

    The feel and variety of the weapons working so well should come to no surprise for people who knew the developers. Bulletstorm was developed by People Can Fly: The studio behind the Serious Sam inspired shooter– Bulletstorm. But what helped elevate Bulletstorm wasn’t the act of shooting, but how you shoot.