Bulletstorm
By Epic Games and People Can Fly
Genre: First-person shooter
Rating: Mature for Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Partial Nudity, Sexual Themes, Strong Language, Use of Alcohol
Kill with Skill! That’s always been a tenet of most first-person shooters. But here, it’s the main idea of the game!
In Bulletstorm, you play Grayson Hunt, a grizzled space pirate, formerly a Captain in a black ops outfit known as Dead Echo, in which a corrupt general, Sarrano, ordered Gray and his crew to assassinate innocents! This will not stand, even for a tough-as-nails, take-no-prisoners type, so Gray and his partners Ishi Sato, Rell and his ship’s Doctor, go AWOL and attempt to take revenge.
Unfortunately, Gray’s drunken state leads him to believe that running his ship right through the much larger Ulysses, Sarrano’s flagship, would be a good start, and gets him crashed on the former pleasure planet, now savage-infested world of Stygia. Sarrano’s still alive and stranded on Stygia as well, and Ishi had to be turned into a cyborg to save his life. Now Gray and Ishi must work through their differences, and find a way to stay alive while hunting down Sarrano for good.
Early on in your travels, you come across an Instinct Leash, which can snare any enemy in range and suspend him in mid-air. From there you can kick him away (preferably into someplace painful or deadly), shoot him, or just let him fly off to his doom. The myriad ways in which you can kill your opponents are cataloged as Skillshots; dozens of them exist, and it’s up to you to find and unlock them all.
You get more points with new Skillshots than with ones already performed; and you can use the points to upgrade yourself or your weaponry. These upgrade include the run of the mill magazine capacity, but there’s also a Charge mode for each weapon, which opens up brand new Skillshots! It’s in your best interest to upgrade as soon as possible to reap the benefits of greater firepower!
Multiplayer modes include Echoes, a solo competition in which you compete against your friends and others to gain the highest score in specific stretches of the campaign; and Anarchy, an online co-op arena mode in which you can compete with people to get the highest score, but the main objective is to get enough points collectively to unlock the next area of the arena.
All in all, an excellent title that’ll have you shooting into the wee hours of the morning trying to get that last elusive Skillshot! Five out of five!