Bulletstorm, Opinion

It is four o’clock in the morning local time. Drunk Jack Black from the future crashes into the spaceship of some hated general of a certain space empire and finally collapses unconscious on the captain’s bridge. A couple more minutes, and I make an amazing discovery – you can’t jump in Bulletstorm.

Such jokes would be expected from games like Call of Duty or Medal of Honor, but in this sci-fi shooter, where the main characters can walk on walls and then can’t jump over a trash bin? Despite the pleasant graphics and drunk Jack Black crashing spaceships, the prologue was quite disappointing, it cooled my enthusiasm. The annoying but already familiar trend of cutting off half of the game interface at the beginning of the gamer’s journey through the single-player campaign added to the picture, but then I finally got the energy leash that was advertised and soon discovered the truth – Bulletstorm as a “full-fledged shooter” is not all it’s cracked up to be, but it excels in the genre of an amusement park game.

Once you accept this fact (and it would be better to do it before finding the local sniper rifle), the boring level corridors suddenly transform into semi-abandoned toxic mines, devastated tourist centers, and skyscrapers engulfed in chaos. The nagging thought of “why do I have to perform all these combos instead of just shooting properly” will disappear along with your ammo, and the grace of the story and the “skillshot” system will descend upon you. Unleashing enemies onto cacti and exposed wires, listening to the banter of the special forces caught in a bind, and lashing out at the carefully crafted elements of the decor – once the player stops expecting goodness from goodness, the game transforms.

I buried my dreams of a new Painkiller somewhere in the episode with the techno-dinosaur, and the ghost of real shooters didn’t bother me much until the very end of the game. The battles with the final boss broke my mind, and I had no desire to delve into the additional game modes after a more or less successful completion of the campaign; but I still can’t call Bulletstorm a bad game – it was interesting to make my way through the perfectly smooth pipe connecting the starting and (intermediate)-ending screens.

If you want to try Bulletstorm for yourself, remember – it’s not a shooter, but an attraction. And everything will be fine for you.