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Friday 25 February 2011

EXCLUSIVE: Bulletstorm Review (8/10)

Bulletstorm.jpgBulletstorm comes fresh from People Can Fly and Epic Studios, a lesser-known 2011 shooter that revels in crazy fun and innovative setpieces to ensure that everyone playing has a great time no matter their skills in the FPS genre. It has a plot that comes off as relatively fresh, following Grayson Hunt and his cyborg team-mate Ishi (try to live with the weird names) after their ship crashes on an unknown planet and they must try to find a way to escape. Much as I'd love to call this a gaming version of Predator, seeing the soldiers hunted by an alien force with some tension building, Bulletstorm decides to head off a completely different tangent, often placing the player in long, shooting gallery-esque corridors of enemies while also mixing things up with thrilling battles against giant wheel crushers and fantastical creatures in an all manner of varied locations. Compared to the Call of Dutys and Medal of Honors we are forced to sit through on an annual basis, this is about as good as the genre is going to get nowadays. A few years ago that would have been quite an accolade for any shooter, not least one made by a third-party developer, however there have simply been too many shooting titles released in recent times for this to come off as unique, a fault mainly caused by the gaming industry itself. Those shooting gallery sections I mentioned will definitely get repetitive fast if players choose not to mix up their murder techniques (although the game constantly encourages them to do so), and replay value here is fairly limited, bottling down to "What do I do once I've beaten the campaign" "Well...play it again!". Despite all its shortcomings, Bulletstorm is a shooter that will truly surprise and impress those still faithful to first person shooters- it's just a shame that the onslaught of COD has reduced that number so significantly, because had this been released two or three years ago many would have heralded it as a revolutionary title (just showing the huge competition games face across 2011)!

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