Ahhh Bulletstorm, from unknown, to potential sleeper hit to regular guest star on Cliffy B's Twitter feed, the game's momentum just seems to keep growing. My enthusiasm, on the other hand, maxes out at "curious" at best. While the game does seem to have the potential for some serious fun, I have some issues with the "kill with skill" combat system at the core of most of the hype that ranges from serious potential for fun-killing repetitiveness to the fact that it's not as original as the parties involved would like you to think.
The main bullet point amidst this storm is that the game isn't just about killing enemies and moving on, it's about killing them with creative and potentially hilarious combos in order to be awarded the maximum number of points for that kill. More points lead to more power-ups lead to more ways to kill enemies.
In order to do this your character is equipped with an energy whip and a time-slowing kick in addition to it's more traditional FPS arsenal. Have a look at this summarizing video, courtesy of IGN, to see what I mean.
Where I start having issues is that I have yet to ready about anything besides the energy whip and boot appearing in your combo-making arsenal. How many times/ways can you pull an enemy towards you, kick it away then shoot it? Or kick an enemy away then pull it towards you and THEN shoot it? Or...erm just eliminate one of those steps and do that. See my problem? I can see the gameplay being really fun...for an hour or two. After that they better have something in store to shake things up a little or the average player is going to get bored long before the end credits roll.
This actually brings me to my other point, MadWorld. "What? That crazy, over-the-top-violence Wii game?" Yup. For those that missed this one, MadWorld is about killing your enemies with the most violent combos possible. You still get points for just chopping a guy in half, but you get a lot more if you jam a tire down over his head, ram a street sign through his skull and THEN chop him in half. Sound familiar? Have a look. (Warning, don't let the cartoony black-and-white graphics fool you, this game is VERY violent)
It almost seems like someone at People Can Fly (the people behind the game) played MadWorld and said "Hey, we should do this with guns!" After all, Bulletstorm was originally a 3rd person game. The additional problem here is that MadWorld seemed to run out of ideas for combos by the end, and the game was only about 4 hours long. When such a short play time will never fly (see what I did there?) with gamers on the "hardcore" consoles (360 and PS3) can Bulletstorm avoid running into the same, potentially disastrous shortcoming? It's still pretty early to tell, but without some really creative weapons, lots of environmental kills or something besides the whip and boot I can't honestly say that I'm holding out much hope. Their latest PR stunt was pretty entertaining though...
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