// PC GAMER — GAMING
Bulletstorm is the stupidest game ever made, and also one of the cleverest shooters ever
Enjoying the high-kicks and low-brows of a timeless FPS.
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From the archives: This article originally ran in PC Gamer #330 (UK, May 2019). You should still play Bullestorm, which is frequently 90% off on Steam.
Everything about this game is stupid. Your character is stupid. Your allies are stupid. Your enemies are very stupid. The weapons are daft. The skillshot system is absurd. The script almost prides itself on how much rank idiocy it can cram into every line. Even the setting is stupid, a holiday resort built using prison labour on an alien planet so hostile that it rains gamma radiation.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that Bulletstorm was developed by semi-concussed jocks during a two-year long frat party. It makes Gears of War look sensible, an impression that is probably the main reason why it sold a pitiful number of copies when it originally released in 2011. The game has such a brash and puerile exterior that it put a lot of people off playing.
That’s such a shame, because beneath the fathom-thick veneer of dumbness is one of the cleverest shooters designed this side of the millennium. Every stupid thing that Bulletstorm does has been designed with a huge amount of thought.
Take the aforementioned setting. Yes, building a luxury vacation town with a bunch of dangerous criminals on a highly irradiated planet is a terrible idea, but the result is a planet populated by hundreds of mutated psychopaths just desperate to greet your bullets with their faces.
You play Grayson Hunt, a mercenary who formerly worked as an assassin for prize interstellar scumbag General Sarrano. When Hunt realised Sarrano had been sending him to murder innocent people, he went rogue and set his sights on Sarrano himself. Bulletstorm begins as Hunt encounters Sarrano’s flagship, the Ulysses, in orbit around Planet Butlins. With his four-man crew, Hunt embarks upon a frontal assault that would form the climax of any other shooter, ending with Hunt using his own ship as a missile to punch a hole through the Ulysses, sending both vessels crashing down to the planet’s surface.
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One thing I’ve always admired about Bulletstorm is its sheer breakneck pace. The prologue alone gets through about four missions’ worth of content, including a flashback sequence where you use gravity boots to walk down the side of a skyscraper. By the time the game commences proper, two of Grayson’s crew are dead, while the third—Ishi—has been turned into a cyborg in an effort to save his life.