Every shift in scenery, from craggy sci-fi-paperback-cover rocks to plush airport terminals and perspective-skewing amusement park rides, manages to transport you somewhere promisingly new and unexpectedly colourful. People Can Fly's artists have filled the game with gleaming details and beautiful vistas, while the level designers have a lot of fun with the fact that the planet you've crashed on was once a kind of intergalactic three-way between Venice, Las Vegas and Disneyland. The pleasantly stupid story curls itself around some ingenious set-pieces: a simple movement tutorial is disguised as an anti-grav trek down the side of a skyscraper, you're chased through sand-drifts by a giant bladed wheel and there are a few brilliantly over-sized bosses (and something we won't spoil that you initially expect to be a boss, but turns out to be something far cooler). We kick off Bulletstorm's first 15 minutes.Įven if you just play it as a standard shooter, it's a campaign of relentless pace and inventiveness.

You won't be quoting Bulletstorm on your deathbed (unless your deathbed involves someone trying to wrap a grenade around your legs before punching you into a giant cactus), but you won't regret the time you spend in the company of its cast as you race through the story mode. The characters are larger-than-life and grimly charming in a 'cousins from the Randy Quaid side of the family' kind of way, while the quick-witted script hands everybody plenty of smart idiocy to spew out. This makes for a simple narrative filled with imaginative (often gynaecological) swearing the biggest twist its plot can offer is that it's actually strangely involving. Your mission is to blast your way back to the man whose betrayal landed you here and put your boot neatly through his ears. You're a swashbuckling space moron and you've crash-landed on a hostile alien planet. This is a shooter in which merely shooting somebody will leave you feeling like you're playing it wrong. In the process, the developer mints gold from a single, shimmering contradiction. It's a game filled with tricks and gimmicks, but its best trick is this: it manages to combine both sides of itself – the brainless rollercoaster and the intricately course-tuned leaderboard-chaser – into one harmonious package.

It's a lightning-fingered restructuring of the genre which borrows smartly from puzzle games, racers and even, in its score-attack modes, time-limited social games. Yet beneath all that is a design built on years of watching audiences play outside of the rules in other shooters. On the surface, People Can Fly has delivered a sustained rumination on what it feels like to really boot somebody in the nuts. Bulletstorm is an astonishingly clever game folded up inside an exquisitely stupid one.

Bulletstorm pc