Bulletstorm opens with a man in a drunken rage steering his ship into a battlecruiser. That is the pitch, and People Can Fly means every frame of it. The 2011 first-person shooter, developed by People Can Fly and Epic Games and published by Electronic Arts, lands on PlayStation 3, PC and Xbox 360 with a single idea it refuses to abandon: killing should be creative, and creativity should pay.
That idea is the skillshot, and it is the whole game. Bulletstorm hands players Grayson Hunt, a space pirate with an outrageously large arsenal, and then scores them not for the kill but for the method. Points buy upgrades. Upgrades unlock more ways to kill. The loop is loud, silly and unusually generous.
- Release year: 2011
- Developer: People Can Fly, Epic Games
- Publisher: Electronic Arts
- Platforms: PlayStation 3, PC, Xbox 360
- Score: 7.7 of 10
Trailer, via Electronic Arts Archive.
Grayson Hunt and the Dead Echo Betrayal
The setup is pure pulp. In the 26th century, the Confederation of Planets is protected by a secret black-ops army called Dead Echo, commanded by General Sarrano. Grayson Hunt leads one of its teams, voiced by Steven Blum, and the team follows Sarrano’s orders to assassinate men it believes are drug traffickers and mass murderers.
One of those targets is Bryce Novak. He turns out to be a civilian reporter who documented other civilian deaths caused by Dead Echo. Grayson and his men realize they have been duped. They go AWOL, becoming space pirates called Final Echo, running from Sarrano’s forces.
Ten years later, near the planet Stygia, Grayson’s crew tries to flee Sarrano’s battlecruiser, the Ulysses. Their ship’s systems are failing. Grayson, drunk, orders a ramming maneuver for revenge. Both ships go down and crash on Stygia.
A Resort Planet Turned Feral
Stygia was a popular tropical resort. Now its population has mutated into feral tribes, and carnivorous plants share the ruins. Grayson’s soldier Ishi Sato, voiced by Andrew Kishino, is critically wounded in the crash. Grayson has to find an energy cell to power the ship’s medical equipment.
He fights to a Ulysses escape pod, where a Final Echo soldier has already been killed by a horde of mutants. Grayson clears the attackers and takes the pod’s energy cell. He also takes an “instinct leash,” a device that begins feeding him strange tactile information — points for every enemy he kills.
Back at the ship, while Ishi is under operation, the mutants attack. An explosion interrupts the surgery. Ishi survives as a disfigured cyborg. The two are the only survivors, and they agree to work together to get off the planet, though Ishi disapproves of Grayson’s thirst for revenge.
Trishka, the Instinct Leash and the Training Grounds
The leash leads Grayson to another escape pod, where they find Trishka, voiced by Jennifer Hale, another Final Echo soldier. She agrees to work with them, but only after they rescue Sarrano.
As they fight through the ravaged city, Trishka explains what Stygia has become. Final Echo used the planet as a training ground. The instinct leashes ranked the soldiers inside the test. Those who scored kills were the only ones who could get ammunition and supplies to survive.
Grayson learns Trishka is Novak’s daughter. He tells her Sarrano was responsible for her father’s death, but claims he does not know who actually killed him. It is a lie, and the game knows it is a lie.
Sarrano and the DNA Bomb
The three reach the top of a skyscraper where Sarrano’s pod landed. Trishka accuses him of her father’s death. Sarrano kicks her off the side of the building.
He then warns Grayson and Ishi that an armed DNA bomb sits on the Ulysses. It will wipe out all life on the planet. His rescue ship will not arrive in time, so they must disarm it. Sarrano leads them through the city’s underground: radioactive waste, a giant prison.
Sarrano explains, snidely, where the waste came from. Shields built to protect the surface from deadly electrical storms created it. The waste mutated the population. The changes came too fast to rescue most of the surface population. Many of the feral mutants Grayson has been fighting were innocent civilians.
Grayson is furious. He keeps helping Sarrano anyway, to reach the remains of the Ulysses. Aboard, Sarrano tricks them a second time. They arm the DNA bomb rather than disarm it. His rescue ship will arrive in time to save him. Fire breaks out aboard the fallen ship. Trishka saves them, having survived her fall by catching a power line.
The Final Fight and the Escape Pod
The three race to Sarrano’s landing site and get on board. They cut through his elite troops and face him alone. Trishka demands to know who killed her father. Sarrano names Grayson.
Sarrano then hijacks Ishi’s computer systems and forces him to turn on his friends. Grayson breaks the control. Ishi sacrifices himself to stop Sarrano from killing Grayson. Grayson impales Sarrano on the wall of the ship.
Sarrano manages one last act, ejecting Grayson, Trishka and several of his own men back onto the planet. With the DNA bomb about to detonate, Grayson and Trishka race back to the Ulysses. One escape pod remains unlaunched. They board it and escape into low orbit, out of range when the bomb goes off.
Skillshots Are the Best Idea Here
The story is a delivery mechanism. The skillshot system is the game. Bulletstorm rewards players for inciting mayhem in the most creative way possible, and the more insane the kill, the more points it pays. Points upgrade the character and unlock weapons, which unlock even more exaggerated moves.
That economy is why the campaign keeps moving. A shooter that scores you for variety cannot let you camp behind cover with one rifle. It has to keep feeding you new tools and new enemies to use them on. The mode list backs this up: single player and multiplayer, with cooperative online play and score attack modes. There are no competitive multiplayer modes.
This is the rare shooter where the scoring is not decoration bolted onto the campaign. It is the reason the campaign exists. Bulletstorm is at its best when it is asking you to do something stupid and rewarding you for doing it well.
Where Bulletstorm Wobbles
The tone is the weak point. Bulletstorm wants to be action, science fiction and comedy at once, and the comedy is the least controlled of the three. The story of a betrayed black-ops team, a dead reporter and a planet of mutated civilians is grim material. The game plays it for laughs anyway. That mismatch does not ruin Bulletstorm, but it keeps the campaign from landing the way its best scenes suggest it could.
The other issue is the leash itself. It is a fine excuse for the scoring, and it gives the game a science-fiction reason to hand out points. But it also means the fiction never has to earn its violence. The mutants are tragic, Sarrano explains. The game moves on. A sharper script would sit in that for a beat longer.
None of that breaks the core. The guns are absurd. The skillshots are the point. The campaign runs its revenge plot to a clean finish, and the co-op and score attack modes give the skillshot system somewhere to live after the credits.
The Verdict on Bulletstorm
Bulletstorm earns a 7.7 of 10. It is a first-person shooter built around one strong, specific idea, and it executes that idea with more commitment than most shooters of its year. The skillshot economy makes every encounter a small puzzle with a score attached, and the arsenal is large enough to keep the answers coming.
What holds it back is the writing around the shooting. The Dead Echo betrayal, the reporter Bryce Novak, the mutated civilians of Stygia — these are strong ingredients for a darker game than Bulletstorm wants to be. The comedy keeps undercutting them, and the result is a campaign that is more fun to play than it is to remember.
That is still a real achievement. A shooter that scores creativity instead of accuracy is asking players to think about violence differently, and Bulletstorm does that from the first drunken ram to the last escape pod. The instinct leash is a gimmick. It is a gimmick that works.
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