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Bulletstorm is best when it’s being offensively stupid, not stupidly offensiveCock Of The Walk
Cock Of The Walk
Image credit:Gearbox Publishing
Image credit:Gearbox Publishing
I’m going to make the declaration: games arefar too nicenow. I’d like some more offensive games please.
Don’t worry, I haven’t taken leave of my senses. This is not some alt-right appeal for gaming to return to the cesspit of sexism and racism that it once was. I didn’t spend the last twenty years raging against that sort of drivel because I was a fan. I just want them to berudeagain. I want to laugh out loud at how revolting the language is. What I’m trying to say is: I want more dick jokes.
Bulletstorm has lots of dick jokes. It has Jennifer Hale bellowing, “Go fuck yourself! You shit piles give chase, I will kill your dicks!” To which Steve Blum’s Grayson Hunt (who was surely modelled onProteusdesigner Ed Key) replies, “What? What does that even mean? You’re gonna kill my dick? I’ll kill your dick! How ‘bout that, huh?” Poetry.
It does this all so very, very well, letting you run at a tremendous pace, dish out your brutality with eager aplomb, stringing together disgusting attacks and grim deaths. It’s adult in a superbly childish way, a big stupid lump of fun, and crucially, executed supremely well.
There are also some uncomfortable lines in there, including using “retard” as a derogatory term. There are the “Ew, gay!” lines that appear to be part of absolutely everything written pre-2015. And a bunch of ‘ironic’ racism, where the baddie uses a collection of slurs against the Japanese character. He’s a prick, is the point they’re making, but, you know, terribly. It’s tempting to say all this would be written differently today, but I’d have thought all this would be written differently in 2011. The point is, in their attempts to portray characters as being unreformed machismo stereotypes, they got to just write a bunch of crappy things.
Then also, they wrote lines like:
“What kind of clock are we running?”
“One that has been recently fucked in the face.”
And those are simply good lines. And we must appreciate them.
As it happens, Bulletstorm slightly outstays its welcome in its six-to-eight hour campaign. It’s one act too long, all its jokes used up, the player progress already completed, as it devolves into a series of scenes as our intrepid trio try to kill the mean baddie over and over again. At this point it’s interesting to note that the heavy-handed writing stops being fun or funny, and just becomes hard work. Yup, he said “dick” again. Yup, he said a sexist thing to the lady again. Get on with it.
Of course, Bulletstorm will always have a soft spot in my heart thanks to the sheer idiocy that was Bulletstormgate, one ofmy favourite series of articles I ever wrote for RPS. There have been few moments as rewarding as when that incompetent and fatuous hacktried to argue back, condemning us in the strongest possible terms for doing proper journalism. Those were the days.
Can I still play Bulletstorm?
People Can Fly released the updated Full Clip Edition in 2017, which for some godforsaken reason added in Duke Nukem as a playable character. Sigh. I tried to find the original to play for this article, but Full Clip has overridden its place in the universe, and heck, it can still be played properly within that. And as such, it runs out-the-box with no issues.
Should I still play Bulletstorm?
For a top-notch violent action game, absolutely. It has some crappy elements, features that it would be a better game without, but it remains superbly fun to play.
John Walker was one of the original creators of RPS, before he was fired for being too great. He now runsBuried Treasure, a site dedicated to unknown indie games. You MUSTsupport his Patreon!
