Bulletstorm is a First Person Shooter with a lot of gore and a lot of attitude. It follows the leader of a band of futuristic rebels that were betrayed by their commanding officer. Originally they were assassins, until they found out they were killing innocent people to keep the government's dirty secrets. The leader, Grayson Hunt, attacks the flagship of the Conferderate fleet in a drunken rage. In the process maroons himself and his teammate Ishi Sato, who is now a cyborg due to his injuries in the crash and is always fighting the AI that makes up part of his brain, on a formerly Confederate run planet called Stygia.
You end up fighting the General's troops, the local life, as well as some mutated monsters that prove to be challenging along the way.
The mechanics of the game work pretty well, but what sets it apart from other FPS' in a real way is the SkillShot system. You can kick, slide into, or leash your enemies into a slow motion free fall, where you can kill them in unique ways that earn you points. In an RPG-esque style, you can then upgrade your weapons with those points. Points can also be earned with non-slow mo techniques as well. The environment ends up being a weapon for you as you progress. From construction rods, cliffs, explosive barrels, cacti, and many other methods, the world around you will allow you to finish your enemies off in entertaining and extremely violent ways.
The story is relatively interesting, but tends to drag a little towards the end. The dialogue is really, really, vulgar and hilarious. I love the prattle between the characters as you play the game, and I ended up having to pause the game, run upstairs and tell my roommate about what was just said... and he didn't really care... sigh.
The multiplayer consists of beating campaign sequences in speed runs and posting the times online, and a horde/firefight type mode that lets you kill waves of enemies as a group or pair, and opens up more avenues for co-op Skillshots. This was a smart move, because the mechanics of this game doesn't lend itself to a vs. mode and against CoD or Halo, the online vs. FPS market is cornered. If BStorm had a vs. mode, the population would die out within a couple months like most multiplayer modes do (see Ghostbusters or Dead Rising 2).
In the end, Bulletstorm is a decent shooter that brings a lot of style, as well as newish gameplay mechanics to the table, and at $30 right now, is a steal.
4.2 out of 5 Skillshots (my favorite is Vertigo... not gory, but satisfying)
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