Second Wind: why you should give Bulletstorm another look

Second Wind is a new Games in Asia column that explores the games stuck in the cracks of popular culture. Too old to be new but too new to be retro, these games were overlooked by many gamers, but they shouldn’t have been. Second Wind will tell you exactly why these widely-ignored games deserve your attention.

When Bulletstorm came out in 2011, it was buried in a hail of controversy, and it ended up posting disappointing sales numbers. When people talked about the game, conversations generally focused on the game’s ultra-violent gunplay and its often juvenile sense of humor.

But that’s a shame, because there’s much more to Bulletstorm than that.

Bulletstorm is a first-person shooter with a twist: players are rewarded for killing enemies in the most creative (and gruesome) ways possible. Equipped with a futuristic “leash” that can rip enemies toward you in slow motion and surrounded by all manner of environmental hazards on a hostile alien world, there are a million different ways for you to dispatch your enemies. You might kick them off a cliff, leash them into a cactus, or blast them back into the gaping mouth of a predatory plant.

At the time of release, I remember some people calling the game a mix of a traditional FPS and a Tony Hawk game, and that’s an apt comparison. You get points for different kinds of kills, and more points if you figure out something new, or execute some combos (like setting someone on fire and then kicking them off a cliff).

This system is the core of Bulletstorm‘s gameplay, and if you don’t mind the ridiculously gory things you can do to your mutated enemies, it’s fun as hell. There are some challenging fights late in the game, but most of Bulletstorm isn’t so much about whether you can kill your enemies—that’s a given—but whether you can kill them in new and interesting ways. It’s also just about having fun. The game features a variety of creative (and brutal) weapons and traipsing through the game’s locations wreaking havoc with them is damn enjoyable, even if it isn’t particularly tough on the lower difficulty settings.

And speaking of locations, Bulletstorm features some great ones. The game is a throwback to the days when colors other than green and brown were allowed in shooters, and you’ll do battle in all kinds of environments from the desert-like city outskirts to underground caverns to a disco bar. The most memorable level takes place in an abandoned theme park with a miniature city that’ll make you feel like Godzilla. Bulletstorm may not have the prettiest graphics ever, but the game looks decent even today, and the unique and varied designs of its levels more than make up for it.