Shaun Munro reviews Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition…
People Can Fly’s 2011’s cult throwback shooter Bulletstorm is a bizarre candidate for an HD remaster, considering that it sold poorly the first time around and has also aged extremely well aesthetically. That said, as an easy excuse to give this gonzo FPS another shot, the Full Clip Edition is a fun go-around for fans of the original and neophytes alike.
Bulletstorm is an affectionate love letter to the ultra-violent, politically incorrect shooters of yesteryear, where story takes a firm backseat to the sheer creative number of ways you can transform your enemies into bloody paste. The game pits the player as the very Kurt Russell-esque hero Grayson Hunt, an elite assassin who ends up stranded with his crew on the planet Stygia, where he’s left to fend off the array of grotesquely mutated denizens within and seek revenge on the savage General Serrano.
The gameplay places an emphasis on frantic, fast-paced, squad-based shooting, where the player is encouraged to pull off Skillshots – that is, uniquely gory and hilariously over-the-top kills – that rack up points which can then be spent on pods lying around the map to upgrade weapons and purchase more ammo.
Whether you shoot an assailant in the throat, set them on fire with the plentiful explosive objects scattered around, kick them into some dangling electrical cables or use your lasso-like “leash” to fling them into a strategically placed cactus (really), it’s a gameplay loop both highly addictive and ludicrously, perversely entertaining.
Played on normal difficulty, this isn’t a particularly challenging game at all, largely thanks to how insanely capable the game makes the player feel at almost all times; surprisingly, there’s no mission here where your leash is temporarily taken away. The general lack of challenge however does nothing to diminish the outrageous sense of fun pervading throughout this well-paced six-hour ride.
The new release also comes with some welcome extras; completing the story mode once unlocks Overkill Campaign, which opens up all of the player’s weapons and Skillshots from the very beginning of the game for an even more bonkers experience. Furthermore, completing every Skillshot for a given weapon in this mode will unlock unlimited ammo for it, which is at least as awesome as it sounds if not more so.
Echoes mode, which appeared in the original game, returns with all of the DLC in the bargain, and sees the player battling through 30 small sections of the campaign using various Skillshots in an effort to score a 3-star rating. While fun for a while, it eventually feels like a fairly hollow recreation of the story mode and will likely only keep the completionists coming back.
Ultimate Echoes is certainly much more fun, repeating these 30 levels but with a litany of ridiculous requirements, such as not discharging a single bullet against the enemy, or pulling off various complicated Skillshots a certain number of times each.
Bulletstorm also touts a wave-based 4-player online co-op mode called Anarchy, but at the time of press this was not operational to review. It’s a shame the remaster doesn’t include a co-op campaign given how large portions of the game feature three players, and the absence of even a bare bones deathmatch mode feels like a huge oversight, considering how well the wacky combat and scoring system would lend itself to straight-up competitive multiplayer.
As a technical package, Full Clip Edition is a rock solid upgrade of the original game (which still holds up impressively well), with sharp, even downright gorgeous HD texture updates, though facial animations still feel very much stuck in 2011.
Performance throughout is basically good, bar some occasional stuttering during loading and frame-rate dips when faced with an especially large fleet of enemies to wipe out. Sound-wise, the musical score is 100% forgettable, but the gun sounds are punchily effective, and the lewd, take-no-prisoners dialogue and voice-work is fun to a point, if perhaps exhaustingly juvenile when played for long stretches.
The major drawback of this remaster is that it’s done little to address the jank present in the original title; for one, collision detection is still rather poor, be it struggling to find the right part of a wall to vault over or an epic slide being stopped dead by a teammate walking in your path. There’s also an abundance of dodgy teammate AI, with characters sometimes teleporting in plain sight to trigger the next scripted event, alongside occasional visual glitches that at least have the good courtesy to be amusing more often than not.
Did Bulletstorm really need a remaster? Not at all, but do you ever need a good excuse to replay a great game with a shiny makeover? The asking price – especially for physical retail copies, which are currently being charged at almost a full AAA tag – does seem rather high for a decent if relatively unremarkable update of a six-year-old game, particularly as PC players may have hoped for a free remaster patch.
At the same time, dedicated players could easily get 20+ hours out of this, especially those who pre-ordered and will receive the Duke Nukem DLC, which allows them to play through the entire campaign as Duke Nukem with new Duke dialogue recorded by Jon St. John especially for the occasion (though sadly, this wasn’t provided for review).
The base game is so intensely enjoyable in all of its self-aware stupidity and surging brutality that Full Clip Edition is an easy recommendation for both hardcore Bulletstorm fans and newbies alike, but with the over-the-odds price tag for a fairly straightforward remaster and short base experience, nobody would blame you for waiting for a sale.
Pros:
+ Entertainingly irreverent, outrageous tone
+ Satisfying and varied combat
+ Slick visuals and solid voice acting
+ A decent amount of side content
Cons:
– Collision issues and general jankiness remain
– Lack of comprehensive multiplayer options
Rating: 8/10
Reviewed for PS4 (also available on PC and Xbox One).
Shaun Munro – Follow me on Twitter for more video game rambling.
