Bulletstorm

Bulletstorm is well past the marmite of games. Either you know exactly what kind of bloodfest you’re getting into by picking up that controller, or you want nothing to do with this game. The gameplay is that natural evolution of achievement – and trophy-based gaming – where accomplishments over the course of play result in a nice trophy room proving how clever you are. In Bulletstorm’s case, however, those achievements are entirely related to how creatively you kill everyone else on the screen.

It’s obvious a huge amount of time has been spent on the visuals and the crazy-pretty levels, but the sad truth is you won’t notice more than 15 seconds of it all in this shouty, 200 mph game. You don’t just open doors, you kick them off the hinges into other players. You never flick a switch when you can use your laser whip to bitch-slap it open. Killing an enemy with a simple gun is shamefully dull compared to flinging them into an electrical conduit after shooting them with a quadruple-barreled shotgun.

Still, if you’re bored by things like subtlety or characters, the gameplay has the same kind of brutal charm as oldies like Unreal Tournament: grab a weird weapon, run through a weird environment, and kill everything you see in weird ways. It’s begging to be accompanied by Doritos, cold pizza, cheap lager and all-night ladder tournaments. This isn’t going to be one of those games that redefines a genre, like Halo. It isn’t trying to be. It’s just trying to be unhinged fun. And for a while, anyway, it manages nicely.