Review by Jason
Oh man where to begin. I was on the edge with this game because while the demo was lots of fun I couldn't imaging how they could make a decent game out of the concept of Style Point kills. I figured it would get old real fast. Still I just had to try this out. It was a bit of a new concept to shooters and boy is this refreshing!!
GAMEPLAY
The meat and potatoes of this game. Pretty much this is like any other shooter but with an edge. Rather than just kill enemies, you kill them with style! Leash an enemy to you, kick him in the face then pop his head off for +50 SP instead of a boring +10 for a kill. Launch an enemy in the air and pull off a quick headshot with a pistol. Kick a hotdog cart into someone to kill em, then blow it up taking out the rest of the mobs! This game is about style and finding a myriad of ways to kill people. I often found myself debating what weapons load out to chose towards the end simply because I wanted to be stylish; yet still try for tricks I had not unlocked yet. There are 2 tabs of "general" kills, and each weapon has its own set of stylish kills + 1 tab of hidden style kills you will try to figure out during the game. Action is fast paced with little downtime and brings only the core elements of a shooter in with it. There is no real fancy cover system or over the top weapon configuration options. This is just here is a gun... there are 8 baddies rushing you. Kill em as stylish as possible. Kick em into spikes, throw em off a bridge, headshot, nut shot, throw em into electricity, a grinding wheel, a plant, electrified bugs. Blow up some explosives and while they are on fire kill em. Hit em in the face with a cannonball. Pop a nutshut then kick em in the face :P go for broke!
GRAPHICS / SOUND
The game graphics are actually quite amazing on the PS3. The PC has the best graphics(no surprise there, my buddy picked it up for PC and it looks amazing). The 360 seems to have just a "slightly" better graphics appearance than the PS3 but I am not surprised by that. This game was mainly developed on a 360. The environments are well detailed, weapon detail is great. Coloring and visuals are nice with some pretty good physics. *** Sound quality is exceptional. The voice acting is very high quality and believable(despite being over the top), weapon sound effects are great as is ambient sounds in the game. The sound track is also very killer especially the main menu them ^_^ .
REPLAY / STORY
The storyline for this game is pretty simple but there is enough there to keep it entertaining. It is obvious just from the first 10 minutes of the game the storyline is just added in there to give the game some flow and direction. I personally enjoyed the storyline and the way characters interacted. The campaign (normal difficulty) ran me around 7-8hrs. About the same time as killzone 3 but part of that was I would restart sections to try and get some trophies on my first playthrough so you can expect more like 6 solid hours of gameplay from the campaign.
*** REPLAY value, for me at least, is through the roof. Not only is the campaign amazing; but the game tracks your stats so you could always try to beat your campaign run. ONLINE offers Echoes and Anarchy mode where ECHOES is pretty much running key parts of the SP campaign with a timer and score counter. Higher you get your SP the cooler you look on the high scores chart. ANARCHY is like horde mode. You have waves of mobs and have to hit a certain amount of SP before advancing with your team. However you can't be a lone gunman with this mode; as there are a set # of mobs meaning you need to WORK AS A TEAM to achieve the scores and pull of team based skill moves. If you get some people willing to work as a team this mode can be a lot of fun (or just get some friends together and try to last as long as you could)
OVERALL (90% 9.0/A-)
This game for me gets a 90%. It is fantastic and for those who aren't to heavy into MP competition this is the perfect shooter to pick up. While it can't compete with other MP shooters out there, it provides a fun and memorable campaign with over the top dialogue - and a MP element that has both competition and requires teamwork. In my book, this is a must have title for any FPS fan period. While this game isn't Killzone 3, Halo: Reach, Gears of War 2... it is a breath of fresh air that more than makes up for that and well deserving of a 5 star rating.
* The only NEGATIVE I have about this game is the dialogue at times could be far to over the top and at times I did find myself getting stuck in textures(like I get hit by an explosion and it pushes me on-top of a texture and can't get down so I had to die/restart checkpoint)
You can buy Bulletstorm from our site.
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