You get moments with this hobby, where you mentally step away and realise exactly what you’d look like to an outsider. It’s not pretty. I’m playing in a darkened room, the shades pulled tight, and I’m shouting to three other people. “HIS ARSE IS OPEN. FOR GOD’S SAKE HIS ARSE IS OPEN. SHOOT IT! SHOOT IT SHOOT IT! SHOOT HIS OPEN ARSE!”
I see myself from above. My eyes are focused on the swollen buttocks of a fat man. I’ve just shot him until he collapsed, almost defeated, onto one knee. What am I doing? Is this what 2,000 years of western civilisation has accomplished? Now I’ve circled behind him and kicked open the armoured flap covering his blubbery rear end. Humankind has split the atom, we’ve walked on the moon. Now three friends and I are readying our pretend guns to fire into a fat man’s exposed anus.
Bulletstorm revels in its childishness. Kicked out of the super secret space army for questioning orders, riotously drunk ex-assassin Grayson Hunt seems to be aiming for some kind of accolade as the universe’s worst man. Stranded on a resort world overrun by murderous weirdos, his most uttered word seems to be ‘cocksucker.’ The sole female character is little more than another marine, burdened with the daddy issues ubiquitous to gaming women and dressed in a pair of breasts. I should turn the monitor off in disgust, and stalk from the room.
The compunction to kill well is magnified by the practical application of skillshot points: they go toward all of Bulletstorm’s unlocks. Those unlocks do standard things – such as increase the ammunition capacity for the Peacemaker Carbine – but they also allow access to a more unhinged arsenal. There’s the gun that fires two grenades attached by a chain. Wrap the bolas around an enemy and it’ll immobilise them on the spot, letting you kick them into their friends and press the detonator. Or deliberately aim wide of your target, sending one grenade into a solid object as the other briefly becomes a horrible strimmer, tearing heads and rending flesh in a small arc.
Each weapon has a nasty application. I found myself flipping between sidearms at each checkpoint – not because I’d run out of ammo, but because my brain had been cycling through new means of murder I was keen to try. Sifting through the game’s recorded skillshots turned me into a macabre Pokémon master, not resting until I’d collected all the heinous ways I could possibly end a life.
Bulletstorm is not art by any metric. It’s difficult to defend, like a friend you take to a party who ends up pissing in a vase. You don’t want to be associated with him, but shit, he provides an evening of excitement. It’s a game that’s very proud of the f-words it’s learnt, and it uses them a lot. Fast. Frantic. Fatuous. Full-on. And yes, that other one: fun.
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