kaka2010
High rank Fallen Angel
Joined: 29 Oct 2010
Posts: 201
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 E3 2010: Bulletstorm Hands-on |
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Ryan Scott, Executive Editor: This game looked incredibly cheesy in the footage I saw at EA's press conference earlier this week. What's the deal, here? Is this gonna appeal to the Serious Sam and Duke Nukem fans out there, or what?
Eric Neigher, Contributing Editor: It is cheesy, but don't let that fool you -- this is not a standard first-person shooter, and not a bad game at all. In fact, the thrust of it is really quite clever, and deceptively simple: take the gameplay in a game like God of War, or even Tony Hawk, and rejigger it to work as an FPS. Essentially, the purpose here is that you want to kill enemies as cleverly and with as many interesting uses of your weapons, secondary items, and the environment as you can.
To that end, every time you activate a special item (such as the energy leash that grabs enemies and pulls them towards you, Scorpion-like), a bullet-time mode is automatically activated for a short time. This allows you to kick enemies out of the air as they're hurtling towards you, or shoot them in the balls (yes, that was specifically shown in the demo) and then decapitate them, etc. You can also use environmental factors, such as hurling enemies into cacti or using explosive barrels on them.
Bulletstorm gives you points for killing enemies creatively, and then you can use those points to purchase upgrades for weapons, which in turn gives you more ability to kill enemies more creatively, etc. You get the idea here. It's a fun conceit on paper, and I genuinely enjoyed playing the game -- in the short term. I can't say the levels offered a whole lot in the way of variety or surprises, so it might be something that gets tired quick. But I heard a lot of fools at E3 casually dismissing this game, and I think that's a shame; the idea behind it really is a good one.
Ryan Scott: So this is all mostly single-player focused? What kind of goofball story does it try to tell?
Eric Neigher: They didn't mention a damn thing about the story, now that you, er, mention it. I got a brief glimpse of a boss fight at the end of the playable levels I looked at -- and the person who walked me through it made much of the fact that you don't only have to fight lame enemies for the purpose of scoring special kills on them: You fight challenging enemies, too! But I have no idea what the story is; I had a female A.I. companion during my playthrough, but I have absolutely no idea who she was or why she was there.
Multiplayer will definitely be a part of the game, although it's not clear how this works, exactly. Since the entire gameplay model is based on you being much more powerful than your foes, it seems impossible to have a one-to-one deathmatch type situation in Bulletstorm. Perhaps multiplayer will consist of competition modes in which individuals or teams will compete to see who can get the highest score on a given level? I'm sure they've got something cooking, but, again, they didn't highlight this for me in the demo.
Ryan Scott: How about the voice acting? The footage I saw had the characters spouting some pretty goofy lines. It just seems like an inane sort of game, which is why I suspect a lot of people are acting dismissive, as you pointed out.
Eric Neigher: Yeah, I mean, the game is goofy. Cheesy, even. But I think it's self-aware about that; at least, that's what I like to think. The voice-acting, from what I heard, was actually pretty good! The dialogue wasn't great, sure, but I was told it was placeholder. The frickin' intro/tutorial movie had a particular line that I'll never forget: "Bulletstorm offers you an orgy of violence, and your gun is the condom." The hell?
But look, it seems like everyone is looking for reasons not to like this game, and I'm not sure why. I guess you could see it as "inane," but you could also see it as charmingly lighthearted. I like to consider myself a glass-half-full guy, so I'm going with the latter. All the rest of you haters can go back to your brooding Gears of War cut-scenes -- but I'm gonna grab a delicious drink of Bulletstorm, and my PC will be the condom. Or something.
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Mai Van Hoa |
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