BulletStorm Full Clip Edition | Review

What do you get when you find Cliff Bleszinski on his day off with little to do? You get a video game mash up of Borderlands and Call of Duty from the creator of Gears of War. It's called BulletStorm and it's six years on since the original release on the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC. Back in 2011 BulletStorm hit shelves marketed as a score chaser, gun toting action first person shooter. While BulletStorm delivered a tongue-in-cheek style humour, it also brought us a plethora of different kill combos to try and pull off all while playing through a linear campaign filled with quirky one-liners such as "You scared the dick off me" and "I will kill your dicks".
For those of you that never played the original release, BulletStorm is a first person shooter with a few specialty quirks thrown in for fun. The core game mechanic will have you using a futuristic 'leash' to grab enemies from afar and reel them close enough for you to kick them into oblivion. You will score style points depending on how you kill your enemies, so kicking them into environmental objects such as spikes, man eating plants and exploding barrels will yield you decent points. Mixing up how you finish off an enemy is always going to earn you more points which you can then spend on upgrading your weapons.

BulletStorm also takes a leaf out of the successful pages of Doom of past and offers up a grand variety of different weapons to choose from to cause maximum damage upon your enemies. While the story is mainly there for comic relief, there are subtle moments of depth and emotion in there. The story isn't going to bring you in, but it will satisfy enough to keep you playing through. The gameplay is fun, addictive and relatively easy to learn, however the general consensus is that the memories won't be long lasting.

There's a multiplayer section thrown in for good measure too which boils down to a horde mode co-op style for online play. Here you will leash, kick, throw and shoot your way through waves of enemies in an effort to score the highest multiplier. While this is exciting and fun for the first few runs, it soon runs out of steam and becomes a little repetitive on its own.

The new look of this remastered edition looks incredible with the all new upscaled textures and 60fps refresh rate, however it was incredibly noticeable that there were slow downs and frame skips when new sections of levels were loading or when the game was auto saving. These are optimising issues that do rear their ugly heads constantly through the campaign. This issue was far from game breaking but on a platform that should be plenty more powerful that the one that this game was originally created for, this shouldn't occur.
If you preordered the game you scored yourself 'Duke Nukem's BulletStorm Tour' which is probably the most noteworthy part of the game that wasn't part of the original. The main character model has been swapped out for Duke Nukem and the dialogue has been re-recorded by the original Duke Nukem voice actor Jon St. John. This time around though, Duke has added his own charm to the script and essentially makes more of a mockery of the already outlandish dialogue. While this changes up the game a little bit, it definitely adds a few more laughs and something fresh and new for players that have already played the game and want to see a different perspective to it. Duke punches out lines that relate to the original dialogue, but changes their meanings and will often pull no punches when kicking the hell out of the fourth wall.

The final verdict here is that if you've already played BulletStorm back when it was originally released then there's not much here for you to come back to. The replayability is relatively low but if you loved the score chasing and having fun with friends in the co-op modes then you'll likely enjoy the return. For those that have never heard or played BulletStorm before, there's a decent experience to be had here and one that will be definitely better than before. If you're going to play BulletStorm, then the Full Clip Edition is definitely where you should start.

Initial release date: 22 February 2011
Genre: First-person shooter
Writer: Rick Remender
Engine: Unreal Engine
Developers: People Can Fly, Epic Games
Publishers: Electronic Arts, Gearbox Software