Andy Laub

Remember how I said I was going to play Crysis 2? I still am, I promise. I just… it hasn’t happened yet. I had planned to rent it shortly after finishing up Bulletstorm, but it was still nowhere to be found. In the meantime, reviews of Bulletstorm led me to Vanquish, a game released last year that is basically what happens when you combine Gears of War and Bulletstorm, then take Epic out of the equation and replace them with Sega.

The result is a third-person shooter in which you run around on a space station and shoot communist robots. Similar to Bulletstorm, there’s a button that lets you slide around on the ground, and also sort of do things in slow motion. And you have a gun, but your gun is special because it’s every gun (more on that later). Also there’s a button that you press to smoke a cigarette, in case you need to be reminded that this game is very, very Japanese.

This sounds like it could be a recipe for disaster, but the opposite is true – Vanquish is a very fun game. Unlike the plodding, cover-reliant pace of a typical shooter, the goal here is speed. I’ll admit that I relied on cover more than the game probably would’ve preferred, but the mechanics are there to keep you in motion a good portion of the time; rarely are there locations in battle that are truly “safe” so you have to use your maneuverability to your advantage.

I mentioned you have what is basically the gun. Your amazing, one of a kind suit of armor is impressive, but your gun? It can look at other guns and mimic them. Remember in the Transformers movie how the robots scanned the vehicles and then turned into them? That’s what your gun can do. Except it’s a little simple, so it can only remember three guns at a time. I don’t know why that distinction exists, but it does.

But your gun can upgrade itself. If you scan another copy of a weapon you already have, the first result is your ammo refills. If your ammo is full, you get a little mark next to that gun. Three marks and you get a star, and each star is an upgrade (ammo capacity, power, etc). But don’t die, because sometimes you’ll loose a mark if that happens. I’m not really sure how the logic for that works – sometimes marks were lost, and sometimes they weren’t, and the same weapon wasn’t always affected – but really, don’t die. It’s bad for your points.

Did I mention the points? This game has them! I’m pretty sure they’re a way of telling other people how great you are at this game. Or in my case, how great you aren’t. But at the same time, the game also has giant enemy crabs, whose weak points you can attack for massive damage. Then they turn into giant humanoid robots.

In short, you should probably try Vanquish if shooting things is something you enjoy. It doesn’t really take very long, and it’s very shiny.

I didn’t mean to rent Bulletstorm. Okay, I did, but it was not at the top of my gaming to-do list, nor (until yesterday) was it even on it. I’ve been itching for something new to play after finishing up Black Ops and that driving debacle game, and because Brink and LA Noire are still over a month away, I had to psych myself up for something I could play now. Crysis 2 was the immediate the frontrunner, but after many fruitless visits to the video store, it became clear that I should find something else to occupy my time.

I didn’t care for the demo of Bulletstorm until I played it the second time. Maybe I wasn’t in the right mood, and by that I mean “maybe I just didn’t want to be distracted by another game so I convinced myself it was nothing special”. Or maybe I just wasn’t doing it right, because I had a whole lot more fun when I retried it. Happily, Bulletstorm isn’t nearly as difficult to get ahold of, so I was whipping guys around and shooting them in the face in no time.

Let’s take a couple of steps back. If you’ve seen any of the ads, you’ll remember Bulletstorm as being the game that encourages you to “Kill With Skill” – in other words, you’re rewarded for finding creative ways to dispose of your opponents. The most prominent mechanism in this involves your leash – an electric whip attached to your wrist that you can use to latch on to enemies and objects from a distance, pulling them toward you (and in doing so putting them in a sort of mini-Bullet Time) so you can more easily target strategic areas (like their butts). The rest of your arsenal is somewhat more conventional but still fun to use, and the points that you receive from killing guys are used to restock and upgrade your weapons.

This whole system, while creative, is a little disconcerting at first because to some extent it requires that you forget some of the things you know about shooting games. While you can certainly make your way through the game with a series of headshots from your assault rifle, to do so would be to forego everything that it’s about. While it initially seems as though ammo is hard to find and somewhat expensive to buy, you soon realize that a) you’re able to kill a LOT of enemies without using any ammo at all and b) you’ll get a LOT more points for doing so, effectively making ammo that much easier to come by when you do end up needing it. The environment in this game tends to be just as lethal to your opposition as your own sidearm – never has rebar been such a deadly force. Or cacti. Or random, dangling electric wires.

And, as advertised, that’s what makes Bulletstorm fun and special. It doesn’t hurt that it’s made by Epic, the folks behind the Gears of War series, and it certainly shows. I like to think that the game takes place in the same universe as Gears, since the aesthetic is nearly identical (big burly guys and lots of masculine gadgetry). However, the mood here (on the resort planet of Stygia!) is distinctly lighter, as is the overall setting. The weather is generally bright and sunny, and you’ll spend a lot of your time outside (or sort of outside, since this resort is comprised entirely of structures that are on the verge of or in the middle of collapse). There are a couple of Gears-like moments where you’ll end up in a cavern or sewer, but they seem to be there only to remind you of how little time you spend in them. An objective like “find your way out of this cavern” would end up spanning multiple acts in Gears of War, while doing the same here means you may not see the sun for nearly ten minutes.

Also interesting are a couple moments where it seems inevitable that the game is going to throw one of the typical shooter cliches at you (ridiculous boss fight, drawn out puzzle sequence), only to send you on your way instead. The game seems to prefer that you don’t remain in a given place for too much time, and instead pushes you along with relative efficiency and urgency – a rare and fitting move since the events all occur within a few hours. I will say that there seemed to be a disproportionate amount of falling through or off of… stuff. That’s a shooter cliche too – especially in the Gears franchise – but in this instance I honestly think they wanted to see how many times they could fit that into the story.

With all this, it would sound like there wasn’t anything not to like. While that’s somewhat true, I can name a few things:

• There were two distinct times where my teammate needed to perform a particular action to drive the story and failed to do so. The first time this happened I had to restart the chapter; the second time (later in the game), I was able to resolve it by restarting from the last checkpoint.
• While it’s nice to have them around, teammates rarely became the focus of attacks. One particular enemy can only be downed by shooting him in the back, which is impossible because he devotes all of his attention to me and me alone.
• One particular class of enemy in the middle of the game completely takes the fun out of combat, in that you can’t use any of the techniques that are the foundation of the game itself. I don’t mind it so much in hindsight, but it was really irritating at the time.
• While occasionally entertaining, the profanity can get a little stale. Also the main guy kind of sounds like Tim Allen at times.

So while Bulletstorm represents a new IP, it really isn’t an unknown quantity. Think of it as a first-person, lighter-hearted version of Gears of War and there you go. The setpieces are colossal and fantastic, and the combat is a lot of fun, so I definitely look forward to future installments.