Hi folks, it's been a while but I finally decided to make a new video for Black Mesa, in this case a videogame review requested by k3nny1550. Don't worry, a big Q&A video is coming soon, I just need some more time to prepare it.

So, videogame review, let's do this shit.

I'm going to review a game I've just completed a few days ago: Bulletstorm, made by People Can Fly, who also made Painkiller, and published by Epic Games, famous for making Unreal Tournament and Gears of War, but I'm sure all of you already know that.

People Can Fly tried to make a sort of a spiritual successor to Painkiller with Bulletstorm and they succeeded at it, since Bulletstorm is all about stylishly killing loads of enemies with all kinds of creative looking guns, just like Painkiller.

The single-player campaign is sweet but short. You can beat the game in less than 5 hours, even if you die quite a few times or decide to go faffing about for a while.

The campaign is fairly well paced and has some really impressive set-pieces, made more impressive with its gorgeous and colorful vistas.

One annoying thing I noticed is that you can't really explore the levels too much, since they've put lots of both visible and invisible barriers around the playable areas of the maps, even going as far as to make it impossible to fall from ledges, while also limiting your freedom of movement by taking out the ability to jump. It's funny, Painkiller had jump and no crouch, while Bulletstorm has crocuh but no jump.

The plot is brief and easy to understand. Grayson Hunt is the name of the main character. He's a drunken space pirate always looking for a quick and easy buck. He holds a grudge against General Sarrano, who tricked him into killing several innocent people in the past and now Grayson wants to kill him.

One day, Grayson finds Sarrano's ship orbiting some random planet and in his drunken rage decides to attack it, even if that means killing himself to bring Sarrano down. After a brief and on-rails space combat sequence, Grayson manage to destroy Sarrano's ship and it crashlands on the surface of the planet, along with Grayson's cruiser.

After that, Grayson and his sidekick, Ishi, must escape from that mess of a planet and, if possible, bring Sarrano down.

There's a bit more to that, of course, but I want to keep this video relatively short, so I'll just give you the quick rundown of the plot.

The characters in this game are some of the most foul mouthed, immature and loudest people I've ever seen in a video game. The main character is unlikeable by design and is the complete opposite of most videogame main characters, which are mostly supposed to shiny paragons of goodness and heroism.

General Sarrano is easily the most unlikeable character I've ever seen in a videogame. He's a completely ruthless monster, a son of a bitch who knows no compassion nor boundaries. He has probably already killed his mother to get what he wanted and his mouth shoots swear words like a fucking machine gun shoots bullets.

The remaining roster of supporting characters is not much better but they still manage to be as interesting as the main characters.

The enemies you fight are humans, either normal or mutated, and monsters native to the planet, mostly in boss fights. Their designs are fairly varied and they act as intelegently as you'd expect from this kind of game, although the normal human enemies tend to backtrack, find cover or try flank you.

Now, one of the best things about this game is the gameplay. The gameplay in Bulletstorm is a mix between old-school fps and modern fps. So, you'll have the frantic shooting action and the big hordes of enemies of an old-school fps with some of the realistic mechanics of a modern fps like iron-sights, linear level progression or quick time events. Don't worry tho, the quick time events are fairly rare, mostly optional and don't affect combat at all.

The whole gameplay mechanics are centered around a gimmick called Skillshot, which scores your performance according to how brutal and creative your kills are. The bloodier the way you kill an enemy, the more points you get. For example, if you kick an enemy towards spikes, you get more points than from just shooting him. You also have a leash which you can use to pull enemies towards you. If you kick an enemy into the air, you can pull him back to you using the leash. The game has a list of all possible skillshots you can do, so you can try to do them all. Also, the points you earn from skillshots, can be used towards buying ammo and upgrades for you weapons.

I haven't played too much of the multiplayer component of the game but it's basically 4-player co-op on tiny maps against hordes of enemies. The skillshot system gives you points towards player costumization.

There's also another mode called Echoes, in which you play on maps taken out of the single-player campaign and try to set the highest scores using the skillshot system, which you can then compare against your friends.

Visually, this is one of the most gorgeous games of last year. It uses the Unreal Engine 3 to great effect, rendering some of the most beautiful and colorful maps ever seen in a FPS in recent years, while keeping the frames per second pretty high, even if you have a modest gaming computer, like I do. The whole colorful and cheery look of world of Bulletstorm really contrasts with the sheer amount of violence and swearing this game contains.

The sound design is very competent, giving you very powerful shooting sounds for the weapons and all kinds of squishy sounds for the great amount of gore you'll cause to your enemies. The voice acting is pretty good and loud, always peppered by truckloads of swearing, innuendo and fart jokes. The soundtrack is also pretty good but nothing to write home about.

All in all, it's a pretty fun game, it's great but no game of the year material. The only downfalls are its extreme shortness, repetitive swearing from the characters, which can get old very fast, even if some of the shit they say can be pretty creative and sometimes hilarious, and uninspired multiplayer.

I bought it for less than 10 bucks and I think that's a pretty fair price for it. I wouldn't have recommended buying this at full price when it came out.

So I guess that's it for the review. For those that have managed to endure all my rambling to the end, I hope you have enjoyed my review. I'll probably try to make another review if you liked this one.

Also, stay tuned for the big Q&A video that should be coming out in the next couple of days.

Until next time!