Shit Outta Class. Hell's Worth of Fun.

Bulletstorm is crass, brawny and raw. Revenge, of course, is rehashed to drive the plot and character dynamics are nothing new. Save from a few key features, Bulletstorm is far from innovative. But, that's not the point of this article.

This dissection and analysis is not a review, but rather a discussion of how and why Bulletsorm is so much fucking fun. 

It's a murdering party! 

Bulletstorm's simplicity offers the breath of fresh air the video game culture needs. While series such as Metal Gear, The Elder Scrolls or Mass effect offer amazingly fun, immersive and vast worlds to explore, games such as these often harbor convoluted and hardcore elements. Bulletsorm is one of the more recent games to challenge that avant-garde direction of video game companies with its back-to-basic attitude. 

I'll admit it: this game may be classified in the genre of brainless-shooters. Epic Games gracefully embraces this idea. However, in doing so Bulletstorm, in regards to its shooting mechanics at least, avoids feeling dumbed-down and shallow. 

In fact, Bulletstorm offers a palate of gore for those that are experimental. In Minecraft, players gather and stack dozens of different environmental-blocks to achieve whatever they wish to build. Similarly in Bulletstorm, players use their environment, and of course their guns, as tools for dealing fountains of death in different ways. These are called skillshots.  

Time to paint the town red 

Need to put down a group of baddies? Activate the Sniper's secondary firing-mode and it shoots an explosive round into an enemy, which the player can then maneuver, with said enemy still attached to the bullet, into the rest of the group of bad guys and "Boom!" Instant ground beef! Or, assuming these baddies are indoors, use the Energy Leash's thumper ability to sweep all the bad guys off their feet and gravity-slam them to their chunky, rainy red demise on the low-ceiling.  

This crimson-colored, lego-blocks style of murder bolsters the adventures within Bulletstorm. Each new gun expands the arsenal of carnage and discovering new ways to annihilate all your foes only adds to the bloody fun. 

Like its action, this game's dialogue and characters are very base. The colloquialism divinely adheres from words such as "fuck," "shit" and "dick." Just check out the video below and see for yourself! 

Awesome, right? 

While many may find Grayson Hunt and his band of merry pirates immature, the language of Bulletstorm falls back to the concept of rawness. The brutality of skillshots and its shades of violence are meant to reverberate the basic shooter. The vulgarity of this title, on the same lines, reflects contemporary societal standards of vocabulary.

In an era past post-modernism, there are fewer and fewer original niches narratives can exploit. Simply put: audiences everywhere think they have already seen and heard everything. So, what is the consequence of including a shit-storm's worth of f-bombs and dick jokes? The answer is simply comedy. 

These jokes, like the violence, communicate through fundamentally basic human aspects. Comedy revolving around sex and bowel-movements can even be traced as far back to Aristophanes and the ancient Greeks. 

"Son of a dick"

The reason such comedy persists today is because of its universality. Everyone farts, burps, takes dumps and  urinates. And because the complexity of language allows it, these everyday, hilarious functions are labeled and survive through base language.  

This universality also equalizes all classes of people. Stripped of possessions, hierarchies and ideals, humankind is homogeneous. And through this basic ideal, Bulletstorm, at its core, reflects that essence of similarities.

Its simplicity mixed with its base-language and kill-creativity brings hours of entertainment. Nonetheless, it follows a basic system of call and response: you fire a gun and the enemies skulls shatter upon impact.

 Again, the cadence of language and the cacophony of battle stirs up the basest pleasures in a medium that sometimes attempts to complicate the concept of fun. 

Bulletstorm's facet of minimalism reflects older games such as Super Mario Brothers and even Pong. While it is far more technologically advanced than the latter titles, its entertainment-value feeds off the same nuances that make simplicity so good. This title didn't make promises to be something that it wasn't. Bulletstorm is simply a shooter basked in blood and fun. 

Stay tuned for Subculture!