I suffer from the unfortunate side-effect of enjoying stupid games, it seems. This condition hampers my attempts to take this medium as an art form and becoming ensnared in that flawed idea that “only gameplay matters”.

It doesn’t, God dammit, it really doesn’t.

Yet despite my initial lukewarm reaction to the Bulletstorm demo I found myself having a blast when digging into the full game. There’s nothing particularly clever going on here. It’s all juvenile and senseless violence. The game rewards you for shooting people in the nuts or the ass, all the while flashing neon Las Vegas signs and lights to indicate your murderous jackpot in points. There’s nothing here that is worthy of the attention of an adult.

Why did it have to be fun, dammit?

I guess no matter how old you are you just can’t resist a cheap thrill. You look back on how you used to go to McDonald’s in high school and buy like five double cheese burgers for a buck each. As an adult, you feel disgust, a little sick, but also a little envious. Hell, maybe you still enjoy that little not-quite-a-pleasure once in a while just because it’s so cheap. There are better hamburgers out there that are healthier and prepared by an actual chef, yet for the price of one of those you could be eating five double cheese burgers.

Bulletstorm is not the McDonald’s of the video game world, though. It’s more like Wendy’s or Arby’s, where it pretends to have some level of class. They present a self-loathing hero out for revenge, a goal that manages to kill those he cares about save for one. The attempted salvation of his friend leads to a path of redemption and potentially some escape-pod nooky with Jennifer Hale.

Except it sucks. The story really, really sucks. The real shame is the developers had a chance at a good story, but I guess they needed to justify all the crazy killing and points somehow. In fact, the gameplay and story are so mismatched that People Can Fly and Epic Games should have realized they were fusing two incompatible game types into one. As a result, everything suffers.

The entire catch of Bulletstorm is killing people in semi-creative ways and then combining them to get the highest score possible. It’s pretty much an arcade game, which means the drive isn’t the story. The entire purpose is gameplay. It should play like Quake II, where there was one swift cut-scene at the start and then no story. Or perhaps like Unreal, where you wake up on a crashed prison ship and need to escape a wild planet. This simple plot line would have worked greatly and would have kept the player immersed in the game at all times, and any subtle hints in the environment suggesting a story (the announcements over the intercom, the malfunctioning news bots, etc.) could have hinted as to the tragedy that occurred on the planet. You know, go Half-Life with it.

The alternative would be to take the back story and build an entire game from there. The protagonist is the leader of an elite military squad that’s been tasked with assassinations and other very black-ops game elements, though it turns out the “dangerous” targets they’ve been taking out have actually been innocent civilians. Manipulated by their leader, they choose to break free from the military and fight back.

There’s actually potential for a much more interesting story here than what’s actually provided, but at the same time wouldn’t that ruin the ridiculous over the top nature of the gameplay? Well, the story does that anyway. There are several cut-scenes that last several minutes, and even levels where you’ll exit a cinematic just to leap into another one a few steps later.

It wouldn’t be so bad if the game didn’t take itself so seriously. Epic advertised Bulletstorm as a ridiculous over-the-top shooter going back to the genre’s roots (because finding blue and red keys in repetitive levels was just fantastic) and seemed to make a mockery of how so many games take themselves seriously (COUGH). Yet with the exception of the numerous lines about shooting dicks, killing dicks, or dicks that also happen to be boobs, the game plays it completely straight faced. You’re evidently supposed to feel something for these characters as they traverse some run-down resort planet full of Mad Max rejects.

The world simply doesn’t blend in with itself. I don’t think anyone knew what game they were making. People Can Fly and Epic got a comic book writer to pen a tale of redemption while simultaneously having the embarrasing lexicon of a sixth grader, all the while building an engine whose entire purpose was to fling a ton of guys into the air, shoot one in the nuts in mid-air, then blast him with explosives in order to get points for killing several foes in mid-air with the flail wrapped around some guy’s head, mercifully putting an end to their misery after blasting their nuts off (bonus if you’re drunk the whole time). Points that could later be used for upgrades, ammunition or other forms of weaponry.

Which pretty much leaves us with the one redeeming quality of Bulletstorm. It provides a variety of weapons with devastating effects, environments full of lethal traps and obstacles that can be used to add some bang for your buck. It’s all about using what’s given for the highest pay, something it is actually pretty good at. As a result, the campaign may as well be training for the additional solo and cooperative modes focusing solely on how high you can tally your score.

In this day and age, that’s not worth a lot.

I’m pretty sure the dude on the right died in the first Gears of War.