Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition is an upgrade to its original title in 2011. Despite this, the game still looks and plays great on both consoles and on PC.
The game takes place in in a futuristic sci-fi universe in which the main character, Grayson Hunt, and his team must fight for their lives on an abandoned resort planet after a drunken encounter with their old General. For veterans of the game, they will be pleased that the story remains unchanged, but newcomers might initially find the story to be generic. While the story seems a bit slow in the beginning, players will see the carnage, humor and beauty that the game has to offer.
Bulletstorm looks absolutely sharp due its use of Unreal Engine 4. The game’s environment is bright, vivid and full of color everywhere, whether it be in the raider-filled desert, the gore-filled base of the mutated inhabitants, the ruined parasite and carnivorous plant-filled city, or even the underground mine full of radiation.
(As a side note, there were several instances where the game would lag when moving to a new area and sometimes the game would drop frames. It’s fortunate that these small instances do very little to hinder the gameplay.)
Truthfully, one of the game’s best features is its gameplay and accompanying point system. The main character gets a piece of military technology that allows him to grapple enemies towards him. Along with that, he is given the ability to earn skill points, earned by performing skillshots on enemies, which are used to buy upgrades. To land a skillshot, the player will have to be more creative in killing his enemies–kicking an enemy into a cactus, shooting their torso off with a four-barreled shotgun or even ramming the enemy to death with a hot dog cart. These skillshots make the game interesting as it’s often rewarding to headshot an enemy right after slide-kicking into them.
This skillshot system lends plenty of replay value to the game. You can go back to any level in the game and play them differently while keeping the weapons that you’ve earned throughout the course of the campaign.
To add to the chance that you might run through the story once more, the game comes packed with a new mode. The Overkill Mode is basically campaign mode, except that you have access to carry weapons at the beginning of the game, each packaged with unlimited ammo, assuming you unlocked every skill in the campaign beforehand. Although after multiple playthroughs the impact of the story’s jokes seem to wear down, the gameplay will remain fun.
Also, as a pre-order bonus, you get to play the game as Duke Nukem in “Duke Nukem’s Tour.” Duke’s original voice-actor, Jon St. John, makes his return as he replaces almost every single line in the story mode with Duke’s ridiculous dialogue. While it may not be everyone’s cup of tea, the DLC is impressive for fans of the King, at the very least.
The Full Clip Edition of Bulletstorm comes packed with another addition: Echoes mode. In the original Echoes, the player could replay the campaign levels to compete online for the most points on the leaderboard. The harder variant, Ultimate Echoes, gives the player an extra challenges to the levels, such as performing only melee kills, or completing the level using a specific weapon.
One of the last game modes that Bulletstorm has to offer is its Anarchy Multiplayer mode. The main goal of this mode is to work together with three other people to fight through waves of enemies while trying to get the most points. While it does include all of the maps from the previous release, there isn’t really much to it. The rewards aren’t very interesting and the gameplay here seems to only work if you have multiple friends to play with.
Bulletstorm: Full Clip edition definitely deserved the remaster it was given and players will be able to enjoy this over-the-top adventure once more. Even with the new game modes and enhanced visuals, the game doesn’t exactly warrant the steep price-tag of around $60 though.
Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition gets a 4 out of 5.
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