Review by: Brian Rowe

Culled from the cesspool of prepubescent fantasies and stripped of almost all morally redeeming qualities, Bulletstorm is trashy, campy entertainment with a budget. Young boys will hide copies at the back of their closets, behind the Playboys, and I expect Mothers Across America to start marching on the capitol any day now. With such classy dialogue as, "I'll kill your dick," followed by, "Speaking of dick-killing parties, " mental stimulation obviously never made the list of priorities.

Just to set the mood right, Bulletstorm begins with Gray and his companion getting drunk and shooting bottles off a captive's head. Once the fiercest military outfit in the galaxy, Dead Echo is now a band of wanted rogues, and their former General has stopped by for an unwelcome visit. Gray, being the subtle tactician that he is, rams his tugboat of a craft into the General's massive warship and brings the whole mess screaming to the planet below. Gray's only hope for survival rests at the heart of a former resort city, now home to gangs of bloodthirsty mutants and man-eating vegetation.

Bulletstorm's Skillshot system dares to wonder how many ways a bullet can ravage the human body, and turns it into sport. Sure, you can blast a man's cranium into sludge, but why limit yourself to such amateurish antics when you can discharge a hundred rounds of hot lead into his sphincter at once? I can honestly say that I have never put so much effort into demolishing another man's goodie-bag before slamming my boot down on his teeth, but really, it was for a good cause. In the twisted world of Bulletstorm, creative sadism is currency.

Caches of ammo are scarce, so completing skillshots rewards you with points to purchase bullets, new guns, and upgrades for your weaponry. You can survive Bulletstorm with only basic firepower and the occasional gun scavenged from corpses, but it will be a tough road and not nearly as much fun. The charge abilities, including a face-melting shotgun blast and a sniper rifle that turns enemies into flying bombs, are some of the most gruesomely satisfying tools of destruction in any FPS.

There is no cover-system, which would only serve to destroy the momentum of carnage. Instead, you can use the preposterous and ridiculously fun slide maneuver to careen through the streets and close gaps, or better yet, use the game's signature leash to lasso enemies and send them skyward in slow-motion. The chaos is so relentless and the weaponry so powerful that it hardly matters that the AI has the intelligence of a depressed lemming.

For a game that's raging with testosterone and drowning in references to male genitalia, Bulletstorm has a hard time keeping it up for the climaxes. Despite the grand environments and the monumental scale of events, the climaxes are reduced to on-rails shooting galleries with questionable hit-detection and idiot-proof quick-time events. When a giant creature the size of the Empire State building breaks through the side of a mountain, I think it's only fair to expect more than the push of a single button to take it down. In fact, there is only one encounter that can reasonably be called a "boss battle," and it is nowhere near the finale.