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And the award for the most surprising shooter of the year so far goes to... Bulletstorm! It hadn't even been on my radar before I read an announcement promising access to the Gears of War 3 Beta upon purchasing the "Epic" edition of this game, and - being a total gear head - I swallowed the bait. I was only expecting a few hours of solid entertainment, but got immediately sucked into the tremendously fun, diverse, creative and well-designed action of Bulletstorm.

Plots in shooters - Does anyone care about them? Well, this game has one, and it's actually quite good. The opening sequence introduces space pirate Grayson Hunt and his crew, who once belonged to a special ops army called Dead Echo. After having discovered the true evil motives behind the hits they were carrying out in the name of General Sarrano, Grayson's squad went AWOL. Since then they've been chased by space bounty hunters. Grayson is now seeking revenge for having been tricked into murdering innocents. Unfortunately, his drinking problem makes him more courageous than he should be, eventually leading to his whole ship crashing down on a planet called Stygia.

You take on the role of Grayson Hunt and things down on Stygia are about as bad as they can get. The planet is overrun by mutants, criminals, man-eating plants and giant dinosaurs (just to name a few), and only one other person from your squad is still alive. More or less "alive" - since your Japanese crew member Ishi had to be turned into a cyborg in order to survive the crash and his robot side isn't exactly pleased with the irrational decisions you've been making. Together you're struggling to find a way off the planet, which is about as much as I will spoil about a story that still has a few twists and surprises up its sleeve.

The characters are, for most part, really cool and fun to watch and listen to. The dialogs and interaction between Grayson and his companions reminded me a bit of a "Gears gone bad". Beware, you'll be flooded with explicit language, sexual allusions and toilet humor, but even though the game has received strong criticism for this and has been blamed for just wanting to provoke, it's not like this is one of the key features of Bulletstorm. Look behind all that over-the-top presentation and you'll find several layers of depth which are the reason why I just can't stop playing this game, and, behold, will use really big words and call this my, "favorite first person shooter so far".

To let you know from which point of view I'm rating this game - I'm no expert when it comes to first-person shooters. I've played and enjoyed my fair share of Halos, CoDs and other offsprings in the past year, but I think I'm mediocre at best. Bulletstorm makes me feel like a GOD. It's like someone designed the game specifically for my pleasure and non-frustration. When I heard its motto, "kill with skill", I was actually worried that I couldn't pull it off because I tend to celebrate each headshot in other games and wouldn't exactly consider myself skilled in the classical sense.

However, Bulletstorm makes it easy to be skilled (and don't mistake that for it being an easy game!) by giving you an energy leash that enables you to pull enemies towards you in slow motion (before kicking them back for that matter), placing you in a hostile surrounding where pretty much everything hurts when enemies fall on it and providing a variety of fun weapons. For example, I quote from the manual - "the Boneduster, a shotgun with four barrels for quadruple the fun"! All of your shots and environmental kills will be named and rated with points, for which you can then purchase upgrades for your weaponry.

There are 131 different skill shots to be discovered, ranging from rather simple shots such a killing an enemy by leashing him onto a giant cactus ("Pricked") to advanced techniques that involve shooting a drill into a fiend in mid-air and then directing the drilled guy to hit another enemy who's unsuspectingly standing on the ground ("Air Strike"). They're either gory or hilarious or both, and there are also unique environmental kills that only work in certain surroundings or with some bosses. Guess what you can make by using a crashed helicopter and its still rotating blades? Right, "Minced Meat"! The names given to those skill shots sometimes made me laugh really hard, too, when they popped up after performing a certain action ("Ding Dong", anyone?). Bulletstorm rewards creativity and thinking out of the box instead of ducking behind cover and sometimes poking your head out. Of course, it's not all running and gunning - as in other well-designed games the gameplay changes every now and then to round up the experience.

Bulletstorm is also quite beautiful - stunning visuals, detailed surroundings and character models, good music and sound - and, for the most part, it has great and believable voice acting. I only remember a few scenes in which I wasn't completely happy, and they were all towards the end. The final 1-2 acts seemed a little rushed, and after so many cool twists I found the ending a bit too predictable, but I'm just being nit-picky here. I also experienced two or three glitches which forced me to reload my checkpoint, but luckily checkpoints are distributed generously and I trust some bug fixes will come up.

As for the other game modes, say hello to Echoes and Anarchy. In Echoes, you're basically replaying (shortened) parts of the campaign and trying to get the best score in the shortest time possible. You'll be graded with stars depending on your performance and unlock new stages when you have collected enough points. Echoes is cool if you just want a short and fun game without replaying the campaign, and it's also quite useful when you're trying to carry out your missing skill shots, since of course there's an achievement for getting them all. Anarchy, on the other hand, is basically the multiplayer mode. Together with up to three of your friends (or alone, if you insist) you'll be fighting waves of creeps and are finally allowed to carry out co-op skill shots - because there's no campaign co-op! Boooo for that! There's also no Deathmatch as in fighting other players, but I honestly don't miss it all that much - we got enough of that already and I imagine it could be quite annoying to have everyone tossing everyone else around with his or her energy leash. Also, talking of "her", there are no female multiplayer avatars. Bleh. But well, I guess the industry isn't used to us girls playing "boy games" yet... let's start a petition!

For you fellow completionists and achievement hunters, 1000G seem quite possible, although I haven't done them all yet. The game isn't that hard and you can earn almost all of the achievements by yourself, there are only two that you need other players for - and they're co-op achievements. No "being better than someone else" which I find quite relaxing. Prepare to spend quite a lot of time on ranking up your character in Anarchy though - there are a few good leveling methods out there, but it still takes a long time.. which doesn't matter that much, because it's fun!

All in all I'd definitely give Bulletstorm 9.5/10. I decided to round the points up this time because I'm having such a blast with it. The game's rated M for a reason, so if you mind neither profanity nor gore and are looking for a fast, different and creative first-person shooter, go get it and join me in Anarchy!