Arcade Shooters: Bulletstorm and Vanquish

Two more great shooters from the bargain bin, Bulletstorm and Vanquish offer an entertaining change of pace from your typical AAA fare. I call these "arcade shooters" because the focus is on fast, chaotic action and rewarding the player for creative and skillful kills. Indeed, each level wraps up with a score breakdown and provides leaderboards to compete with people on your friends list.


Bulletstorm is the product of People Can Fly, a Polish development house owned by Epic. You play as a black-ops commando turned alcoholic space pirate, who crash lands on a jungle planet filled with mutated prison gangs and carnivorous plants while trying to hunt down his mortal enemy. If that premise sounds ridiculous, that's because it is, and the game purposefully plays up the absurdity of the setting and uses it as an excuse to go hog-wild with creative weapons, enemies and set-pieces. I love the visual design of the levels; even though it's a post-apocalyptic setting, the world is filled with vibrant colors and gorgeous vistas. It has a very distinct style, not to mention an incredibly crass sense of humor. Some sample dialogue:

Token Tough Chick: You shitpiles give chase, I will kill your dicks!
Main Character: What? What does that even mean? You're gonna kill my dick? I'll kill YOUR dick! How 'bout that, huh?

Yeah, it's pretty much all like that. It sometimes feels like if Matt Parker and Trey Stone tried to write a sci-fi epic, this is what they would come up with. Ultimately you just shrug and accept the ridiculousness. Still, there are points where it approaches the level of subversive satire, like when the antagonist needles you via radio for killing thousands of people in your quest for revenge. Bulletstorm, like Starship Troopers, manages to be both a testosterone-soaked teenage male power fantasy, and simultaneously a subtle parody of testosterone-soaked teenage male power fantasies.

Skillshots in action.

What carries the game, though, is the completely out-of-control firefights. Your arsenal is a huge sandbox of ridiculous weapons, like a flail gun, a rocket-propelled drill gun (appropriately called "The Penetrator"), and my personal favorite, a sniper rifle with remote-controlled bullets. You're also equipped with a frog tongue-like electronic whip that yanks enemies and items towards you, and a melee kick that flings them away, both of which activate a slow-motion mode allowing for precision shots. Bulletstorm rewards you for using its arsenal in as many creative ways as possible, racking up points and combos for increasingly spectacular "skillshots." Kill an enemy by kicking him against a surface for "Graffiti" (25 points); send an enemy off a ledge for "Vertigo" (50 points); launch an enemy into the air, kill a different enemy, then kill the first before he lands for "First In Last Out" (100 points). The list is long and comprehensive, and completing every skillshot in the game is a great incentive to keep playing to the end. The levels are tightly constructed thrill rides that keep the momentum moving forward from beginning to end-- there's no "fluff" here, just plenty of action.

Normally I hate rail sequences, but Bulletstorm uses them to show off its impressive visuals.

Vanquish comes from Japanese developer Platinum Games, and was the brainchild of Shinji Mikami, the wunderkind behind the Resident Evil series. But Vanquish is about as far from being a Resident Evil game as possible, despite being largely created by the team that made RE4. Where RE employs limited ammo and tanklike controls to create a methodical pace that encourages you to think about each and every footstep, Vanquish is a crank-fueled rollercoaster that puts the focus on mobility and firepower. The action takes place on an O'Neill cylinder space station in the near future, which has been taken over by Russian robots for some reason. (I played this game immediately after reading Rendezvous With Rama, which may account for why I liked the setting.) The plot is filled with the usual Japanese stereotypes-- stock characters, byzantine plotlines and relationships, plenty of references to American government acronyms (POTUS, DARPA), and at least one dude with a gun arm. But the game doesn't spend too much time on plot building, and mostly gets right down to feeding you hordes of robots to kill.

Firefights in Vanquish frequently involve huge numbers of both allies and enemies firing from all sides of the battlefield, so much so that it often feels like a third-person version of a bullet hell shooter. It has a cover system that actually works better than most other shooters that make cover systems their focus, which is a bit ironic since your greatest weapon is actually mobility. Your ability to flit around the battlefield via rocket-powered knee slides allows you to escape from jams and flank enemies, and is a huge asset. If you're holding still in this game, you're doing it wrong. You also make frequent use of bullet time, which activates on cue or automatically when you're near death. Like Bulletstorm, it hands you a huge arsenal of creative ways to kill your enemies, then sends you into some spectacular set pieces and sets you free to kill how you please.

Knee-slide to victory!

What I loved about Bulletstorm and Vanquish was their lack of pretension and willingness to just be video games, putting the focus on squarely on fun and good gameplay. They are the video game equivalents of summer action flicks. It's very refreshing to play a game that does nothing more than give you a fun box of toys and let you go crazy. Each one is short at about 6-8 hours, but they're tightly directed rides that don't have any fluff or pointless filler. If you're looking for a game to get you through the long summer before the fall rush, these games are a great (and cheap) way to pass the time.