Bulletstorm charts the misadventures of Dead Echo, the black-ops assassination unit you command until you realise that the foul-mouthed General Serrano has set you up. As you try to exact a violent revenge on Serrano, your two ships crash land onto the resort planet of Stygia. Unfortunately for you and your crew, this game needs adversaries to kill and you quickly find that Stygia is full of insane tribes of humans and mutants, as well as hostile plants and enormous Godzilla-like beasts.  Most of the game is spent hunting down Serrano and killing anyone or anything that gets in your way.

The single player campaign begins with you trying to save the life of a team member by collecting power cells in the debris outside your ship. Initial waves of enemies allow you to come to grips with Bulletstorm’s excellent shooting mechanic known as ‘skillshots’. While the game begins simply enough, things take a turn for the enjoyably ridiculous when you discover the energy leash. This devastating implement can be used to whip enemies, set them up for skillshots and propel them into surrounding objects (spikes, electrical wires, etc).

As your hapless victims fly through the air, the game enters bullet time, enabling you to improve your accuracy and/or rate of fire. You can even extend the slow-mo shenanigans by kicking enemies and keeping them airborne for extra kill combinations. This mechanic never gets old as you are constantly surprised by the variety of options at your disposal. This is where Bulletstorm is just pure fun. Points awarded for accurate or creative kills can then be used to upgrade your weapons or unlock new and exciting skillshots.

The game world looks great, with liberal use of colour and an interesting mismatch of styles. Locations vary from radioactive underground complexes to rundown exotic resorts. The level of detail is impressive, but some levels will feel familiar to fans of the Gears of War series. The well animated enemies range from deranged to disturbing, with the mutants in the final levels being a particularly disgusting treat.

If you’ve been spoiled by the freedom of movement offered in Halo, you may well be frustrated by your inability to jump in Bulletstorm. Fortunately, the energy leash goes a long way to overcoming this feeling. People Can Fly also works hard to make you feel that background elements, so often stagnant in other games, can suddenly become an important part of the action. In one particularly memorable level, you guide a remote-controlled monster through a scale model city with hilarious consequences.

One of Bulletstorm’s biggest weaknesses is a deadness of plot.  Taken alone, events carry a level of visceral excitement that commands your attention, but together they lack any sense of forward momentum. You quickly became bored with cut scenes and the fate of your companions doesn’t really concern you. The crass need to set up a second game in the series also cheapens the plot. The occasional (obvious) twist clearly exists only to set up the next action sequence or fragment of abusive dialogue. In short, the story quickly becomes dull and pointless.

The script contains some loopy offensiveness and occasional laughs, but it often gets in the way of the next frenzied battle. It also means that the replay value is low as events get a little repetitive for the last few levels and the other modes fail to extend the variety of the main gameplay experience. Echo mode provides key sections in levels to play with time and skillshot bonuses used to earn stars on completion. While fun at first, it quickly starts to feel pointless as you’ve already played these levels and there aren’t any new abilities to unlock.  Multiplayer modes require teams to earn point bonuses when taking down waves of enemies, but again it repeats the style of play seen in the main game, though with a cooperative element.

The FPS mayhem of Bulletstorm is great fun while it lasts, but you probably won’t feel the need to go back and play it again. Bring on Gears 3.