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Games: Bulletstorm: Full Clip the smartest dumb game you'll ever play

Bulletstorm – the kind of shooter that makes you crave red meat
Bulletstorm – the kind of shooter that makes you crave red meat Bulletstorm – the kind of shooter that makes you crave red meat

Bulletstorm: Full Clip (Multi)

By: Gearbox

ONE of the last generations’ overlooked classics, Bulletstorm was a giant boot up the butt of the humble shooter. Adding filthy tongue-in-cheek chatter and a variety of ways to off your foe, the game was a satirical slap to the genre’s chops and two trigger-fingers up to PC namby-pambies.

Yet behind the juvenile veneer, a very clever game was at play, brimming with ideas that, sadly, never got a sequel. Mediocre sales (the developers blamed piracy) meant Bulletstorm wasn’t the blockbuster EA expected, destined to remain a little-played cult classic. The jarhead action, however, has risen from the dead in time for Easter with this full-fat do-over from the shooter maestros at Gearbox.

With the FPS genre choking on generic, poe-faced war games, 2011’s Bulletstorm was a gasp of manly air, with juvenile humour, overblown set-pieces and dialogue seemingly cribbed from the wall of a public bog as stubbly space pirate Grayson Hunt whips, boots and shoots his way through a firestorm of mutants and crazed gangs. 

The focus here is on earning Skillpoints, used to upgrade weapons and earned by creatively killing enemies with ludicrous combos. Sadistic streaks rack up points as you kick foes into spikes and electricity pylons or simply shoot them in the groin. You’ll never stop pulling that trigger finger or applying size 10 to face in this man-tested, Trump-approved dose of right-wing destruction.

You see, Bulletstorm’s balletic take on gunplay is less about shooting enemies than setting ‘em on fire or whipping them into the hereafter with your arm-mounted leash. With swearing in every line and a homoerotic obsession with penis jokes, it’s gory, vulgar and wickedly funny – a final act set-piece has our heroes escaping a ticking bomb through a labyrinth of tunnels only to end up, Spinal Tap-style, in the same room. Hello Cleveland!

With a modern lick of paint the mayhem still looks glorious, and Full Clip includes an Ultimate Echoes mode that tasks players with completing bite-sized level chunks on certain loadouts and uploading their best runs to online scoreboards. All of the original’s DLC is present and correct along with two expansions and additional multiplayer maps.

Best of all, a bonus feature replaces our hero with Duke Nukem, with new dialogue recorded by Mr Nukem’s voice actor, Jon St John. With its whip-crack-away action and sky-high body count, Bulletstorm is the kind of shooter that makes you crave red meat.

The smartest dumb game you'll ever play, if you missed it first time around, Full Clip a must, and even warrants a double-dip for PS3 veterans.