In today's review, I will tell you about the remake of perhaps one of the most underrated shooters of 2011. Therefore, meet our guest today, Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition. This computer game in the First-person shooter genre, developed jointly by the Polish studio People Can Fly and the American studio Epic Games, and published with the support of Gearbox Software on April 7, 2017 on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
And although he actually won, the pirate ship received significant damage and made an emergency landing on the nearest planet "Stygia", this is the plot of the game. Over the course of the playthrough, which spans eight separate chapters, you will be able to thoroughly enjoy the picturesque views and landscapes of this confederation planet, which is very similar to one large resort town. And this would be a wonderful place to relax if it were not for the aggressive local residents, as well as representatives of the local flora and fauna.
Now we move on to gameplay and technical features games. The remake has become noticeably better visually thanks to the transition to an updated version of the Unreal Engine, which makes some scenes look even more exciting and epic than they were in the original.
Verdict
It was 2011 and three letters ruled the world: CoD. Pseudo-realistic shooters about the fact that bad Russians are stirring up something have been the dominant genre for several years now - not only was Call of Duty regularly released, an infection, every year, alternating developers, but also Battlefield and Medal of Honor both followed the same path crooked path, trying to lure the audience away from the dutik - as always, unsuccessfully. But it was precisely that year that the brown jokers about hiding in shelters and tactics were decisively rebuffed. That's when RAGE, Serious Sam 3 and Hard Reset. Well, our today’s patient led this movement to restore fun in shooters, boldly being the first to go on the attack and striking a blow at brown despondency with all his might.
You can’t blame the game for anything other than the lack of bright colors.
And... failed miserably in sales. Twice.
Bulletstorm is truly a sad case because everyone forgot about it as soon as it came out. Who is to blame (tell me, brother?) for this? An unfortunate release date for the game - after all, February in the West is an absolutely low season, the busiest time is in the fall and before Christmas? Bad marketing? How did Cliffy B, with his tweet and lack of a demo (and the mocking tweet was just about him), anger the PC players who made up the main target audience for the pseudo-old-school buffoon? The dog knows it, but the fact remains that the game was very quickly forgotten and since then it has only been remembered in the top of all sorts of underrated games. And the recent remaster in no way improved the situation.
The development of this opus was carried out by the Polish studio People Can Fly, which previously created the unforgettable Painkiller. Since the development of the Battle out of Hell addon for it, the studio has disappeared from the face of the Earth and only appeared when it became known that they had joined Epic Games - and were developing our today's patient. The collaboration between Epic and PCF has produced an interesting fruit with a very distinctive taste. Since Epic is Epic, the technical side of the graphics was handled by the Unreal Engine, the most current at that time, third variation, which meant that the picture would be at least not bad. The PCF artists made it really good, filling it with bright and rich colors - just in defiance of the aforementioned gray-brown games that were fashionable at that time (if you think it’s too early to talk about “that time” in relation to 2011, let me remind you that it was seven years ago Yes, the desire to scream in horror from the realization of how much time has passed is completely normal, I myself am currently struggling with it). Actually, the excellent technical side of the game is spoiled by only one thing, which is probably why I did not finish the game during the four years that it spent in my library on Origin. And when Satan looked at this spawn, he named it Games for Windows Live and sent it to do evil on Earth, and strictly ordered his henchmen from Electronic Arts not to patch the game and not to remove this squalor from it. Fortunately, a couple of DLLs and NoDVD did their job and the game was ready to use again.
However, even this game sometimes suffers from brown scenes.
The music in the game is spot on, but it’s not memorable. It is there, it is not bad, but nothing more. The sound effects are well chosen. The voice actors honestly earn their fees, so there are no complaints about the audio in the game.
Before we get to the tastiest part, I’ll mention the plot, because in my opinion it’s very good for a shooter of this caliber - at least it’s clear that the developers tried to develop character development. Whether they succeeded or not - I will leave that to everyone’s judgment, but there is an effort. So:
The future has arrived. In this future there was a certain Grayson Hunt, the owner of sideburns like Wolverine and a voice like ... Wolverine (actor Steven Blum often voiced Logan in all sorts of cartoons and games). Ten years before the events of the game, he and his buddies were part of the super-mega-elite-secret detachment "Dead Echo", which was engaged in the extermination of all kinds bad people... or at least that's what they were told, because it turned out that in fact they were killing innocent people who were disliked by their commander. Having sent the commander on all four sides, three letters and two middle fingers, Gray and his crew of three became pirates, and his former commander announced a hunt for them. During these ten years, Gray realized that being a pirate was not enough for him and, in addition, he also became an alcoholic. When, in a drunken state, he met on his boat with the cruiser of the former commander and decided to tear this cruiser to hell - because this is one of those ideas that seem cool when you are in trouble. Two shipwrecks (the cruiser was in pieces, like Gray's ship) later, Gray lost two crew members, and the only survivor besides him was seriously injured and had to be implanted with so much cybernetics that it began to drip on his brains. Unfortunately, their former commander, General Sarrano, remained alive and even caused an evacuation - and Grayson was able to find out about this by capturing one of the special energy whips of the “Last Echo” squad, which, in addition to the whip itself, also had a walkie-talkie, radar, vacuum cleaner, coffee maker and MP3 player. So now he, along with his cyborg friend going crazy, will have to work together towards salvation - and, if possible, revenge on a planet infested with bandits, savages, mutants and other worthy individuals.
He's just resting.
Although I will give the plot a solid four (for the action) for its efforts, the dialogue causes a lot of surprise, in particular the curse words used by the characters a lot and often sound extremely ridiculous, which betrays the Polish origin of the game - and the developers later honestly admitted that they were mumbling in this regard.
But enough, you didn’t come to this game to read the letters (because EA didn’t translate it except with subtitles. Because EA), you’re here to kill goats in sophisticated ways. Well, dear friends, this is where the game reveals its cloak, under which something unimaginably beautiful is hidden - namely, ten hours of pure awesomeness. The entire game is built around killing goats in sophisticated ways, and it rests solely on this. The game has tons of ways to kill enemies and each of them is rewarded with the nth number of points, which in turn are spent on acquiring and improving weapons and buying ammunition. Combining these techniques and using them on multiple enemies at once is encouraged and encouraged, and it's all polished to a shine. In almost every scene there are a huge number of ways to send the reptiles to their forefathers, it is convenient to do this and here everything is limited only by the skill and imagination of the player. In a special menu you can read the available “Skill Shots” (a clumsy translation of the word “skillshot”, which applied not only to shots), which are unusual kills, how many points they give for them and what is required to open new ones. Some of them are told to you right away, some are unique and secret.
Knocking out points is the alpha and omega of the game, its beginning and end. To the sufferer he will give freely from the heart - something carried me away.
You have to fulfill this whole sadistic paradise not only by shooting at enemies - oh no, shooting is almost in second place here, because the first one is occupied by a whip and a kick - with the Q button you can hook an enemy with a whip and pull him towards you, while he will hang in air and you can do something fun with him - shoot him, kick him, kick something at him, et cetera. The kick is performed on the E key and after it the enemy will also hang in the air for a while - more precisely, it will fly slowly, highlighted in blue, after which the physics will pretend that nothing happened and it will fly in a given direction - where there may be spikes, an abyss, a pond with piranhas or just a very solid wall. In addition to this, you can also perform a tackle while running, which will also send the enemy into first slow and then fast flight. Combining all this with weapons - of which there are many and each of which has an alternative shooting mode - and the environment, some of which are varied, and in some places even unique - you need to kill the enemy beautifully and coolly. If you do it very beautifully and very cool, then everyone on the screen can freeze and be shocked by what just happened. And here all my praise goes to the level and gameplay designers, because this greatly raises what could have been a fairly standard and mediocre linear shooter about cover and regen three levels higher. It's downright fun to play and that's the main thing. In addition to killing enemies in sophisticated ways, the game also does not skimp on unexpected changes in gameplay and unique cool moments, sometimes reminiscent of a roller coaster in the rapidity of scenery changes. All this also has an extremely positive effect on the impressions and sensations during the game.
Alas, the project failed. It seemed that there was no hope for a sequel, when suddenly in 2017, with great fanfare, help came from where no one was expecting it - from Gearbox. The remaster, called Full Clip Edition, was intended to correct the injustice of the past, attract the audience that the game deserved and finally elevate it to the gaming Olympus. To do this, they even shoved in one of the real icons of first-person action films, Duke Nukem.
But Gearbox is not a very good publisher, to put it mildly.
In the screenshot: the first time in many years that Duke Nukem appeared in a good game.
Selling a remaster of a game for the price of a brand new AAA hit is madness. Making DLC for pre-order, which will be paid for for those who buy the remaster after release, is double madness. Not providing any discounts for owners of the original is suicide. But Gearbox did all of the above. Among the impeccable advantages of the remaster, it is worth noting the absence of Games for Windows Live and the very DLC that replaces Grayson with Duke Nukem, with fully voiced dialogues, in which Duke laughs with all his might, makes references to his games and wonders why on earth everyone calls him Gray. Of the minuses, they looked for the difference in the graphics of the remaster during the day, and after comparing it with the original side by side, for a long time they could not understand which of this should be a remaster. It’s not that there is no difference at all, but it is insignificant, and in some places it is very amateurish. However, for the absence of GFWL at least, the remaster can be safely recommended to those who do not own the original game.
At a very big discount.
Okay, Duke might be drunk and not know that “bubblegum” is spelled without an “e,” but what’s the translator’s excuse?
Comparison review of Bulletstorm and Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition
6 years after the release of the original version, the Developers from People Can Fly released a kind of “Remaster”, in which they tried to adjust everything to modern standards, and if you are asking questions like “How different are these versions of games” or for example “what is better to play “, then we will gladly try to answer them. AND SO - LET'S GO!
The basis was taken on a test PC with 5 years of mileage, and hardware that is currently of a weak level, namely:
This PC was chosen as optimal for the original version of the game, but in the end it showed results that surprised me, but more on that a little later. Be that as it may, the guys from People Can Fly seem to have done the impossible, for which they have great respect and respect.
IN modern world where games simply have unrealistically brutal requirements and disgusting optimizations, at least someone else makes games on normal level, and I would like that in the future this would not be uncommon.
When we first enter the game, we are greeted by colorful game videos, which in the original run at a freerate of 30 fps. As for the original, this value was raised to 60k/s because the time of the old version has already come to an end, and all modern games show videos in this format.
Then, after the intro, we find ourselves in a menu where the game screensaver is shown on the game resources, and here we can already note the fact that both versions look wonderful in their own way. In fact, even despite the differences in the quality of textures or any other indicator, both versions look good, as if you are choosing between two filters you like for an Instagram photo, and you can’t decide which one is better.
Many will say that the textures look sharper in the original, and perhaps they will be right, but here I would like to note the fact that in motion, or in a game, the remaster looks completely different, and the colorfulness of the picture does not harm the update at all. When starting the game, the standard settings that the game offered were selected, where in the remaster the texture quality was slightly reduced, so this may probably be slightly reflected in the screenshots.
Otherwise, it can be noted that the update brought to the game a brighter palette of colors, improved color scheme, anti-aliasing (which in the original hurt the eyes at the edges of the textures), as well as updating the visual effects, which now do not look unclear as or what. A good example effects at the beginning of the game can be seen by looking at the screenshots of the ship that the heroes are firing at before the accident.
In short, the remaster looks “modern” and fits the style of the game very well, while the original did not show off any colors and was duller and grayer.
Original -
Remaster +
Well, as promised earlier, let’s finally talk about the most important thing, which most likely worries most of those who read this review. What's up with optimizon? How many fps are in the game? Will the remaster work on my vacuum cleaner? We will now try to answer these questions.
First of all, I would like to say that with the default settings proposed by the game, the original on high sliders produced an honest 50k/s, which, with the caveat of the old system, can be considered a quite decent indicator. Fans of high numbers can indulge themselves either by lowering the settings, which will lead to blurry textures, or they can resort to simple advice don’t torture yourself and your eyes with all this torture, but simply move on to the remaster, and here’s why. Behind last years The quality of pictures in games sometimes does not advance as much as the demands of these same games grow.
And of course, players don’t like this very much, for which they lower the ratings of games on many sites and express their dissatisfaction in the comments. But the guys from People Can Fly didn’t seem to want to be among these same hacks, and even with quite impressive differences between the requirements of the original and the remaster, they managed to do the seemingly impossible - they improved not only the quality of the graphics in the game, but also increased the FPS by 50% . Yes, yes, don’t be alarmed - this may surprise someone, but everything is much simpler.
The whole point is that the game is built on the good old Unreal Engine 3, which by modern standards produces a “Nice” picture rather than making you open your eyes wide in surprise and the quality of every detail of the world. But unlike the deplorable optimization of modern engines, the old UE3 manages to fly even on old hardware at high settings, and the fact that in recent years it has also been tricked with the notorious anti-aliasing, blurring and the maximum freerate set to an unimaginable 240 fps, suggests that the optimization the remaster should be better than the original, and believe me, it is.
As for more summary results, then the original produced ~50k/s at high, while the remaster with just one setting to medium offered already ~75k/s, and even if this setting could be turned to the maximum position, there would still be no drawdown at 25 frames. Thus, we can safely say that the developers not only updated the game, but also tried to optimize it as much as possible on modern hardware in order to squeeze much greater performance out of the old engine, because modern fashion It is no longer limited to 60 or 120 fps as it was 5 years ago, and some monitors already offer scanning with support for up to 240 fps.
In conclusion of this point, we can only add that it is unknown how the game will behave on older machines, but the fact that even a 5-year-old PC copes with the remaster better than the original is worthy of special attention good words to the developers.
Original -
Remaster +
After perhaps the most striking moments of comparison, you can sum up the results, and also devote a couple of lines to small details that someone may also find interesting. Firstly, I would like to raise a point regarding overall size installed games, where the original with all the additions after installation took up 9.8GB of hard drive space.
For a game 6 years ago it's quite a normal size, but you'd probably think that the remaster would follow the trend of everyone modern games and will differ many times more busy place? If so, we hasten to disappoint you and please you at the same time - after installation, the updated version weighs 10.7GB, which is only ~900MB more.
This is approximately 10%, and here again we can note the merit of the developers, who did not force the old engine by cramming ultra-textures into it for a maximum of 5% of players, but offered a much more adequate option suitable more players.
The remaster also boasts much more large print, which is more suitable for people with poor eyesight, as well as care for young players, which includes the ability to set a certain version of “Parental Control” in the game, where before starting the game you will be asked to enable censorship and dismemberment with blood.
Well, the cherry on this cake will be an unusual gift in the form of changing the main character’s persona to the legendary Duke Nukem, who, according to the developers, will also have a couple of additional lines in the game! Well, such a remaster can rightfully be considered a good job, because for its intended purpose it offers exactly what was expected from it.
Original -
Remaster +
Summing up the results of the comparison, we can say for sure that the remaster turned out to be quite adequate, and all the intimidating video comparisons on the Internet, as well as the inflated system requirements, unjustifiably force us to pass this game by, which is of course wrong. Bulletstorm was a solo project of People Can Fly without the strict supervision of corporate managers regulating all the main aspects of the games.
This game was exactly the one that the developers would like to make the way they, and not marketers, see it, and now, 6 years after the release of the original, they offered us even more better version, so that we can play this project, which at one time was not like everyone else, and now has made itself felt in excellent form.
Bulletstorm is just the perfect game to be blamed on the evening news for another teenager murdering a person. A little story intro and BOOM! There is massacre around you, pieces of flesh are flying, blood is on the cacti and in the center of it all you are Grayson Hunt, the commander of an elite squad who wants revenge for being simply used for murders innocent people. That is why he goes in search of General Serrano, who gave orders to the protagonist’s team. This is how the festival of violence begins, where almost all the cards are revealed to the player at the very beginning.
Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition
You're just trying to get used to the game, and a big mechanical wheel is already rolling towards you. At the same time, enemies crawl out of all the holes and beg to shoot their heads off. This, by the way, is one of the problems of the game. Trying to amaze the player in the first hour of playthrough, in the future it is difficult to perceive what he sees on the screen as something super cool, because you have already been shown such things that expectations for the future grow incredibly, but are not completely met.
Mini missions keep interest in the game - unique tasks for each weapon that the player can perform during the game. It is not necessary to do them, but then you will simply bypass the incredible variability of reprisals against opponents. And we are not talking about shots in the butts, although there is such a thing, but about opportunity. For example, shoot from sniper rifle explosive charge and blowing up several enemies without directly hitting one of the opponents with a bullet really wouldn't have occurred to me right away.
If we talk about the level system in more detail, it is quite simple. You won’t surprise anyone with the corridor type of shooter, so Bulletstorm wins in this regard due to the filling of the world. You cannot, but must, interact with objects. Cacti, trellises, living vegetation, etc. help to deal with the enemy without firing a single shot, which makes it possible to save bullets for the future, where they will really be needed. The player himself creates a combination for kills. Unless you have chosen the most difficult level of passage, then you will no longer need to think about performing some incredible shots, but about how to protect your own ass. Therefore, for the first playthrough, you should not overestimate your strength, having received a mountain of pleasure from the bloody dynamics of the average difficulty level.
Bulletstorm tries to force the player to play through the campaign multiple times. He is trying, because the “Overkill” mode, where we are offered to start the passage again with all the existing achievements and weapons, is only an attempt to encourage the player to get the achievements missed. And the “Echo” mode simply repeats all the maps from the campaign without plot inserts. It's like a training field where you can just shoot enemies. Fussing with rivals even at the end of the main campaign begins to get boring, but here we are forced to do the same for another half a dozen hours.
Multiplayer is also based on arenas where you need to shoot off the heads of enemies. If you're tired of co-op zombie games, you can move on to Bulletstorm. Here, destroying hordes of enemies is at least fun, especially with so much variety in weapon use. And with GFWL you won’t have to fool yourself. Nobody is saying that Microsoft is rotten, but the lack of this service is perhaps one of the main reasons to try this game again.
Why pay money?
Imagine if Michael Bay took over the development of Gears of War. The creators of DOOM, who are fans of Infamous, would help him, and the developers of some Call of Duty petitioned for the levels. From all this vinaigrette, Bulletstorm would be born. This game doesn’t just provide a great spectacle, but makes you want more. The only thing you want after completing it is an explosive continuation. This is where you can play on the feelings of the players, because with successful sales one could promise a sequel, but for now we can only wait. Wait for the reaction of Gearbox, which is trying to scam you out of an extra few tens of dollars.
So is the game worth buying? Of course, there’s nothing to even think about here. But you need to do this at least with a discount, because paying full price for a rather old game that will last for ten hours of entertainment is not worth it. Bulletstorm deserves a sequel, because such cinematic shooters fulfill their main task - to entertain the player.
Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition- this is a re-release of the game Bulletstorm for personal computers, expected to be released in April 2017.
The interesting thing is that the publisher is listed as Gearbox Software instead of Epic or EA. Gearbox is a fairly popular company, known for its crazy games.
First of all, this shooter. The events in the game take place on a distant planet, which is teeming with mutated people, plants and animals. For the creative killing of all these monsters, as they say "skillshots", bonuses are awarded here. "Kill masterfully"- this is a great slogan that demonstrates the essence of the game.
It is worth noting that the remaster of the video game remained as brutal and bloody as its original, released in 2011. But now the game can boast of high-resolution textures, improved lighting effects, animation, improved sound and smoother frame changes. also in new version there is absolutely every DLC that has ever existed for Bulletstorm, and in addition to this - new content that has received 6 new cards for adversarial Echo mode.
In general, the remaster is distinguished by excellent humor, of which, by the way, there is a lot here, Grayson’s incomparable comments and an emotional plot. Great universe!
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