Bulletstorm Full Clip Edition launched on modern consoles and PCs last week. In a different universe, maybe the remaster of this 2011 first-person shooter would have had some obvious, significant care poured into it. Maybe it would come with new modes or twists, or maybe it would be paired with an event, an anniversary, or a beloved character in a way that reestablished its context as a quality, one-of-a-kind shooter. Any of those things might have given the game a decent shot both critically and commercially.

Instead, the game launched as both a bad product and a clueless answer to the ongoing question of how we should value video game purchases.

Kill really stupid enemies, but with skill





















In 2011, the gaming world was pretty much done with the genre of trick-score video games. The most glaring example was that Tony Hawk's virtual reign was long over, replaced by the "let's just glitch forever" whimsy of 2010's Skate 3. Bulletstorm arrived as a last-gasp attempt to freshen the concept, and it was admittedly pretty fun—and absolutely gorgeous—at the time.

With an electric lasso, a variety of Doom-inspired super-weapons, and a couple of useful kick attacks (standing or speed-sliding), Bulletstorm expected you to fling enemies all over the place and kill them creatively. Kick to launch an enemy into a wall and you'd get a special bonus for killing him with the environment. Lasso another one to fly in your direction, then kick them back into the air and aim at their butt (yes, specifically) for another unique point bonus.

Bulletstorm's colorful worlds, expansive views, and die-real-good enemies showed off all the aging-hardware performance power that Unreal Engine 3 could muster. And the basic mechanic of contending with waves of foes, then killing them creatively to rack up points, put an exclamation point on a concept that had been toyed with elsewhere (most notably, Sega's 2008 game The Club).

It was fine. It's still fine. A game that both looked forward and backward, Bulletstorm's most unique elements feel fresh because so few games tried the same ideas. The problem was, and always will be, that Bulletstorm required a few painful design decisions to work as intended, including obnoxiously gated world designs and incredibly dumb enemies. To pull off the game’s melee and short-burst attacks, which spice up the point-rewarding “skill kill” combos, you need complicit AI. These idiots run directly up to your armed-to-the-teeth hero and attack in one-at-a-time fashion, like in a bad Chuck Norris film.

The gaming world saw this game and, for whatever reason, sighed. One reason might have been its tiresome, genitalia-obsessed aggro-dude dialogue, which sounds a lot like other Eastern European takes on gun-happy American culture; it's very similar to the film Hardcore Henry, for example. You'd probably be more on the nose blaming the fact that Call of Duty fever ruled all consoles at the time.

Bulletstorm had no competitive online modes, let alone any of the grabby, XP-laden romps that ruled at the time. It also didn't include campaign co-op, which was a letdown in an era when Halo kept co-op appetites quite high. The only multiplayer mode was a cooperative enemy-wave battle, but this never truly felt cooperative. You could get all kinds of bonuses for juggling and combining attacks against an opponent by yourself, but Bulletstorm didn't have as many ways for friends to do this together in this "Anarchy" mode. At least players could simul-lasso a bad guy and rip it apart that way, but there were only seven such co-op skillshots in all; that wasn't enough to drive a non-stop co-op gib-fest.

Lest we forget, this was also a product from EA's "see what sticks" era of one-off game publishing in the late '00s and early '10s. Bulletstorm, Syndicate, Shadows of the Damned, the Army of Two series: lots of weird stuff appeared and then was just kind of forgotten (particularly in terms of ongoing online update support, since this was also the wretched era of "online pass" pack-ins for disc games).

Eyes on the deathwatch

The latter issue is probably the major reason a Bulletstorm remaster should even exist. Only a company like early-2010s EA could release a game that qualifies both as "high profile" and "cult classic," after all. With the game's license in hand, Bulletstorm's creators at People Can Fly Games had a shot to remind modern gamers that, hey, it wasn't all that bad. And then... they handed the publishing keys to Gearbox Studios.

Yes, Gearbox, the same company I personally added to Ars' 2017 Business Deathwatch list. Bulletstorm Full Clip Edition was the reason I even considered Gearbox for the list, because I saw a problem coming. I knew what a flop the original game had been in its era. I didn't see any event or excitement building around its second coming. And I had seen Gearbox flail wildly at getting gamers' attention for months. The worst example was a "nobody was asking for this" re-re-remaster of Duke Nukem 3D for modern consoles, which included brand-new levels and a rebuilt version of the original game's wonky build engine (which famously faked its 3D effect at the time).

The Duke remaster was timed for the original game's 20th anniversary, but that seemed like less of a reason for its release. The larger issue was Battleborn, a long-in-development MOBA-ish shooter that premiered pretty much DOA in early 2016. (Talking about Battleborn could seriously derail this article, but I dove back into the game a couple of months ago, with barely any online players to match up with, and was astonished by how poorly it teaches or emphasizes any of its unique aspects. Simply saying "Overwatch overshadowed Battleborn" misses the point.)

Two duds in a row isn't good news for cashflow. Maybe that's why Gearbox picked up the publishing rights to Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition and slapped a $50 price tag on its digital download version and $60 on the boxed console edition.

Full Clip fails to deliver a certain "bang"







Let me be frank: "Bang for the buck" as a phrase sits in the bottom of my trash can of hated phrases. Gaming is afflicted with this metric in ways that other media are not, and while I understand that to some extent—games revolve around repeat play and constant manipulation, and thus have a more pronounced cost-to-content ratio—I shy away from emphasizing it.

But Bulletstorm Full Clip Edition is a different proposition because it's re-asking for your gaming time and attention—and it does so little to earn it. Case in point: this game's content and mechanics haven't changed at all. Set up a second monitor and load a Let's Play of the Xbox 360 original while playing the new one, and watch as seemingly identical content whisks by.

Much of the original art direction and asset work still holds up nicely, with apparent geometric details filling out large, open-air views (as opposed to pre-drawn skyboxes). Some updates to textures and engine effects (bumped from Unreal Engine 3 to UE4) have clearly been implemented, particularly for those who want to play in 4K, and these are appreciated, as is the generally efficient rendering to keep 4K play at a 60-frames-per-second refresh on moderate hardware.

One of the biggest Full Clip upgrades comes in the facial rendering system, which fixes some of the creepy face issues in the original. Overall, though, it doesn't mask, smooth out, or fix the remaining uncanny-valley issues with how faces animate and react—which means the faces still look horribly dated. And in terms of sheer geometry and processor-pushing effects, Full Clip isn't adding much of anything. It looked good last time, and it looks the same this time.

In some game-restoration cases, a massive price tag makes sense. In particular, some beloved games' source code is just totally gone—somebody forgot to save some master files, or an important floppy disk got tossed during a merger, or something else. This stuff happens, and it requires some painstaking work to restore the exact look and feel of a classic. Full Clip clearly isn't in this camp, since its cut scenes and level geometry are mostly one-for-one matches with the original.

I have felt more interactive excitement holding a burning $5 bill in my hand.

Having the existing code base handy might have let People Could Fly's developers hit the ground running, but they didn't build new content or stitch together existing modes or levels beyond what the core game already offered. Heck, even some interface-related tricks could have been added, like a speedrun-specific mode that further streamlined transitions between levels. (The game's existing "Echoes" mode already cuts to the chase in terms of delivering explosive, arcade-burst doses of Bulletstorm's missions.)

Instead, the remaster adds one "new" and "major" gameplay element: a character swap, in which main character Grayson Hunt is replaced by Duke Nukem (and newly voiced by original Duke voice actor John St. John). This is embarrassingly bad.

None of the other game dialogue is changed to reflect the fact that Grayson, who had been leader of a ragtag cast of mercenaries, now looks, sounds, and acts like Duke Nukem. (They all continue referring to you as "Gray" or "Grayson," with Duke occasionally asking who the heck that is.) As a player, your own abilities and actions are identical. Half of the time, Duke parrots the same dialogue that Grayson originally spoke, while the other half sees him stitching together this cockamamie body-swap premise with flat, curse-laden boasts.

Worst of all, Gearbox doesn't even make this Duke patch a default part of the full-price package. You are asked to pay $5 more to play it (unless you made the dubious decision of pre-ordering Full Clip, in which case the Duke pack was a freebie). I have felt more interactive excitement holding a burning $5 bill in my hand than playing with any of Duke's "enhancements" turned on.

The eye of the storm

I'm not the first person on the Internet to point out that Bulletstorm: Full Clip seems way too expensive, but I find the conversation fascinating because of how many industry players are experimenting with prices these days, both with physical and digital-only games. Most intriguing is how game makers outside of the triple-A space have to convince fans that anything in the $40-and-up range is worth it.

In some cases, it's sheer brute force of emphasizing finely crafted content. The Witness offers the most recent and high-profile example, priced at $40. In others, a high price tag sets an expectation that a "season pass" cost is already inherent in the package. Ongoing updates to content and gameplay balance, plus a lack of subscription cost to play on live servers, makes a $40-60 package a lot easier to purchase.

Bulletstorm: Full Clip does offer a $10 price shave for its downloadable version, but $50 is still a lot to ask for a game whose Xbox 360 original can still be nabbed for as little as $10 used. Gearbox had all the opportunity in the world to impress upon people why this remaster, as opposed to all of the other remasters or all of the other Early Access first-person experiments, was worth a full, modern price. Instead, the company gave us identical content, a dated perspective on multiplayer, old-looking faces, and a Duke Nukem add-on that is only worth its cost in unintentional comedy. (And it did so in a modern game-price market that has made abundantly clear how likely the price will plunge.)

As such, Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition will probably be better remembered as a baffling example of game marketing and distribution than as a fine-enough retouching of a unique shooter. Game-industry historians will probably have a field day uncovering just how and why People Can Fly didn't just go to digital storefronts on its own. Assuming this remaster's half-cocked launch sets Gearbox's public unraveling into motion, we may soon hear exactly how that, and other head-smackingly dumb decisions, went down.

This article has been updated to correct information about Bulletstorm's cooperative modes.