WARNING: THIS REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS
Skip to the fourth paragraph if you want to get right to the segment that describes the game.
I recently picked up Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition but to be honest, it was an impulse buy and it would've been wiser to look for a demo on the PSN before buying it. I think I remember downloading a demo, but not playing it because I thought it would be bland to me by having a counter strike vibe. Boy was I wrong; I never thought it would actually end up so close to being perfect for me. I don't know if the gameplay is different from the initial release, but the version I have is fantastic.
Now to get to the gameplay, I'll talk about the combat soon enough, but let me first disspell some concerns that might arise from my description in sort of an anti-disclaimer for those who are pessimistic.
There's a game mechanic where you can melee enemies into floating slo-mo mode while they glow the most beautiful of cobalt blue and let's you juggle them around. There's an invisible wall that prevents you from accidentally impaling yourself on —spike walls and cacti (cacti is the plural of cactus,)— and many (but not all) of the exposed electrical wires and hazards. Also, the health automatically regenerates while avoiding bulletfire so no need to worry about health pickups. —The list of stunts that you have performed— carries over from campaign mode to new game+ mode and subsequent playthroughs so if it was inevitable for you to perform —at least one new stunt,— on every playthrough and you keep playing though it on new game+ over and over again, then you're 100% likely to unlock all of the stunts. —The reward for unlocking all of the stunts is infinite ammo for that weapon,— but you can disable that feature if you've unlocked all the stunts and don't want infinite ammo.
So let's talk about the game, as I mentioned before, there's a visually stunning melee attack that puts your enemies (besides bosses and minibosses) into floating slo-mo mode, which gives you enough time to either figure out whether you want to impale your enemies on spikes, knock them into exposed electrical wires (or throw them into one of the many, many things that will 1-hit instakill them) or just shoot them as they float helplessly like ragdolls in The Matrix.
The crown jewel of this amazing gameplay mechanic is an OP lasso that pulls enemies towards you even from behind cover and through the cover, itself, which I genuinely thought was a glitch when I saw it. There are certain enemies that have to be kicked blinded with toxic fruit before it can be used on them and it doesn't work on bosses or minibosses, but there's a super powered charged shot that can kill —any miniboss that has a gun— in 1-3 shots (that would be the charged shotgun shell) and there's only one boss in the entire game and it's really easy.
—The stand on which the games crown jewel rests— is a a system where you get rewarded points for killing enemies using —methods other than the standard 'shoot it until it's dead' strategy,— and you use those points to buy weapon upgrades and enhanced bullets that have an extra effect such as the aforementioned charged shotgun blast that sends out —a shockwave that turns everything it passes through into scorched bones.—
So the final word is that if you like fast-paced action games that don't put you in constant fear of dying in two seconds from being spotted by one enemy, I'd say buy it. If you don't feel the need to play as Duke Nukem (since playing as him literally has no effect on the gameplay, just the dialogue,) I'd say buy it pre-owned for the PS3.
