1. Summary
2. Background
3. Hype

Bulletstorm is the inheritor of a storied legacy. While tactical, semi-realistic games like halo and Modern Warfare are all the rage today, shooters were originally a little more ridiculous. Games like Serious Sam showed us just how over-the-top violent and fun an arcade-style shooter could be after we became accustomed to the less frantic style of gunplay. Painkiller refined it, and now Bulletstorm is going to refine it even more. Naturally, there's a lot of influences on Bulletstorm, thanks to its status, and we wouldn't have it any other way.

The first, and most obvious, influence on Bulletstorm is the cult-hit Painkiller. Revolving around one man's fight against the forces of hell, Painkiller channels id's classics in both story and gameplay. The gameplay bordered on the silly, with tons of gore and physics as you blasted away through increasingly more bizarre environments. Besides the shooting, there was a card system (gaining cards by completing certain extra objectives), which would later show itself to be a distant relative of the scoring system seen in Bulletstorm previews. Both the original game and its expansion pack are excellent, and they are also budget price now, so there's no excuse for fans of shooters to pass up this classic.

As People Can Fly made the PC port of Gears of War, elements of Epic's hit series have made it into Bulletstorm. The bulky, powerful-looking characters are a far cry from the relatively normal-looking character from Painkiller. The guns bear a distinctly industrial aesthetic that Gears of War had as well. The story is inspired by military science-fiction and takes place on a ruined planet, just like Gears of War. However, where Gears of War's aesthetics has leaked over slightly, the gameplay has not. Unless you mean the ridiculous gore and violence, which both games have in spades. Gears of War is a much slower and methodical game than Bulletstorm appears to be, thanks to the weight of the characters.

One game that most of the populace overlooked that appears to have an affect on Bulletstorm is the shooter Black. With a stereotypical spec ops storyline and fairly standard levels, it's nothing special in terms of gameplay. However, two points about the game appear to have been integrated into Bulletstorm: hyperkinetic gunplay and a focus on creative kills. Creative killing in shooters is not an uncommon theme, but the combination of visceral violence and environmental destruction with this theme of scoring through kills is reminiscent of Black. It may not have been great, or even released on PC, but it's still entertaining.

The last game that Bulletstorm is being compared to is Borderlands. Frankly, we were a little baffled as to how they are similar in any way, but on second glance, they do have a few similarities in their presentation. Both games have eccentric-looking heroes fighting in a world comprised of mutated fauna and flora. Both games have strange guns, although Bulletstorm's guns are definitely more strange than Borderlands. Both games have a very earthen color scheme, with browns and greens everywhere. Both games have numbers that pop above enemies, although they are for different reasons in each game. However, when it comes to the core of the gameplay, there's not much in common between them. Even the art style is different. They just happen to use the same palette!