OK, results may vary on this one. The year is 2004, and I’m late to the PlayStation 2 party (blame: EverQuest). My roommates and I are poor, finishing up our last year at Ohio State, and poor. We live in a cinderblock mansion. Three floors of verticality; the living room and kitchen on ground level, two rooms and a bathroom on the second floor, the same on the third. It’s November, and I have just purchased the hot new hot, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, alongside the PS2. My roommate, Buzz, has the TV; I’m with games; Dirty owns the backpack; and Try Hard, well, she’s the one with the car. Most of these details are important, I swear.

San Andreas is good. I don’t need to tell you that, and even if I did need to, I couldn’t possibly convey its genius right here and now in this article. What I’ll say is that for that bright, beautiful week, Columbus’ clouds and dreariness and coldness and dullness ceased to exist. Mostly because we never left the living room, thus rendering the outside world moot. There was only CJ and his bicycle, Los Santos and its stars.

But, as you tend to learn in college, life can become terrible at a moment’s notice. I’ve named Dirty as I have here not because he’s a crook, but because he’s the single most filthy, slovenly, irresponsible human being I’ve ever met. I lived with the guy for four years (blame: EverQuest), and in that time, I don’t recall him ever throwing anything away. We moved three times, and still he never threw anything away. Walking into his room was to wade into a knee-high midden heap. He never washed his socks; he simply bought new ones when the old became so sodden with sweat and grime that they maintained their shape when he removed them from his feet. I literally found a sock on the floor that was still in the shape of his foot! Just a stiff tube! (Come to think of it, the shape may have been due to a different reason… oh God, I touched it!)

But I digress. Dirty had a way of leaving the front door unlocked whenever he came home, despite being reminded on a near-daily basis not to do so, because, you know, crime-infused college town. But Dirty being Dirty came home late one night after we’d had the game for a week, left the door unlocked, and when Try Hard awoke at around 7 a.m., heard someone rummaging about on the ground floor. She thought it was me–I have no idea why–and went to class, oblivious. Try Hard comes home a few hours later, notices the missing TV, screams–I have no idea why. The rest of us wake up, head downstairs, and scream–at Dirty, for being such a lousy asshole and leaving the door unlocked yet again.

We take stock. My beautiful, new PS2 is gone, of course, as is the Xbox and myriad games. Buzz’s TV has been pinched. The thief rifled through Dirty’s backpack, dumped its contents on the floor, and then, presumably, loaded it up with my stuff. Try Hard, though. Try Hard is smug. “Haha,” she says. “What have I told you boys about playing with your toys in the living room?”

And then, two hours later, “Hey, has anyone seen my car keys?”

Want to play as the famed composer Frederic Chopin? Play Eternal Sonata!

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Immature. Wafer-thin plot. Dumb bro game. Just a long-list of dick-jokes. These were some of the criticisms thrown at Bulletstorm (opens in new tab) when it appeared back in February 2011. Didn’t bother me. In fact, I really enjoyed all the creative swears and testosterone-driven plot. In a game about murdering virtual people for high-scores, having anything less than a dumb, foul-mouthed narrative would be pretty disingenuous. It just feels… right.

I first discovered Bulletstorm about a month before it actually released, at a review event in London. Cliffy B and Adrian Chmielarz rocked up, very late, to introduce the game before we started playing. He used the words ‘Angry’ and ‘Birds’ a lot when talking about Bulletstorm, something that set off my internal alarm bells. I was tired, I was on deadline, I was hearing about Angry Birds–not a great start. But the moment I started playing all these reservations and frustrations just melted away.

From the first interactive scene–where you drunkenly shoot a bottle off a prisoner’s head and flush him out into space–through to the final scenes where you impale (yeah, it’s irony) your nemesis, General Sarrano, on an exposed spike of metal, Bulletstorm entertains and challenges. It doesn’t ponder life’s mysteries, or try to teach us about the savage nature of man. It demands that we shoot a bad guy in the nuts and then kick his head off so we can score more points than our friends.

It does that beautifully too. The actual gunplay is slick as hell, and the opportunities for combining weapons, whip and the hazards dotted around you to create absolute mayhem are vast. There are few things in games more satisfying than pinging a man 50ft into the air with a thump from your leash, before picking him out with a flare and watching him explode in a shower of gore and points. I love a smart story as much as the next person, but if the game is no fun to begin with… what’s the point?

People often criticise Bulletstorm for being a dumb game. Bulletstorm is actually one of the smartest games of this generation because it perfectly marries up gameplay and subject matter. Not only that, the balance between weaponry, scenario and the points you’re awarded for killing is incredibly well balanced. It’s one of those games where you assume you’ve nailed a certain level in Echoes–no-one could possibly beat your score–until you find someone who has not only beaten it, but smashed it. You go back, you replay, and you discover even more creative ways to kill. Most of the time, you’re not even competing against the person who beat your score; you’re challenging yourself.

People often criticise Bulletstorm’s producer, Cliff Bleszinski (formerly of Epic Games), for being a dumb bro. Cliffy B, as he’s known, is actually one of the smartest men working in games. In many ways, Bulletstorm is both his personality and persona in digital form. On the outside, it’s brash and loud. You assume it’s dumb because it wants to fist-bump you and use words like Sushi-dick. On the inside, it’s smart and knows exactly how to entertain and amaze you.

When it launched, no-one really knew what to make of Bulletstorm. It was a new shooter entering an industry at the height of the Call of Duty craze. It looked a bit like Gears of War, but it was first-person and had high-scores like a retro game. It laughed at itself and challenged the prevailing thinking that games should be serious, gritty and arty. No wonder it received a mixed critical reception and underperformed in the sales charts.

It was great to see Bulletstorm recently appear as one of the PS Plus instant game collection titles. This has undoubtedly exposed it to a wider range of people who ‘gave it a go, because it was free’. My hope is that I don’t even have to talk it up to you all–you’ve already played it. Good. A big, dumb game like Bulletstorm deserves a large, discerning audience like yourselves.

Want to parachute children into bottomless pits? Play Snowboard Kids!

Looking for games to play outside of the stuff we already tell you to play on a daily basis? You’re in luck! Every Saturday we’ll recommend an older game for you to check out, complete with a story on how we found the game and why we recommend you play it.

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