Bulletstorm should be the last game that appeals to me. I’ve criticised games such as Killzone for having generic-sounding “ShootMan: Kill”-type names, and my frustration with the market’s oversaturation of first-person shooters is well-documented.

So why do I find myself wanting to play it?

Well, there’s quite a few reasons, actually, and despite Bulletstorm‘s generic-sounding title and the fact it is indeed a first-person shooter, there’s enough in it to get me interested. Most importantly, though, it’s a game which doesn’t take itself too seriously in the slightest. It knows only too well how ridiculous it is, and it’s happy to provide said ridiculousness in spades.

There’s a couple of specific things that get me, though. First up is score attack. Score attack is something that I seem to have developed something of a liking for in the last couple of years thanks mostly to Geometry Wars 2 and Pac-Man Championship Edition DX or whatever the bloody thing is called. Score attack is a simple, asynchronous way for people to play “together” and compete. It allows people on opposite sides of the world the chance to enjoy some friendly competition without those pesky timezones getting in the way. It encourages people to talk about the game. And it encourages people to replay the game rather than just ditching it after they’ve beaten the campaign.

The second thing about Bulletstorm is ironically one of the things that I thought would put me off it, and that is its immaturity. It has a sense of humour and throws obscenities around with gay abandon and from everything I’ve heard from reputable sources of information (well, friends) is all the better for it. A line about “killing your dick off” is supposedly a particular highlight, but the fact the demo for the game ended by referring to the player as “dick-tits” pretty much convinced me that this was a game built on the same values as late 90s shooters in which cheeky, immature fun was at the forefront, not trying to be over-the-top epic.

Fun is good. A lot of shooters, in my experience anyway, seem to be forgetting that part. When you repeat the same bit over and over again due to cheap deaths and hear the same annoying bit of inevitably-shouted dialogue over and over again, it kills all sense of immersion in the story which the developers are clearly trying so hard to achieve. Sure, I haven’t played the full version of Bulletstorm yet, but since the plot is rather secondary to the gameplay and the scoring, it strikes me as something that will be rather less frustrating than the reason I put Gears of War down and have never touched that series since.

All of the above isn’t to say that I am going to get Bulletstorm. I haven’t decided yet. But they’ve done something right along the way, as it’s the first shooter in a very long time that I’ve been genuinely very interested in playing.