Final Thoughts
The single-player portion of Bulletstorm certainly makes for a fun and unique shooter experience. While there's still a limited number of ways to entertain the skillshot system, the game didn't seem to get old, at least for me. Concerning the multiplayer aspect of the game, on the other hand, I'm not as convinced, perhaps I need to spend more time getting into it, but so far there is little calling me back.
On another positive note, those wanting to pick up a copy of Bulletstorm, chances are if you've been able to successfully play games released within the few years using high-quality graphics settings, the same should be true for Bulletstorm.
The game will run perfectly well using a mid-range graphics card at 1680x1050. However because of the native implementation of Anti-Aliasing we found Bulletstorm to be considerably more taxing on the GPU than other Unreal Engine 3-based games like Singularity.
In other words, the easy route for boosting performance is simply to disable Anti-Aliasing. Although we don't enjoy looking at all the jagged edges, this means that graphics cards such as the Radeon HD 4850 and GeForce GTS 450 will be able to provide playable performance at 1680x1050 using high quality visual preset.
For those concerned about their old dual-core processor, need not worry as Bulletstorm is primarily GPU dependent. For the most part an old Core 2 Duo or even a budget Athlon II X2 processor will deliver virtually the same gaming experience as a Core i7 processor in Bulletstorm, which is not something we find often.
Throughout the testing phase we ran into no problems with Bulletstorm and as far as we are concerned this was a justified release. However that is not to say the game is perfect. There are a large number of settings that need to be better tuned for PC gaming and they can go a long way to improving Bulletstorm's gameplay experience.
Just removing the ridiculous fps cap makes a considerable difference on how the game feels. It's not uncommon for PC gamers to fine-tune games to suit their style and preferences, so why has the developer made doing so such a nightmare? They say it is to prevent cheating, we say they could have provided the tweakable settings for performance in a separate customizable configuration file to keep everyone happy.