Bulletstorm’s Energy Leash, a signature weapon that broke a host of FPS rules – and worked

Bulletstorm is a gutsy, brash yet intelligent firstperson shooter, combining a sniggering, juvenile sense of humour with thoughtful ideas about how to encourage, incentivise and reward creative, extravagant carnage. It’s a shooter about shooting, so focused in its appreciation of all the many ways bullets can tear through flesh that it’s easy to forget that its signature weapon – the glowing, whiplike Energy Leash – has been snatched from an entirely different genre of game.

The Energy Leash is Bayonetta’s whip, it’s Dante’s Demon Pull and Angel Lift abilities, it’s Nero’s Devil Bringer arm. In thirdperson brawlers, grapple tools like these provide a snappy way to instantly negate the gap between you and your enemies, chain combos together, and look controlled and cool while doing so.

Bulletstorm has Skillshots, not combos, and a firstperson perspective doesn’t lend itself to admiring your savage attack strings. Still, an FPS built around earning points for murdering NPCs in stylishly inventive ways (knocking them into the air, say, then hitting them with an explosive round to send them sailing another 50 feet) needed a more tactile verb sheet than the abilities offered by Call Of Duty. You can’t set up the perfect Skillshot if you can’t reach out and grab, can you?

The Energy Leash’s two moves are the connective material that hold the Skillshot system together – as fundamental to setting up high scores and stringing together tricks as the manual was in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2. The first ability lets you snatch an enemy and tug them towards you where they’ll float, temporarily suspended. The second grabs your victim and slams him to the ground, causing all nearby assailants to bounce into the sky.

Dozens of Skillshots require one of these steps, and others are more easily achieved using them. As well as giving Bulletstorm’s combat a dynamic, bouncy rhythm unlike other shooters, the Leash gives players control. Without it, the Skillshot system would force players to wait for opportune Skillshot moments to appear. With it, players carve out opportune moments of their own. In

fact, the Energy Leash wound itself so tightly around the Skillshot system that when we ask Bulletstorm’s creative director, Adrian Chmielarz, which came first, he can’t even remember.

“Was it first? Goddamn it, I can’t recall. It’s so connected to the Skillshot system that I actually cannot say,” he begins. “I can say that the Skillshot system itself was introduced well after preproduction. The problem we faced with it was that you’re fighting these enemies and, yeah, you’d expect them to take cover. It makes them believable, not just standing in the open. But [we wanted] players to have fun with all the Skillshots. That’s hard when all you see is a couple of pixels sticking out behind cover. You can do the stop-and-pop gameplay. But that’s it.”

The Leash was the perfect solution. It meant that Bulletstorm’s enemies could be as cowardly as they like and still discover they had nowhere to hide. Tellingly, in the finished game the brutes that charge straight at you pose a greater threat than those that just duck behind cover. As useful as the Leash is, however, and as much as it resolves Bulletstorm’s potential design pitfalls, People Can Fly’s novel weapon seemed sure to raise problems of its own. Not least because the studio had handed players a tool more useful, versatile and powerful than anything else in the game – and offered unlimited uses for its standard attack.

“It was very counterintuitive to us to offer such a powerful weapon, that can basically grab every single enemy in the game and expose them. To give that to the player, for free, with no limits – during testing we were like, ‘Dude, no, it’s too powerful, the range is too high. I can just abuse it!’ We tried to stop it, actually. We were going to overheat the leash if you were using it too often. We were going to have munitions. But we realised that when it was unlimited, the game was just an insane amount of fun. On the surface completely wrong, like unlimited ammo for a gun. But it worked!”

The Leash works because Bulletstorm is, frankly, an easy game, but one in which players effectively set their own difficulty level. The challenge here isn’t surviving, it’s utilising the Leash to ratchet up hundreds of points via inventive Skillshot combinations. Coming out of an encounter unscathed doesn’t feel like victory; it feels like the bare minimum expected of you. Still, this poses a question of its own. Without Skillshots the Leash is merely an overpowered weapon. But once they’re there, how do you weave such an overt points mechanic into the fiction of the game? Questions relating to immersion and ludonarrative dissonance are important to Chmielarz.

“Sometimes I think we made a mistake,” he says, “trying to incorporate the Skillshot system into the game, trying to make sure the Leash and Skillshots were part of the story. We had this story, and we had this great idea, and we knew the game was better because of it. But it made the story a little bit convoluted. We had a cool, simple story, and suddenly there was another layer.”

For us, part of the Energy Leash’s guilt-free thrill can be found in the way the surrounding story and upgrade systems justify its use as a tool of cruel and unusual punishment. We’ve played plenty of games that ask us to kill things – but few that invite us to have quite so much fun doing so.

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