LogFAQs > #966031039

#44: BPM: Bullets Per Minute

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/0/9/AAA-H0AADXzF.jpg

I had a rule when making this list that went something like this: I only wanted to include games that I would mostly talk about positively. It's fortunate that the number of games that I could give a glowing review really did shake out to be almost exactly 50 - these are all games that I can recommend to varying degrees and that I can write about while focusing on the positives more than the negatives. If there was a game that I felt like the review would mostly just turn into me griping about it, then it doesn't really belong on a best-of list - this should be a list of positivity, and if not, why would I rank these things on a best-of list in the first place? That's my policy. Good vibes. Strong recommendations.

I have to make one exception, though. I hope if you'll forgive me for spending the next few paragraphs airing my list of grievances about BPM: Bullets Per Minute, one of the most frustratingly designed games I've ever played. Like, really, normally I prefer to try to stay away from toxic over-complaining about a video game but I have a lot to get off my chest here.

BPM: Bullets Per Minute is a game that got recommended to me by many people due to its notable combination of genres - a rhythm-based FPS roguelike, drawing obvious parallels to my love for Crypt of the Necrodancer, another rhythm-roguelike (but not a FPS - yet). When you hear that combination of games in your brain, what you imagine in your head is pretty close to what the final product is. Randomly generated series of rooms where you can only fire your gun to the beat, and you run around getting powerups and stuff and make you way deeper and deeper into a dungeon, getting stronger until there's a final boss at the end. It's pretty much what you think it is.

It's good. It also royally pisses me off. Look, this writeup's gonna be different, I'm just gonna get into my list of gripes right away:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/1/0/AAA-H0AADXzG.jpg

1) The visual aesthetics. Yeah, I'm not gonna beat around the bush here, I think this game looks like absolute horseshit. Everything in the game is rendered in this style where everything is in a single shade - usually violently bright shades of Virtual Boy red by default, at least in the first level of the game. It is IMPOSSIBLE to look at - the default settings are completely blinding, and everything in the game is really hard to visually identify or understand because there's so little contrast between anything. It's like staring directly into the sun. I had to fuck around with the settings in this game to make it even possible to see at all; turning it all the way down to grayscale made it easier on the eyes but also made it way too dark to see anything. I eventually found a middle ground that didn't burn out my retinas but also gave objects just enough definition that I could tell they were there. But it's probably the worst-looking game I've ever enjoyed. I truly hate the artstyle of this game.

2) Bad roguelike design with regard to making meaningful choices. As a general rule, I prefer when my roguelikes give the player a lot of room to make build decisions and to hunt around and find different weapons/items potentially at the cost of putting yourself at risk of death. The worst roguelikes, for me, are the ones where whether or not you get good weapons or items, or even any weapons or items at all, is completely left up to the roll of the dice, and sadly, this is one of those games. You don't see a lot of choices of items so you're stuck with what you get, and they run the gamut from overpowered to basically useless. Will you find a weapon shop? Who knows! You're not guaranteed to on the first level, and if you don't you're in trouble. There's plenty of special bonus rooms but some of them are totally trash and some of them are game winning, but it's really just luck of the draw what you find. It reminds me of an older FPS roguelike that I hated called Ziggurat, where it just randomly gives you weapons but sometimes you don't get good ones or you get ones for slots you already have and there's nothing you can do about it, you can't like look around the level to find different ones. What makes Necrodancer good is that each level has items scattered all over it if you know where to look, but you have to hunt around, and looking for items forces you to play more of the level and potentially get yourself killed. None of that here. The level design is simply boring.

3) The stat system is incredibly opaque and boring. There's like six stats in this game - about half of them I don't know what they do at all, and the other half I have an idea of what they do but not how much they're doing. The game doesn't really make it clear how much a point into damage or range is really improving your capabilities, and good luck understanding what a point in agility or luck is even supposed to do. You don't get to pick your stats in this game - you mostly only raise them by finding little shrines placed around the levels, and again it's pure luck how many of these the game gives you, and they raise specific stats, so there's no choice here. Sometimes they're hard to find but I don't even think it's on purpose, it's just because it's hard to see anything in this game. I think raising your stats is good, but I can't even tell. It feels so boring because I can barely perceive any actual difference in my capabilities.

4) Enemy attacks are really hard to read. Half the time I can't really tell what they're doing. All FPSes have a little bit of this problem where all you can do is kind of strafe around them and hope for the best, praying that you're not going to actually bump into something in your blindspot as you do, but BPM really suffers from this because I can't tell what enemies are or what they're doing most of the time. This all goes double for bosses - I can't even remember what any of them are like because I either destroy them with an overpowered weapon or I just kinda die because I can't figure them out in time - and because of this game's visual style they don't look like anything.

5) Running across levels for powerups is annoying. When you find a health pickup, if you didn't get hurt then you can't heal yourself at max hp, so you just have to leave it there - but you can come back for it later after you do get hurt. But sometimes that can take a solid minute of running back through rooms you've already cleared out just to pick up a health pack you left behind a long time ago, and then run alllll the way back. There's no downside to doing it unless you're speedrunning, so you obviously should, but it wastes a lot of time.

6) Weapons vary wildly in power. Some of them are great. Some of them suck. You really have to experiment with them to figure out which ones are good. Again, I feel like they're boringly themed and I can't really tell the difference between most of them.

7) Platforming in FPSes suck. Please don't do this. Unfortunately, this game has a lot of FPS platforming and you stand to take a lot of damage from falling which is bad in a game where you can't just restore your health on command.

8) So there's like, optional challenge rooms in this game where you have to fight a really tough mob of enemies, but then they just basically give normal room rewards instead of something really special and cool for clearing them? I keep trying them just in hopes that I'll eventually understand why they're there but I almost always lose more than I gain from them and sometimes die? They're really unexciting and I don't understand the point.