There’s no campaign co-op in Bulletstorm due to it’s style of gameplay.
Cliff Bleszinski has told of why they haven’t brought a co-op campaign to Bulletstorm.
“First off, it was in there at one point and it actually worked, but we found that the game shifted from being this kind of puzzle shooter into essentially this downhill skiing simulator, where people were seeing how fast they could get to the bottom of the mountain,” he said, speaking to UK paper The Daily Telegraph.
“Really the game just broke down, and it was a situation where people would race through the game, ignoring the vistas and they wouldn’t set up as many skillshots.
“So when we made the decision to go straight campaign, it gave us the chance to put in one-offs that could only be controlled by one player, like the giant robotic dinosaur, where you don’t have to worry about Player 2, or slow motion one-offs that could only occur in a single player game.”
Although Bulletstorm’s campaign mode is only single-player, the game does still feature a co-operative mode in its multiplayer.
There’s team-based play, for up to four players, in which people go against an infinite number of harder and harder enemies, much like the Horde mode in Gears of War 2.
What might seem a little strange, is the lack of a deathmatch mode for player vs player. There’s no killing of other real people in the game at all, CliffyB explains:
“We empower the player through the verbiage and the weapons so much that if you were in multiplayer on the receiving end of that, it would be the most agonising, unpleasant experience,” Bleszinski said.
“It is a solvable problem, I do believe, but it would basically require building an entirely new game that is in many ways not even Bulletstorm.
“The flail gun, for example, where you wrap up enemies for up to six seconds, which would be an eternity if you’re playing an online first person shooter. People in Gears of War, where we’d have a pause for half a second for an explosion or something, were raging, they wanted to keep moving.
“It could be something that could happen, but in this day and age, with the Wild Wild West nature of Xbox Live or PSN, where for every friend made there’s someone insulting you, I’m a fan of co-op. I like the idea of four players teaming up, cracking open some beers and having a good time together.”