I'm going to put this bluntly: Bulletstorm is not good. It's not even decent. It's downright bad.
I'll start with the good parts. The graphics are really quite good; the texture work is done well and the game has that signature polished metal look that most games Epic has been involved in share. The lighting is fantastic, though that is to be expected from the Unreal Engine at this stage. The environments are your standard ho-hum shooter fare, with industrial jungle areas and futuristic ravaged cityscapes. All of it looks quite nice, and for that I have to give Bulletstorm credit.
The sound is also good, with guns sounding suitably powerful and ambient noise doing a nice job of setting the stage. The soundtrack, however, is lifeless, mundane, and generally weak. It does nothing for the game, and in more than a few instances I found myself wondering aloud why they would include such awful, mediocre music. The voice acting is passable, although the horrific writing behind the game takes a significant portion of the shine off some of the actors' talent, but more on that later.
The story is horrendous, there's really no way around that. I'm not sure who came up with the idea to actually pen a story that tries to take itself seriously in a game like Bulletstorm, but they should be fired. The opening scene involves you and a redneck partner stumbling around your ship drunk while interrogating a hostage and eventually assaulting a much larger capital ship. The whole opening is painful and the only demographic that will find it interesting or funny is the slack-jawed frat boys who like anything if it has to do with drinking. Despite this ridiculous opening, the story then proceeds to try to tell a touching story of redemption and revenge through the lens of an awful and completely unlikeable protagonist, whose name I can't even be bothered to remember now. It's very nearly impossible to care what's going on, and that puts a serious damper on the game. There are some failed attempts at humor, but for the most part the game seems to actually think it has something meaningful to say.
Bulletstorm would have been better had the entire story been removed from the game. I never even bothered finishing it - a true rarity for me - because I couldn't have cared any less about the world, characters, or "mission." Unfortunately, the awful story is backed by some of the worst writing I've ever heard. The script sounds as if it was composed by middle school students who are just beginning to experiment with cussing. I can't even repeat most of it here, but suffice it to say that about 75% of the dialogue is a pathetic attempt to string together swear words, sexual organs, and bodily functions into barely coherent insults. It isn't funny, it isn't cute, and it can't be classified as anything but awful. If you are into potty humor, this is your game. If you prefer more thoughtful, well written humor like that in Portal or Portal 2, prepare to have your I.Q. knocked back a couple of points just from subjecting yourself to this stupidity.
Even more unfortunate for Bulletstorm is its immense failure to capitalize on its one major draw: the skillshots. These kills range from kicking an enemy and then shooting him in the genitals/anus (of course), to sliding into him and knocking him into a conveniently placed spike wall. They are enjoyable for the first level or so (you don't even unlock them until an hour or so into the campaign), but quickly devolve into tedium due to the fact that the pretty pop ups telling you what you did and displaying the huge points you got for doing it soon shrivel up into withered little +10s that are about as satisfying to look at as a plank of wood. Go ahead, Bulletstorm, make a sex joke. I'll wait...
Ostensibly this reduction in visual stimuli is to force you to use new moves. Seeing which moves have to be done to get back to the dopamine-producing pretty lights, however, involves pausing the game and scrolling through a list of dozens of possible kills. In a game designed to be focused on action and gunplay, the decision to force players out of the action and into a pause menu every ten seconds or so baffles me. It completely breaks any immersion that the game had gong for it (which wasn't much due to the bland enemies and laughable AI), and it sucks all the life out of the action. It's like going grocery shopping with bullets. Look at list, complete action, look at list again. This is one of the most poorly thought out mechanics I've seen in recent years, and it kills any value the game had. Why not let the satisfying kill pop-ups continue and simply give more points for unique kills? Why inhibit the only good feature in the game? I certainly don't know.
Beyond the poor campaign, Bulletstorm offers no real multiplayer. It does offer a horde-like cooperative mode that can be fun from time to time, but really just boils down to a less-than-innovative twist on a mode Epic has done before and for the most part repeats the same sins as the single player campaign. The other option is Echo mode, which essentially just funnels you through the most action packed levels in the story and compares your scores and times against others on a leaderboard. This had potential, but again it is limited by either forced and frequent list checking or simple memorization. I had high hopes for this game, and I'm sad to report that it has failed miserably to live up to them. Apparently some like the game for reasons I don't understand, but I recommend avoiding it at all costs.