Bulletstorm
All hail.
Anarchy takes co-op to heart, letting loose with the points only when you're working together on some truly collaborative murder. This is where Bulletstorm standards like Team Deep Penetration (being shot by several people at once, I gather) and Drawn & Quartered (being torn apart by more than one fizzing electrical leash) really come into their own.
It requires genuine teamwork to make the most of every situation. If your attention wanders, the game's pretty good at broadcasting opportunities for a combo attack using the age-honoured system of having them flash up on the screen in massive letters. This gives you plenty of time to quickly rush over to the action and put a boot in while there's still life to extinguish.
In a final twist, an unlock shop appears in between waves to make sure the carnage gets more and more extreme as the challenge progresses. It's smart, ghoulishly enjoyable stuff.
While it would be nice to have spent a bit longer with the campaign itself at this point, Anarchy and Echo are enough to suggest that Bulletstorm is coming together rather well.
The levels are colourful, richly detailed and filled with gimmicks. A run about during Echo let me loose in a cluster of futuristic garbage piles strung across an balmy atoll, while Anarchy takes place in an area built from blood-red caverns surrounding a pit with, um, a tornado in the centre.
More importantly, there's a real sense that the developers have thought through all of the brutally creative things players are likely to dream up. Think of an imaginative kill and the chances are the team got there first, and is waiting to reward you with a shower of points and an amusing name, probably taken from the realms of adult cinema.
The elaborately deranged weapon set provides huge potential for hilarious destruction. You'll get to try out cannons that fire bolo grenades, wrapping around an enemy's neck before exploding. Then there's the bone-duster, a quad-barrelled shotgun that's great for blasting enemies into the sky. Or how about the bouncer, which sends rubbery bombs springing through the world and is named after a dog from Neighbours.
Bulletstorm is a shooter where you're looking for the juicy racing line that runs through each level. Its high score arcade ethos has been tried before - notably with love-'em-or-hate-'em oddities like The Club - but it's never been done with this kind of big-budget assurance and hillbilly humour. Fling that together with a single-player campaign packed with set-pieces and huge bosses and you can see why EA's excited about this one.
So it seems 2011 might just be the best year yet when it comes to shooting other people in the nuts. Where do I sign?