Bulletstorm was a good mix of cinematic linearity and interesting encounter design with cool open arenas, and had a good and dynamic shooting system that encouraged diversity of play.
Uh...
5 years is 2011. Not sure there's much else I'd go to bad for in that timeframe. Most of the interesting stuff in the first person space has been in non-shooter designs like post-Portal FP puzzlers and post-Amnesia FP horror and the rise of walking simulators. I don't think there's been anything multiplayer driven in the FP space that's interested me since TF2.
Certainly I wouldn't go to bat for Halo or Call of Duty. Maybe Battlefield is better but it doesn't release on platforms I own.
I found Bulletstorm super okay, but that's about it. While the game ostensibly encouraged a variety of play, it never ever intrinsically incentivized or required it. I found the kill with skill stuff to be adjunct to the actual encounter design; I could slide into one enemy, knocking him into the air and then drill shoot him in the testicles to stick him onto a spiked plant, but all it did was get me bonus points which were never necessary to generate actually useful abilities.
It's one of the core issues with an unlock system that is gated by player use variance in a linear campaign: you either make every enemy defeatable with base abilities or you risk hard locking progress not behind player skill, but ability unlock.
As such, the encounter and enemy design stays flat through the entire game. You never HAVE to actually kill with skill to overcome obstacles. You never have to actually be better at the game or delve into the variety of mechanics available to you. You can just quad shotgun every enemy in the face and kick them into spikes. Machine gun them from a distance and aim for every red barrel. It's bread and butter shooter design with the ability to layer (sort of?) interesting combinatorial weapon mixing on top if you're so inclined. But you don't have to to progress.
Other issues with the game: incredibly linear levels that you just walk or run through to stop in a kill room to blast away. The enemies don't have awareness states so you can't plan an encounter. it's all reactivity - which is fine in shooters, but because the awareness states don't exist in the pathing or encounter structure, every fight ends up the same. They can't do the push pull of having scenarios that the user can initiate and then have an ambush, then have a locked-in-room, then have a traversal fight, then back to a user initiated fight, etc. It's all just one note.
Speaking of one note - it's one of the flattest shooters I've ever played on the account of not have a jump button. There is almost no verticality and the visual dissonance of having knee high obstacles that you can't traverse is grating. Being able to jump is not some massive necessity, but it severely limits the type of encounter design the designers can create levels for (like the awareness state thing above), and it structures the game around that one-note feeling the rest of it has.
I guess it could be one of those "make your own fun" types of games, which is fine, but damn: in a completely non-grounded world with walking down the sides of buildings and man eating plants - the actual bread and butter enemies couldn't have been more rote (the running at you enemy! The machine gun enemy! The sniper enemy!). When you design these wacky weapons with secondary fire and push skill kills as your thing, why not go ape on the enemy designs with non-standard behaviours and strengths and weaknesses?
Like, I can't remember a single encounter from that game. I can remember walking down the side of a building at the beginning (that was cool), and that the entire palette of the game was the bluest and yellowest thing I'd seen in years, but the actual game is a blur of shooting gruel.
It was okay.
EDIT: i just realized that this post may come across in that OH YOU LIKE THAT GAME? IT'S SHIT! which is was never meant to be. I just am always trying to find out why certain GAF member like certain shooters and why some don't. And actually talking about game design. I'm not some Nu-Doom fan (i'll probably buy it when it's $5), it's just that shooter discussions here generally never get into how the actual games are structured and designed, and i jump at any chance to do so. So often the phrase "the shooting is good" is used in the place of actual discussion, when the phrase is at best confused for 10 different things amongst 10 different posters, and at worst, entirely meaningless.
