Video Game Review: BPM: Bullets Per Minute

Developer: Awe Interactive

Publisher: Playtonic LTD

Genre: First-Person Shooter/Rhythm/Roguelike

Platform: PlayStation 4

You know, Dear Reader… in hindsight, I’m not sure why I thought I’d be any better at rhythm-based roguelike BPM: Bullets Per Minute than I am at rhythm-based roguelike Crypt of the Necrodancer – which is to say, VERY bad. Maybe it was that it’s a first-person shooter rather than a top-down dungeon crawler, maybe it was that the movement isn’t restricted like in Necrodancer, maybe it was simply hubris. Whatever the case, I was VERY wrong, but I nevertheless have a great time playing it.

The Basics: BPM: Bullets Per Minute is a blend of first-person shooter, rhythm game, and roguelike mechanics in which you assume the role of a Valkyrie fighting through four of Norse Paganism’s nine realms to kill the dragon Níðhöggr. If you’re having trouble envisioning what that mix of genres looks like, dear reader, don’t worry; I couldn’t either until I played some myself and saw it in action. At all times (unless you turn this off in options) your aiming reticle has a set of pointed brackets moving in on it from the left and right, representing the beats on which you can take actions. Basic movement is not restricted by this, but almost everything else is: jumping, dash-dodging, shooting, reloading, and using abilities. All these things can be done on the beat, but some actions can also be done on the half-beat, such as firing pistols, reloading, or chambering the next round for a shotgun or bolt-action rifle. Learning which actions can be performed on the off beats and mastering the timing is, as one might expect, vital to doing well in this game, and once you can get it down the pacing is even faster than it normally is (though there is actually an “auto-rhythm” mode which serves as an accessibility feature for anyone who just can’t seem to get the timing down). It helps, of course, that the soundtrack is absolutely phenomenal, and listening to the music even when I wasn’t playing it helped me familiarize myself with the score even faster.

Learning the beat, however, is probably the easiest part of BPM. The game holds your hand very little, and honestly I wish they had done so even just a little more. The game doesn’t do much to explain its mechanics or even what items do to the player, expecting you to instead pick things up on the fly. For example, learning the attack patterns of bosses and certain mid-to-late-run enemies is made slightly easier by the fact that the brackets which appear around the reticle change appearance slightly based on what you need to do to dodge them, whether that’s jump, dash, or just hide behind a pillar. However, the game leaves it to you to figure out which of these signals corresponds to what, and this is far from the only example of this. There exists a decently sized arsenal of weapons you can potentially encounter and use, but none of them are named when you see them even in the weapon shop, so until you’ve used any given firearm at least once picking one up to try it can be a huge gamble – especially from the weapon shop, where you also have to pay for it.

There’s also the matter of the characters, all but one of whom are locked when you first start up the game. All of them share names with various figures from Norse Paganism but precious little else (as do the bosses), and indeed the Norse theme is really more like a fun skin over everything else due to the lack of much of a narrative. That part, at least, isn’t really a bad thing, just an observation. The differences between characters are also not explained on the selection screen, nor is the fact that completing easy or hard mode with one will unlock a starting secondary or ultimate ability respectively for that character, leaving it to the player to discover these things on their own. Even one or two of the unlock conditions are vague or less than obvious, again leaving it to the player to discover their meaning by stumbling into it or looking it up on the wiki.

Items and stats are arguably worse in this regard, as there exist descriptions and item names but they can be vague at best. I didn’t realize that the “precision” stat affected the extra damage done by critical hits until I looked it up. Sometimes equipment will be fairly straightforward, like an item that gives you “one more life” or grants a huge boost to speed. Other times, the description (which is only ever about five words, max) will be something like “cleaving” for which the meaning of “damages enemies near the one you shoot” will only become clear when and if you happen to notice the little arcs of lightning jumping between the mobs. Most cases are simply not detailed enough to tell you everything its doing for you, but one particularly egregious example is the Giant Slayer Boots , which “deal percentage health damage.” The meaning of that being that it does extra damage proportional to your targets current health wouldn’t have even been in my top three guesses. This is, perhaps, a problem endemic to roguelikes as a genre – certainly I recall The Binding of Isaac or Enter the Gungeon having examples of this – but that doesn’t make it less of a frustrating and frankly obnoxious design choice. Nor does the fact that once you learn the game it becomes a non-issue make it any less hostile to those just dipping their toes in.

In any case, I’d like to talk about the game’s visual design for a bit. The game is largely monochromatic, with each of the game’s four “zones” having a different color palette, such as it is. While it’s an interesting artistic choice, I don’t really care for it mainly because it can be a huge eyestrain, especially in the first zone, third, and fourth zones. I also suspect it’s especially rough for those with vision impairment, something for which I noticed no accessibility features. In a game like this, where everything is extremely fast paced and difficult even on easy, visual design which disorients the player is particularly bad.

Oh, and if you’re thinking of getting BPM on the PlayStation 4 (which is the platform I played it on) be forewarned that the load times are very long, at least on the base model.

Despite spending roughly three and a half paragraphs lambasting this game, I really do enjoy BPM: Bullets Per Minute and think that its core mechanics of the gunplay and rhythm are well designed. I think it’s a game a lot of other people would enjoy as well, and I can recommend it to those people for sure, but it’s very much not for everyone in a way that’s different from other games you might say that about. My more general recommendation would be to maybe find some gameplay videos first and see whether the visual design is too off-putting for you. If you can’t handle it, stay away, because it doesn’t really get any less intense. If you can though, great! This may very well be your next “one more run” obsession.