BPM: Bullets Per Minute is a recent rhythm-based rogue-like shooter from UK-based developer Awe Interactive. It offers compelling gameplay ideas and a soundtrack that should attract fans of rock opera, then grinds to a rather dizzying halt.

When I first saw the trailer for this game, I was nearly all-in. The core mechanics looked fun and engaging. The music hooked me. It was enough, at least, for me to roll my eyes and set aside my impatience with derivative, Marvel-inflected takes on mythology.

Then I had the opportunity to experience some gameplay, and I was left wondering how it could be that my game looked and felt so wildly different from the promotional material. Sure, the movement was about as smooth as the trailer seemed to suggest, but that was about it.

Rhythm-based rogue-likes aren’t a new idea, and I’ve had a lot of fun with them in the past. However, they do what they do best when they have a clear internal logic. If Bullets Per Minute has one, I certainly haven’t been able to find it.

Despite the game’s core conceit requiring you to fire, move, dodge, and dash on the beat, there’s no clear difference between doing so and failing to. Nor is there any tutorial teaching you the controls, or how to use them effectively. I tried putting rhythm detection to low and even switching to the auto rhythm setting to see if it was just me making mistakes. It is something I thought might be feasible given that the game seems to pride itself on its difficulty. Yet I got nowhere.

The enemies, meanwhile, seem to face no such restrictions. Their attacks do seem to more or less line up with the beat of the music, but that stops feeling like a fun mechanic when your own ability to react in kind seems to be scuppered altogether. If my firing and movement doesn’t actually sync with the music due to latency issues, that rather defeats the purpose, don’t you think?

Equally troubling is how much of your progress is not just affected by, but actively dependent on randomly generated loot. I was ready and willing to accept the random dungeon generation; that’s another mainstay of this genre. Provided enough opportunities to learn how the enemies move and fight, your survival isn’t dependent on learning the structure of any given map.

However, the game is so dependent on RNG that the difference between a failed run and a successful one often has far more to do with the randomly generated items collected than it does with any kind of skill. This undermines the premise, and just ends up feeling demoralizing. On top of that, you also deal with the already present issues with seemingly being unable to use the game’s mechanics to your advantage.

Now: let’s talk about those graphics, shall we? Even giving the benefit of the doubt to assume coincidence that the Valkyrie on the game’s starting screen looks suspiciously like Overwatch’s Mercy, these visuals are rough. They’re not just “less pretty than the trailer” though that would be frustrating in itself.

The font, any time it’s below a certain size, becomes questionably legible. The graphics are painfully oversaturated, and turning the saturation down — supposedly an accessibility option — only reveals poorly assembled assets. None of this helps either, due to the fact that many enemies’ color schemes are too similar to the backgrounds. I can’t tell you how many times I got killed by a creature I didn’t even see, because it was the same color as the floor or walls.

Still, I was trying to engage with the game in good faith. I thought, maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s just my computer. I watched other people’s playthroughs and discovered they dealt with the same painful saturation, and the same poor attempt to mask haphazardly put together assets.

Still doubting myself, I showed some gameplay to my partner. We hadn’t even passed the starting screen before he told me he was feeling queasy. I decided to give the first room a shot just in case, and he had a headache from the graphics style and flow of movement before I was done.

All in all, Bullets Per Minute is an entertaining idea, looking in from the outside. On the inside, it looks like something rushed through assembly to meet a deadline — imposed by whom? — and surrounded by questionable advertising. If you’re priding yourself on the difficulty of your game, make sure it’s actually difficult. Not just so janky and visually exhausting that people get frustrated and give up.

“Fight as a mighty Valkyrie,” you say? I might as well have been handed a water gun and a Walkman with a dodgy headphone jack.

A PC review copy of BPM: Bullets Per Minute was provided by Awe Interactive for this review.

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BPM: Bullets Per Minute

$22.79

3

Score

3.0/10

Pros

• Interesting core concept

Cons

• Heavily oversaturated graphics
• Mechanics don't sync well
• Relies too much on RNG