Was bro-shooter Bulletstorm actually ahead of its time?

polygon.com:

A dozen years later, Bulletstorm, somehow, endures.

You wouldn’t expect it for a game that, in hindsight, scans more as a Duke Nukem-esque guilty pleasure that came nowhere close to its sales expectations. Gratuitously violent and absurdly foul-mouthed (does anyone else remember “Hey, dick tits!”?), even if Bulletstorm drew laudatory reviews for its gameplay, particularly its ammunition economy, it hardly seems like a game that could be called “ahead of its time.”

But it is, insists Radomir Kucharski of Incuvo, the Polish virtual reality port shop that Bulletstorm maker People Can Fly acquired at the end of 2021.

“When we were searching for a next project, we looked at Bulletstorm and thought this game, with its mechanics, was actually, like, designed for VR,” Kucharski said. “Bulletstorm is so action-packed, so close to the action, and with such physical interaction, it just looked like it was designed for VR.”

At the time, Incuvo was independent and fresh from its VR adaptation of two of Bloober Team’s horror titles — Layers of Fear and Blair Witch, both for Oculus Quest and PlayStation VR. Incuvo had found success adapting established games on a work-for-hire basis, and Kucharski was looking for another hit to keep the studio’s momentum going. It also helped that People Can Fly, like Bloober Team, is a Poland-based developer.

More crucial, Kucharski said, was the cult-hit status Bulletstorm continues to enjoy. Electronic Arts and Epic Games practically abandoned the property after it fell far short of profit and sales expectations. People Can Fly, which Epic acquired in 2013 and then spun off in 2015, retained ownership of the franchise, and still had enough of an audience to warrant remastered releases for consoles