BPM: Bullets Per Minute Review

BPM: BULLETS PER MINUTE is what you get when you mix the aesthetic of the 1980s / 90s Amiga demo scene, a rhythm game and a first-person shooter and I bloody love it! I’m terrible at it, soul-crushingly bad. I mean, I’m 47, slowly going deaf, and (when using a controller) have the manual dexterity of a pensioner on mogadon and yet I still can’t help but love this game!

As a first-person shooter, BPM: Bullets Per Minute is generic and harks back strongly to classics such as Gloom, 1993’s Doom and even Hexen II, and yet the addition of the mechanic of only being able to fire or reload on the beat (or half beat) of the electro-rock soundtrack adds some real playability to it.

Setting up the game is wonderfully simple; you’re walked through syncing the audio and video like in other rhythm games and it’s off you go.

Picking the one character available to you at the start, a lovely lady by the name of Göll, it’s off to the first level and some shooty noises. The visual style evokes my youth on the Amiga and my mate’s Atari ST in a way that instantly makes me feel 16 again.

From this point it’s standard FPS fare: shooty shooty bang bang, learn the patterns of the enemy, kill them and don’t die because it’s a roguelike and that would mean starting again. At least it is at first glance, but once you start to notice the little nuances it’s more than that. As you clear rooms, chests drop with gubbins in them that can be money to spend on boosts or even a new toy to kill stuff with (GOD but that shotgun is awful).

With the room layouts being procedurely generated each time you run through the game, it’s all too easy to find yourself face to face with the boss of the level before you find either the big lizard with the halo or the giant chick with a halo who act as blacksmith and shopkeeper respectively.

As a game, BPM: Bullets Per Minute won’t be to everyone’s taste, and some people will hate it with a passion. I, on the other hand, LOVE it! The difficulty is insanely high, you never really know what’s in the next room, and even baby bats can clean your clock.