I do not know how this one passed me by for so long.
BPM: Bullets Per Minute came out in 2020. 2020! I have owned it on Steam for about two years and looked at it maybe four times before finally sitting down with it last week. Now I am genuinely annoyed at myself for waiting that long. This is exactly the kind of game I should have been playing immediately, and instead I let it sit in my library gathering digital dust whilst I went off and played other things. Classic me.
The concept sounds like something a fourteen-year-old would pitch in a game design class, and somehow it works completely. You are a Valkyrie blasting through procedurally generated dungeons in Asgard, fighting Norse monsters to a heavy metal soundtrack, and everything, absolutely everything, is tied to the beat. You can only shoot on the beat. You can only reload on the beat. Jump, dash, use an ability: all of it has to sync up to the music or it simply does not happen. Miss the beat and your gun just clicks. There is no penalty as such; the game does not punish you for mistiming, it just does not let you do the thing. Which, in practice, is its own punishment, because a mistimed reload whilst three monsters are bearing down on you is a very efficient way to die.
It sounds like it should be maddening, and for the first hour it genuinely is. Your brain is trying to do two things at once that it has never done together before: track a first-person shooter environment, manage positioning, enemies and ammo, and also count beats. It feels impossible. And then something shifts. Somewhere in the second or third run, something clicks and you stop thinking about the beat and just feel it. Suddenly everything snaps into this flow state where the shooting and the music and the movement all become one thing, and it is one of the best feelings a game has given me in a while.
The soundtrack is doing a huge amount of work. Heavy metal, operatic, completely relentless, and perfectly matched to the pace of combat. When you are deep in a good run and everything is clicking, and the guitar is absolutely screaming, and you are headshotting things to the exact beat of the drums, it genuinely feels incredible. Like being the main character in your own metal music video. Which, at thirty-something with a child and a very normal life, is not a feeling I get all that often.
Is it rough around the edges? Yes. The visuals are muddy and the colour palette takes some getting used to. Enemy variety runs thin quicker than you would like. The RNG can occasionally hand you a run so badly equipped that it feels pointless from the first room. These are real criticisms, and people who bounced off it for those reasons are not wrong.
But when it is working, it is one of the most purely fun games I have played in ages. The kind of game that makes you look up and realise you have been sat there for two hours without noticing. Those games are rarer than they should be, and I am very glad I finally gave this one a proper go.
If it has been sitting in your library the same way it was sitting in mine, go and play it tonight. You can thank me later.