If, after ten seconds of playing Bulletstorm, you get the distinct feeling it's one wooden mallet and a fistful of Acme-branded TNT away from Looney Tunes territory, then you've discovered developer People Can Fly's dirty little secret. They purposely took a huge step away from the deadly serious tone set by shooters like Call of Duty, Medal of Honor and Halo: Reach in favor of yucking it up with ridiculous murder.

How I spent my summer vacation.

Forget pathos. Forget patience. Forget physics. Bulletstorm puts all the emphasis on skill points, accumulated by filling your enemies full of lead. That earns you a measly 10 points. However, pull off one of nearly 200 skillshots -- those gonzo kills that put the gratuity in "gratuitous violence" -- and you'll bank 50 or 100 points to spend on upgrades and even bigger ordinance.

It's certainly more entertaining than just lining up headshots.

I recently got extensive hands-on time with both the Echo bonus mode and horde-ish Anarchy multiplayer, and make no mistake, the cruel laughter flowed. Welcome to Sadist Heaven, friends. But this accent on style over sustained gunfire has drawbacks. Big ones.

Multiplayer strictly adheres to four player co-op -- no versus modes -- and we spent our time in Anarchy on one map, Deadrock. It's an arid, stony, mountainside disk with a few signs of dirty civilization mashed in and a swirling blue vortex of terror right in the doughnut hole. Smacking a baddie into that hurricane nets you the Spun Right 'Round skillshot. In fact, the landscape's loaded with danger, from electrical hazards to a carnivorous plant straight out of The Little Shop of Horrors. This is a hostile environment.

It's critical to use those deathtraps to your advantage. Anarchy throws waves of 32 enemies at you to dispatch and a group skill point goal to reach. Fail to meet the quota and you do that wave over. And over. And over. Until you hit the magic number.

So you really have to work together. Our gang of four quickly started calling out team skillshots, which earn up to quadruple the points but occasionally prove frustrating to pull off. Shouts of "Team Yoink!" -- where everyone snags the same chump with their whip-like energy leash for some mild dismemberment -- often resulted in a "Challenge Failed" notice, even though we all seemed to do our part. Other team skillshots we scored without any idea what we were doing.

But mystifying skillshot challenges aside, I never felt challenged.

Blood Symphony in D minor, conducted by Satan.

Focusing on Nom Nom Nom, Team Bullet Kick, or Deep Penetration skillshots forces Bulletstorm to water down the difficulty, else you'd constantly die while lining up your target with that conveniently placed spiked cactus. Minus a rare minigun-toting mini-boss, enemies are fodder, not threats. Blood Symphony, an overkill mode, feels largely redundant. We ended up chasing down spawn points instead of worrying about taking fire, and in 90 minutes of gameplay, I was only downed three times. I didn't die once.

Adrian Chmielarz, creative director at People Can Fly, later confirmed that's because you can't die in Anarchy mode. While that might change before release, the current reasoning puts near-death experiences in the same category as a penalty box. Fewer active players means fewer skill points earned. "It's quite damaging to the team if one of you is downed," says Chmielarz, "since that limits your Team Skillshot options."

Amusingly, teammates are revived by a swift boot to the head.

Chmielarz's philosophy might prove out, but a breezy spin through Echo mode made me wonder. Essentially, Echo chops out segments of the campaign, strips the boring stuff (cut-scenes, plot, words), and turns it into a timed point-to-point race. Given how fast Bulletstorm plays, it makes perfect sense. Even the standard run feels slightly faster than what you find in other shooters, and that's before you hit the sprint. Never mind how a face button double-tap instantly sends you on a power slide halfway across the map.

Bumping any nasty on the way turns them into a floating, bullet-time piñata eagerly waiting for you to skillshot them to their maker. Accordingly, I plowed through Echo's industrial level unhindered, assisted by the Flail Gun (one of Bulletstorm's charming superguns) and without a care in the world.

Thank you for helping me murder.

Sadly, such weaponry does little good back in Anarchy, where tagging mutants with a grenade bolo and remote-detonating it just isn't cool enough to win the big skill points. The skillshot quota makes it fairly pointless to upgrade guns, even though every round begins with a timed upgrade session. Boosting the leash with a Thumper upgrade might be the exception, though using Thumper guaranteed a blinding flash that brought the frame rate crashing to a halt.

As it stands, this early version of Anarchy (which Chmielarz characterized as pre-optimized) suffered from frequent stuttering and frame drops. Echo ran far smoother, though it's hardly a heavy-load-bearing mode.

Between those hiccups and an intense, even relentless pace, Bulletstorm often tilts towards sensory overload. Even four hardened gaming journalists could only take a dozen rounds or so before pushing away for a breather.

I definitely had fun gunning around Deadrock, and its very structure subtly enforces the kind of cooperation too often lacking in other online co-op modes. But given how flat the difficulty curve is, it's fair to ask how long it can sustain interest. More maps will undoubtedly help, and the outrageous flavor makes the mayhem quiet enjoyable. But in Bulletstorm's current state, it feels like some great ideas are bumping up against each other.

Fortunately, it sounds like People Can Fly plans to do a lot of tweaking before the February 22 release date. Count me as hopeful those issues will resolve by then, along with some technical problems that regularly left me killing enemies I couldn't see through the lightshow.

Though at least I earned skillshots for it.