2011 was a year full of big-budget, suffocatingly hyped sequels, and it was sometimes difficult to spot the games that favored risk and intrigue over iteration. All this week we'll be profiling games we found fascinating for one reason or another, with interviews from some of the folks behind them. Check out the all of the entries here.

We’ve probably never played a 360 game as audacious as Bulletstorm. With its unique approach to first-person shooter mechanics (the Leash is still amazing), a perpetually hungover hero, over-the-top violence, and locker-room banter, Bulletstorm was a peculiar animal that thankfully never took itself too seriously.

You may remember project lead Tanya Jessen from the ridiculous, expletive-laden viral marketing campaign leading up to the game’s release — one which also saw Epic design-director Cliff Bleszinski say he “made a videogame where you can blow out a man’s a**hole.” Jessen says after Bulletstorm landed on store shelves, it elicited a wide spectrum of reactions. “It ended up being one of those games where the people who loved it, really loved it,” she said. “But you also had the other half: people who maybe didn’t quite understand what we were going for, or didn’t understand the Skillshot mechanic, or maybe it just wasn’t the kind of game for them. We saw a little polarity.” Here's some of what else Jessen told us.

OXM: Before it came out, when Fox News called it the ‘worst videogame in the world,’ what did you make of that and do you think that kind of stuff is good or bad when you’re putting out a game?

TJ: With a new IP, we know how hard it is to get through all the messaging that’s out there about other games. Especially when you’ve got such hard-hitting sequels coming out all the time. My personal perspective was, "It sucks that it’s a negative opinion, but if it does encourage people to go out and find out more about the game, and they wouldn’t have heard about it before, to me, that seems like a side benefit of it." Hopefully there were people that didn’t know about it that said, "Oh, this game isn’t for me" or "Hey, this game does look pretty awesome, it’s not a bad thing." What do they say, "Any news is good news?" It’s positive in some ways.

OXM: You guys had a viral marketing campaign that seemed to really embrace the colorful language in the game, so it almost felt like Fox played into your trap a little bit.

TJ: It’s funny because we definitely knew the game we were setting out to make was over the top and crazy. And it was definitely interesting to see what people would gravitate to when they started to see some of the marketing. Or that Fox News story, which was quiet funny because I don’t think, when you look at the games coming out right now, in terms of language, Bulletstorm is certainly very colorful, but I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s a giant leap ahead of what’s out there now.

OXM: Recently a high-level executive at Ubisoft said that game critics don’t want innovation. Bulletstorm could be considered an innovative FPS, and so I’m wondering your thoughts on that?

TJ: If something is totally new right out the gate, it’s human nature to go, ‘Wait, what is this?’ I have to kind of figure it out. If you’re one of the first ones right out of the gate doing something new, it can be hard. But it depends on the timing and all of that. Innovation is absolutely crucial in our industry. When you take a look at the mobile and XBLA space, if larger companies can’t afford to do a huge AAA game that’s super over-the-top innovative, well, we’ve got lots of other spaces in our market where we can. And to me, that’s incredibly encouraging and exciting.

OXM: But you didn’t feel like that was almost a knock against Bulletstorm, that it was different?

No, not at all. Even though it didn’t hit the expectations we were hoping to hit, there’s absolutely nothing I would have changed about the game that we made. We set out to make that game that’s fun and over the top and does stuff a little bit differently. If I were to do it all over again, I would have taken the same tact and been just as creative or innovative.

OXM: In a recent interview, Adrian Chmielarz from co-developer People Can Fly expressed a twinge of regret that Anarchy mode wasn’t more accessible for inexperienced players. What are your thoughts on that?

TJ: I kind of feel the same way. It goes back to what we were saying about the response. Something that we found after shipping the game is that people that really understood the skill shot system, and grasped onto it, and really learned the ins and outs, they are also our biggest fans of Anarchy mode because it becomes second nature, just like with any shooter: okay, I do this and this and this. Or like in a fighting game with a combo system. So whenever you’re introducing something new like that, you have to expect that people that haven’t quiet grasped it or don’t have all the combos memorized, it’s just that learning curve. Part of our post-mortem that we discussed, we thought we had really gone deep down the path on a tutorial during the (game’s) first 45-minutes, but we wished we had even continued to teach even those basic skill shot abilities so that everyone, by the end of the single player campaign, felt like they had just as good a grasp on that stuff.

OXM: What aspects of the game are you most proud of?

TJ: I’m a huge fan of our dialogue. When we were looking at reviews and stuff, it’s a split. I think it was 60-40 or 75-25 on the positive. There’s a lot of encounters, even when I play the game today, that I laugh at. Like when Ishi and Gray are talking in the elevator and they’re having this intimate moment in the middle of this battle, and you’re like, "Oh God, that’s Bulletstorm! It’s awesome!" I’m really happy how that turned out, especially given a primarily Polish company- non-English for a first language company- making the game. Thought that went well. And along with that, the skill shot system. That was something that started and we looked at it and went, "Oh my God, that’s super ambitious, how’s that going to work design-wise, how are we going to sell that, how is that going to tie into every aspect of design?" And I feel like in the end, for what we executed, definitely a huge accomplishment for the team.”

OXM: Were you to do a sequel, what do you think are some of the things you’d be looking to explore more in the next game?

If there was some theoretical, magical world, it’d be a lot what we just talked about: making sure that the skill shot system really does resonate. It’s not just the people who get it and latch onto it, but everyone who picks it up feels that same feeling that they get the creativity aspect behind it, the sandboxy nature. Continuing to build upon that, and that bleeds into so many things like the Echo mode and really making it more of a feature that is built out a lot more and has more social and competitive elements and time that to the skill shot system. But that is a purely hypothetical, magical place that doesn’t actually exist.