Leggy heroines have long been used to move shoddy games into the hands of unsuspecting teenage boys. Some of them, like BloodRayne, even get bad movies built around the female form. Meet Bullet Witch, the latest entry into that category. This one features the lovely Alicia, a witch with a gun that looks like a broom. She's the quiet type with a dark past and a desire to wipe every demon off the face of the earth. Unfortunately, the game built around this premise didn't turn out so well thanks in large part to the spotty engine it was built on.
The campaign to save the world follows Alicia through a grand total of six stages with the last one taking place in the same environment as the second. If you don't get stuck on any of the frustrating parts, you can finish Bullet Witch in 3 or 4 hours. As you might be guessing by now, there isn't a lot to see here. To be fair, there will be several downloadable packs on Xbox Live that will include several new missions and a costume in each one, though only the first pack is slated to be free.
The six levels in Bullet Witch are fairly standard and don't offer anything you haven't seen before. The first few send you down city streets and through tunnels, seeking out floating brains known as Walnut Heads to kill and remove magical barriers in your path. Things begin to open up a tad in the latter levels as more and larger monsters are sent to take you down. Each stage features a bit of environmental interaction to amuse you in the form of destructible items and buildings, ceilings that you can cause to collapse and the like. Along the way, you'll gain some nifty magic tricks that can serve to deliver some of the best moments in the game and a quartet of gun options to give you new play style options.
Sniper enemies are the most annoying foes in Bullet Witch.
The magic powers that Alicia has at her disposal are the only thing that gives Bullet Witch any distinction over the myriad of other third-person shooters. There are three greater powers (lightening, tornado, and meteors) that are used to create the most damage and visually pleasing moments. The latter two are only available at the very end of the game and even then are not put to good use. Aside from that, there are a few lesser powers that are primarily used simply to mix things up. Unfortunately, the system for calling up a spell is unwieldy and frustrating. Rather than allowing you to hotkey your favorite spells, you have to cycle through the list by pressing the bumper buttons. Once you've cast the spell, the game will go into an animation that will cause your targeting reticule to move, making it a chore to aim the longer spells properly. If you're hit while selecting or casting a spell, it gets canceled and you have to start over. When you do get your spell off, the animation causes you to freeze in one place for a few moments which will often cause you to get killed. It's annoying and after a few hours of playing we wound up ignoring the spells and just running around with the machine gun equipped.
Games where you run around and mindlessly shoot demons can be fun, but the engine Bullet Witch was built on just doesn't cut it. The collision detection seems almost random at times, often causing things to kill you for seemingly no reason at all. If an explosion goes off and sends a car flying by you, the game will often read the projectile as hitting you. This invariably ends your life and causes you to curse at the screen and question your sanity. Falling objects must be avoided by 10 yards or more; standing too close may cause your death. Or the falling object might clip right through you and leave you in one piece. It's like playing rock-paper-scissors, but everybody always loses and you'll constantly be left wondering why.
The clipping issues also cause you to have a whole new outlook on the way things work. Enough play time makes you forget that people floating several feet off the ground with their back stuck partway through the wall should be seen as an oddity. Chain link fences can be seen through, but act as a wall to bullets. That is, of course, unless you get close enough for your gun to clip through the wall. Or sometimes the bullets will just fly through what you thought was a wall, or any other object, as if it wasn't there.
Further preventing you from having fun is the sorely lacking artificial intelligence. Demons in Bullet Witch enjoy running face first into a wall, ignoring you while you shoot them, or standing in one place firing at you. Occasionally they move. Just jumping through a level is enough to confound the enemies making it possible to just bounce through large stretches of the game. When you die, it isn't because you were outsmarted. Instead, death comes most often from random occurrences produced by the physics engine or flat out cheap enemies that are thrown at you out of the blue.
Keep your distance when these guys start falling.
All told, the work Atari did bringing Bullet Witch to the US turned out quite well given the source material. The voice acting during the cutscenes is decent in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way. Even the signs reading, "Sorry, mirrors were removed," that were slapped on the bathroom walls in lieu of mirrors as an excuse for Bullet Witch lacking reflective surfaces are funny once you get over the fact that the game doesn't look all that great.
And don't be fooled - Bullet Witch is not pleasing on the eyes. The shadows are pixely where they exist and the general enemy design and environments are uninspired at best. This game may not have appeared bad when it came out in Japan last summer, but we have since seen a plethora of visually stunning titles and comparatively, Bullet Witch doesn't hold up. The sound samples, too, end up feeling a bit lazy. While the voice acting provides a few chuckles, the death screams and constant droning of the gun get mind numbing after a short while.
The saving grace, if there can be one, of Bullet Witch is the ending. Not the final boss, which incidentally was designed beyond the limits of the engine and produces massive slowdown at points that should be climactic. Nor is it simply the fact that the game is over. No, the end cinematic is by far the greatest part of Bullet Witch. We won't spoil it for you, but know that it is hilarious.
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