Bullet Witch

March 16,2007 - If you were to judge Bullet Witch off of the first fifteen minutes of gameplay and cutscenes, you would probably be impressed by the high quality of action and storytelling presented. Unfortunately, after those fifteen minutes (which is basically all videos with no actual movement by the character), Bullet Witch turns into a really terrible game that feels like it does not know what to do or where to go at any given moment. To get an idea of what exactly Bullet Witch is all about, try to imagine a game in which Devil May Cry, Chaos Legion, and Resident Evil are all rolled into one…except that game turned out to be complete trash.

Bullet Witch is all about a witch named Alicia, who is half human, half demon, and 100% boring. Don’t expect to ever get too attached to her, as the story is uninteresting and never allows for any character development or back-story. To make matters worse, random characters will show up throughout the game to offer help, but they are just as mindless and boring as Alicia, often adding pointless insight to the current situation, such as “Hey, there is a zombie…lets kill it.” Be prepared to hear that line over and over again as Bullet Witch offers no respecting form of dialogue or literary sense. Even some of the lines in the tutorial have grammatical errors and missing words, which could cause confusion to most people.

For some odd reason, Bullet Witch never tells you what is going on for the first hour or so of gameplay. After the initial cut scene, your character just appears on a deserted street with enemies who seem intent on killing you for no apparent reason. After making your way past dozens of some of the most idiotic and visually repetitive enemies ever developed, you are greeted by a mysterious red haze floating in the middle of the level which blocks your path to advance. You must eliminate a floating brain-like enemy nearby in order to make this haze disappear. Ironically, this floating brain lacks the mental capacity to notice you or even attempt to fight you when you are nearby. However, he can deter your advancement throughout the level until you defeat him. Don’t be surprised if the game feels familiar to you, as you probably played a game like it ten years ago.

Prepare to be haunted by those floating brains because they appear quite often throughout the game. In fact, every level is almost identical to one another, with the player randomly firing at enemies and shooting brains in order to advance. In order to dispose of the enemies quickly, Alicia uses her gunrod, a sort of half-broom, half-shotgun weapon to dispose of the enemy. After every level you will have the ability to upgrade the gunrod to four different forms, some of which alter reload speed and accuracy, but since the enemies are incredibly lacking intelligence you will never find the need to use any gunrod other than the default one you start with in the beginning. If using the gunrod somehow gets too repetitive for you, Alicia can tap into her witch roots and unleash powerful magic spells upon the enemies. While these magical attacks sound cool in theory, the execution is flat-out terrible.

Tapping the either the RB or LB button brings up a mini-menu with the list of spells on it. In order to execute any of these magic spells, you access the menu and use the analog stick to choose which spell you wish to perform. There are no hotkeys or shortcuts here, so expect to get extremely frustrated as you realize that the magic menu takes up roughly half of the screen and you must choose a spell mid-battle. This gets particularly annoying seeing as how the whole point of using magic is to defeat the enemies, not blind your view of them with an on-screen menu. While most of the spells cause some form of destruction, a few spells have Alicia use defensive maneuvers to block enemy attacks and sacrifice her health to help citizens and other players. Later on in the game Alicia will earn the chance to truly unleash total devastation with some of her more powerful spells, some of which can drop meteors onto enemies or have them spinning wildly out of control inside a tornado.

For the times you are able to use those super-powered magic skills, the game feels somewhat fun to play. It is always entertaining to see an enemy fly in the air before crashing down through the roof of a house fifty feet away. However, these moments are scarce and really only appear about once every level, and since there are only six levels in the entire game, the odds of being able to use these abilities are slim to none. To top it off, Bullet Witch hardly looks good at all; the textures are rough, the levels all look the same and the framerate even drops when a lot of enemies appear on screen. Its even more frustrating to note that the draw distance is incredibly small, which makes maneuvering around the levels a real pain since buildings and enemies just randomly appear on screen when you get close to them.

It is really a shame to note how terrible Bullet Witch turned out. The opening cinema and gameplay show what the game is capable of, but ultimately Bullet Witch fails to deliver on any aspect of the game, and feels like it would have been appropriate ten years ago. The game just has too many problems to even consider a run-through, but if you like the subject matter you may enjoy it just a bit more. You should be able to finish Bullet Witch in five or six hours…four hours more than necessary.

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