The year is 2013. Natural Disasters, War, and Pestilence have reduced the planets population by a few billion and to make matters worse hordes of demons and zombies have been unleashed upon the survivors. You play the role of Alicia, an Amy Lee (from Evanescence) looking witch armed with a massive gun-rod, as well as magical powers, with which to banish these pesky demons from the world and save humanity. OK, I admit she doesn’t look like Amy Lee but for some reason I’ve always wanted to mention that in a review.
We get introduced to Alicia, our heroine, through the obligatory initial cut-scene which tells us of the myriad of disasters that have reduced the human race to less than one billion souls. She is tall, she is elegant and more than a little cute, however can she save the human race? At the end of this cut scene we find ourselves pitched into our first combat situation with three Geists. Geists are the main troops of the demon hordes that have invaded Earth. If you can imagine size zero marine zombies with the faces of skeletor then you have a pretty good idea of what a Geist looks like. They alter appearance slightly throughout the game, donning maybe a helmet or beret, but essentially it is the same character model used over and over again, other monsters that you come across will be Gigas and Walnut Heads to name a few (yes that is what they are called), but for the most part it will be Geists that you fight.
You do battle with these enemy forces with magical spells and a gun-rod. Part broom, part alien spaceship antennae the gun-rod is the only physical weapon that you get to use. You can add three other variants to your gun-rod via upgrades and power ups at the end of each level (more about that later) although the initial variant of the weapon you get is a machine gun. Eating its way through 80 round magazines in no time you will be relieved to know that you do not run out of ammunition, instead you use up some magical points to reload, but the reality is that your magical points generate really quickly so essentially you have unlimited ammo no matter what mode the gun is in. Other variants are the Sniper, Shotgun and Gatling which alters the gun-rod’s appearance slightly so that you can tell that the variant has changed.
The magic spells is where the real fun lies with Bullet Witch, you get a number of these magical spells to aid you in your quest. Some of them spells are more destructive than others and you will find yourself wanting to use Tornado, Meteor and Lightning over and over again, the meteor spell especially shows the games one true merit and that is superbly destructive environments, although I found Tornado immense fun to use too.
At the end of each level you get points based upon your performance. You can use these points to upgrade your weapons and spells strength. You need to spend these fairly wisely and some options are definitely better than others, however spend wisely as you may find yourself getting bogged in places.
Placing the fun you will have with the spells to one side there are a fair few bad points to the game. The AI is pretty dire. Not only in terms of the enemy soldiers whom you could be attacking one of them whilst another a few feet away ignores you, or you will fire directly at them only for nothing to happen, whereas aim slightly to their left or right and you will score a hit. But also with troops that are on your side as well as civilians. You will find that they stand and walk directly in front of you which is bad in itself, but if you fire you gun-rod with “friendlies” in front of you the bullets go straight through them without killing them
Other technical issues to watch out for are with the games collisions. A lot of the time you will run directly through scenery, barrels, tables etc then at other times you will not be able to mount a simple curb without jumping over it, it all seems really hit and miss and botched together.
Game play consists of you making you way through 6 levels, none of which are exceptional, but what exasperates this is you are generally fighting the same enemies over and over again which not only, for the most part, look alike but the action is a case of finding a group of monsters to fight, killing them, moving a little way forward and fighting another bunch and so on which quite frankly is boring as the enemy AI is so basic. What I found tended to happen was that you killed enough monsters to unleash a fun-to-use destructive spell such as Tornado and then rinse and repeat.
On the graphics side of things we have a bit of a mixed bag. In the initial levels of the game the graphics seem rudimentary at best but as we progress to the second and third levels the graphics of the game do seem to become a little better. Although overall the game is let down by it’s engine. The collision models are utter rubbish causing issues such as running straight through barrels and other scenery and not being able to cross small barriers without jumping over them. Overall very average graphics and the Xbox 360 is capable of so much more. Last but not least is the short draw. You will be running forward and enemies, trees, cars and entire buildings will just appear directly in front of you, which makes the game feel amateurish and cobbled together.
Overall:
I found the end of game boss extremely difficult to defeat which coupled with being bored throughout most of the game didn’t really warm this title to me. The graphics are PS2 standard, and the lack of different weapons only served to add to the frustration. As far as FPS games there is much better out there and Bullet Witch offers little incentive to purchase.