Bullet Witch review (Xbox 360)

This could have been good. Instead, broken, broken, broken...

Bullet Witch is one of those concepts that must have taken all of half a second to be approved for development. Unfortunately, having crossed that hurdle, the development team obviously though that their work was done, because the end result is truly terrible. OK, so the lead character is nicely designed, but that really is the beginning and end of the good bits of the game. I’ve no idea about the development history, but what’s left of Bullet Witch is something that looks suspiciously like an under-funded PS2 title that has been chucked over to the 360 after a change in publisher.

The storyline sees some grief-stricken father making an ill-advised deal with demonic forces to have his beloved daughter returned to life. The result is that said demonic forces use the father’s grief and pain to power their entry into our world, whereupon they begin to destroy humanity. We enter the story at a point where the world’s population has been reduced to, effectively, nothing. The resistance is faltering, and humanity seems lost. Yawn – enter the saviour.

Alicia is a witch with a HUGE gun that you’re told looks like a broom. Actually, it looks like a garden rake, but never mind. She has some kind of vendetta on the go, and is out to kill demons. Fortunately, judging by the AI, the demons are out to commit suicide, throwing themselves slowly at Alicia and being killed by a combination of magic and infinite bullets.

Charmed

Well, mostly by bullets. The magic system is broken, hobbled by a menu system that can see you easily picking the wrong spell, no spell at all, or being slaughtered by enemies while you try to remember where you keep your ravens. Of course, actually using the majority of the spells (even when they’re ranked up) proves to be unsatisfying and ineffective, so the magic is something you tend to only use on the occasions when the game tells you to.

So, you’re left with the HUGE gun. There are various forms for the gun, ranging from the basic machinegun, through the shotgun, (crappy) sniper rifle, and an even bigger machinegun. That said, much like the magic spells, you’ll quickly find that you only really need one, the basic machinegun, to progress as the others are just weak, limited, badly implemented rubbish.

So, with the two core mechanics broken, what’s left of the game? More broken stuff, I’m afraid.

The Worst Witch

Pop-Ups
A real blast from the past here. Sure, the draw distance for the basic, often destructible scenery is nice, but the details pop up horribly, sometimes within a couple of virtual meters from the main character. That includes bad guys when viewed in the pitiful zoom mode. Shoot them and they will sometimes, in their death animation, fall back and despawn from the game world only to return fully healed when you step forward.

Clipping and Other Scenery Glitches
Bad guys can shoot through scenery that you can’t shoot through – a capital offence in anyone’s book. You can trap bad guys in a scenery glitch so that they can’t hit you but you can nail them. This is as much a fault of the terrible AI, but the scenery doesn’t help. Allies and enemies frequently walk a good foot or so off the ground, or spend ages trying to run through walls and the like. Oh, and there are piggin’ invisible walls EVERYWHERE!

Broken Event Linearity
Everything in the game is meant to happen in a certain order. Unfortunately, the open nature of certain environments, particularly the city one, means that it’s possible to accidentally walk around a trigger point. This can result in you being trapped for ages in a big, empty world, wandering endlessly in a pathetic search for something to do. Very, very annoying when the level is often graded on the time it takes you to finish it. At one point, you get to blow up a large wooden structure on which some bad guys are standing. The game continues to heli-drop baddies into the wreckage of the structure, only now you can’t get to them. They can shoot you, of course, and when you add the one-hit kill snipers to the mix you can imagine how annoying it can get.

Uninteresting Graphics
There are, the game text tells you in loading screens, hundreds of types of demon assaulting humanity. Great, but you will only see about seven or eight, and three of them are big bosses. The environments are equally uninspiring, though some of them fall to bits quite nicely (for a four year old PS2 title). One level takes place in a forested valley that was eventually so misty that I started having Turok flashbacks.

Witches Abroad

Live support, such as it is, is the final nail in the coffin. There are a few costumes to download (including the schoolgirl one for the nominal-paedophiles in the audience). Equip them and you will find that they are sometimes enabled in cutscenes and sometimes not. Also available are downloadable missions. These go for 20 points each but are massively not worth it. They are mostly tweaked versions of existing missions, and two are variations of the same mission, only with slightly different restrictions. This is known in game development circles as ‘taking the piss’.

Achievement awards rely on you wanting to play the game through lots of times on varying difficulties. That is not going to happen.

Oh, and the front end of the game is terminally rubbish too, forcing you to re-enter your choices of save location, auto-save and so on if you choose not to continue after you get killed in the game, something that tends to happen only when you get bored and then careless. Or when the blasted snipers get you through the scenery. Which is often.

Bullet Witch is, as was said at the beginning of the review, broken, broken, broken. Even if you are tempted by cute Goths lumping around bullet-spitting phallic objects, just go back and watch your wipe clean copies of Urotsukidoji. You’ll go blind, but at least you won’t have to play this lamentable title.