Lawrence.com

QuickView

Good: Some nice looking spells

Bad: Length, magic system, voice acting, collision detection, A.I.

Hey, are you a fan of that shitty band Evanescence? Do you also like shitty video games? If so, you're bound to love Bullet Witch. You play as a broom-gun toting witch that looks exactly like the lead singer of aforementioned shitty band. While there are flashes of interesting gameplay elements, the overall package is put together in shoddy fashion.

One of the first missteps you're bound to notice is the absolutely horrid A.I. You'll be facing the same zombie-ish soldier enemies for most of the game, and they're as mindless as the demons in the original Doom. They stand in the middle of roads and absorb your bullets until they die, run into walls, and get caught on environmental objects. The occasional allies that you'll run into are equally mindless, and tend to just get in your way more than help you.

The magic system is simultaneously one of the best and worst aspects of the game. Some of the attacks are devastating and visually impressive, but the act of casting them is far from intuitive. Using the bumper buttons will scroll through wheels that allow you to select your spell. These wheels take up a large area of the screen, and you can't even move around or defend yourself while selecting them.

Collision detection is obviously a foreign concept to the developers of Bullet Witch, as there are many items in the game world that can be completely walked through. I found a group of trash cans that didn't impede my character's progress at all as I walked through them. They didn't fall down, block my path, animate at all, or indicate in any way that they even existed.

All of the stages are linear, littered with similar enemies, suffer from color oversaturation, and generally uninteresting in every way. There are plenty of annoying hazards that will kill you with one hit, and many of them don't even require you to be very close to them. A gas station swiftly took me out when I should have been well out of the explosion's range, and some enemies cheaply toss cars at you for one-hit kills.

Certain moments are visually solid, but there are simply too many glitches to make it a next-gen worthy game. Some of the larger spells trigger some serious framerate issues as well. The voice-acting could probably be done better if you hired some junior high school theater students who wanted to earn some extra credit.

I'd imagine this game will appeal to a select group of people, namely the type that get pumped up for movies like Underworld. Even if you do enjoy your time with Bullet Witch, it's likely to be blown through in six hours or so. Some of the attacks are impressive, but the cumbersome nature of selecting them and overall mediocrity of the game make it impossible to recommend.

Graphics: 7.0

Sound: 5.0

First Play: 5.5

Replay Value: 4.0

Gameplay: 5.0

Overall: 5.2