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May 3, 2007
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Bullet Witch (360) Is your average third-person shooter not quite goth enough? Then Bullet Witch is the action title for you. Strike that, Bullet Witch is for nobody because Bullet Witch is stupid. If Bullet Witch has one thing going for it, it’s that things blow up all purty when they get in Alicia’s (your overly sexualized goth mistress) way. Ichor splashes from enemies with abandon, barrel upon barrel of explosives are strewn about the city for your hail of fire to ignite and, oh, lookie, somebody parked a tanker full of gasoline right next to that mob of monsters. But the boom doesn’t stop there. In time you’re bringing massive scaffodlings down in cataclysmic crashes, summoning meteors to Armageddon your foes and whipping up tornadoes to whirl baddies over the rainbow (and by over the rainbow I mean into a wall of bullets). When you’re not hexing geists (evil spirits who have possesed bystanders) with your decidendly non-wiccan spellcraft, you’re blowing holes through them with a broom. Yes, that’s right, your broom is also a gun! Get it? Broom that turns into a gun? Bullet. Witch. Bullet Witch. GET IT?!? Actually your broom is a collection of guns, a broom shotgun, a broom machine gun, a broom sniper rifle and a broom Gatling gun (which, correct me if I’m mistaken, but isn’t that really just another machine gun?). And here is where everything goes downhill (I’m sure you thought that we were already at rock bottom what with the broom/gun thing). See, shooting in Bullet Witch is frustratingly hard. There is a criminal lack of target lock making any attempt at aiming a herky jerky affair. This is made even more obnoxious when you are tasked with protecting NPCs who wander moronically in and out of your field of fire. Enemies will often clip through walls and corners, making your tactical maneuvers fruitless, which doesn’t really matter much anyway considering how decidedly sluggish you are. Since you will spend most of the sprawling levels walking forward with broom-gun ripping full bore you won’t often try to dodge. Even when you do attempt an acrobatic side-step, you will find that its effectiveness is negligible as throttling back on the firepower is a poor strategy. And did I mention the lifelong companion of third-person action games, poor camera control, also gets a healthy amount of screen time here? Mmmm, oh yeah, who doesn’t love being shot by impossible-to-see off-screen opponents? I know I don’t. Somebody got paid to make this and if the gaming public is stupid enough to buy Bullet Witch then those people will be paid to make Bullet Witch 2. Break the cycle of sucking. D — Glenn Given |
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