For all those waiting for Atari to return to videogame relevance, please hang in there. The gaming icon's latest next-gen effort is not so much a bad game as it is a mediocre one, devoid of innovation and plagued with poor controls.
Bullet Witch tells the futuristic tale of a demon-ravaged world, set in 2013. Gamers take the role of a green-haired witch named Alicia. The game thrusts the action forward quickly, as players are immediately thrown into a suburban town in an effort to save the townsfolk from demons with a flair for bad dramatic acting and a nasty case of 'flesh eating virus'. The goal is to fight your way through the town until you reach the end of the level, triggering the next. There is no boss battle, which is an unfortunate running theme. In total, there are only two boss battles through the brief six-level game; far too few given the easy gameplay found throughout.
The when the two boss battles happen, they are either hilarious or induce a major case of the 'controller throwing blues'. The first battle happens on the top of an airplane mid-way through the game. Alicia takes it upon herself to jump on top of the plane to battle a giant flying demon, shooting wiggling eyeballs off its body. The hilarity ensues when the slithering eyeballs, with a striking resemblance to a certain man-made liquid under a microscope, lands on the plane; leaving gamers wondering whether the demon is trying to bring the plane down or impregnate it.
The game looks like what you would expect from a next-gen title, but falls well short of the high bar set by recent games for the 360. While Alicia's slick acrobatics, flowing costume and the Toxic Avenger / Zombie crossbreed look of the demons work well, some of the different enemies move awkwardly. Motorcycle helmet clad baddies behave like an online opponent suffering from severe lag, jumping from one spot to the next to evade bullets. Rather than looking like a slick effect, it looks like a choppy online opponent that you would quickly 'avoid' on Live.
Sonically, the game gets the explosions and gun battles right, only to become a laughing stock anytime dialogue is used. Bullet Witch's voice acting deserves an award for being so overdramatic and lame. It is the kind of acting that b-movie and soap opera stars point and laugh at. The chuckle-inducing voice-over work may reach its comedic peak at the end of level five, when the real (and obvious) reason the demons are attacking earth is dealt with by Alicia in cold fashion.
The game's control scheme is a sub-par replica of what 360 owners have been getting used to with Gears Of War and Lost Planet over the last several months. The left stick controls movement, and the right stick controls the aiming. The right and left triggers are for shooting and jumping, respectively. Alicia's magic is handled with a sloppy large on-screen wheel, showing three spells each time the user clicks one of the bumpers. The oversized magic wheel is only the start of issues with the game's controls.
In addition to taking up the majority of the screen with the spells, the action fails to stop when the wheel is open. This means Alicia can expect quite the whooping when attempting to cast spells, because she generally needs to cast them within the same distance that enemies need to shoot. Occasionally, it causes the spell casting to cancel, if an enemy hits Alicia at just the right time.
