The Bullet Witch, Alicia
Bullet Witch was one of the games on my radar before it came out in February. However, with its release, reviews shot it down left and right to the point that I decided to hold off on the purchase. Only after the game was out for several weeks and I checked out several forums related to it, I heard positive reviews from the fans: “This is the best bad game I’ve ever played.” “Whats with the bad reviews for this game?” “WOW not nearly as bad as everyone says…..” I saw videos from the game, and the premise seemed to definitely be my type of game so I reconsidered.
When I found it on sale for $35 shipped on eBay, I decided to order it. I figured even if I didn’t like it, I could still turn around and sell it for close to that. After having recently completed it this past weekend, I must say that it’s definitely not a game that I can recommend to everyone, but like Ninety-Nine Nights, it was under-rated by reviewers (59% on GameRankings.com).
Intro
Bullet Witch was developed by cavia, inc., a Japanese group most known for Drakengard and its sequel. These two games were published by Square Enix for the PS2, but were generally considered poor. (What’s funny is that if they were released on the 360 today, I would still probably get them even though I skipped them on the PS2.) Based on how badly Drakengard and its sequel turned out, most of the gaming community has already stereotyped cavia, inc. as a bad game developer. Fortunately for me, I have a fanboism for any Japanese developed games on the 360, as it’s a pretty rare thing. Atari handled the publishing rights to the game in the United States, and claims that time was spent tweaking the game and fixing problems with the original Japanese release. However, upon the game’s release, the general public wasn’t quite sure what exactly was fixed.
What’s also annoying is that Atari promised free downloads for the game when it was shipped (new costumes, etc.) since that was what the Japanese release got. This excited the fans, as it was free content – can’t complain right? Well, weeks passed after the game’s release and the free content still hadn’t arrived yet. Eventually it got released last week with the costume being free and the new missions costing points. What’s alarming is that this has made me realize how Microsoft is giving developers a very hard time to release free content on Live. Epic wants to release a ton of free new Gears of War content, but Microsoft is not letting them. They don’t want certain companies to release “big” free content since it makes the charging of smaller content from other publishers seem ridiculous. As much as I’m a fan of the 360, this nickel and dime strategy of the Live’s microtransactions has me hoping the PS3 will succeed on some level to force Microsoft to get rid of their enforcement for how publishers want to distribute their content.
Anyway, back to the game. Bullet Witch’s graphics sit somewhere between the PS2 and 360; slightly better than PS2 quality but not at the level of the 360′s true graphical power. Sound is decent – the audio tracks, while repetitive, aren’t bad. Voices are dubbed in English (no option for Japanese or English dialogue) and they’re definitely cheesy but so is practically any other English dubbed Japanese developed video game..
The main undead-like enemies that you’ll see in the game are called Geist
Storyline and Premise of the Game
What’s this game about? Based on the title alone, it’s self explanatory – in fact I think it’s a pretty clever name (although reviewers love making fun of the name in their reviews for it, replacing the Witch with Bitch in their negative reviews). You play the role of Alicia, a woman with magic powers that also relies on guns – hence the use of bullet and witch in the title. Some guy opened up a portal and demons of all sorts were let forth onto the world. Now the undead-like Geist rule the streets with their military power, killing humans as they please.
Enter Alicia, who not only fights against these demons, but she also co-operates with a human resistance fighting for their very survival as well. What is Alicia’s origin though? The humans have never seen anyone like her before. After several levels we do learn where she came from and what her purpose is. I actually found the storyline pretty interesting, although it was a bit cliche and short. There’s definitely room for a longer sequel.
Not only is the storyline quite short, the game is also short – only six levels (and the sixth level uses basically the same map as the second level). Each level is about 30 minutes except the final level, where the boss fight takes about half an hour in addition to the half hour level. It’s possible to finish this game on an easier difficulty in under four hours. That may explain why the price tag of the game is $50 instead of the usual $60. While it’s obvious that there could have been several more levels added in (action/adventure games that are similar to this like Devil May Cry/Ninja Gaiden have closer to a dozen levels instead of 6), this game is still decent due to its replayability.
Alicia is still able to prevent this civilian from getting killed
For me, I find it difficult not to like a game where you get to take on hordes of bad guys and kill them through the use of guns and magic, while saving humans as well. It’s not the most polished game out there, but it’s in a state that I consider playable without being too annoying. At the end of each level you get a score based on how fast you complete it, how many enemies you killed, and how many people you saved. The score determines how many “experience points” you earn, which you can use to upgrade your gun or magic spells.
One of the enemies Alicia must fight are these huge giants
There are five difficulty levels, and everything carries over from one difficulty to another, giving you plenty of time to earn enough experience points to max out your gun and magic spells. I personally enjoy maxing out in games, so the ability to do this made replaying the harder difficulties more enjoyable for me. The enemies become more difficult, but you also become stronger so it balances out in a way and it’s still fun because you are evolving with the difficulty level. Games like Lost Planet can be frustrating because you don’t have any sort of upgrades when you play harder difficulties. In fact, you get downgrades to your character so it really comes down to skill. While some people may welcome the opportunity to play the hardest difficulty of a game in a gimped state, being given the option to power up your character before doing so is definitely welcome.
Game Mechanics
Alicia always travels with a long barrel gun (I guess it’s this witch’s broomstick?). Initially it is a machine gun, but it can transform into a shotgun, cannon/rifle, and gatling gun as you earn experience points to buy the different guns and upgrades. The guns are your main combat option in the game due to the way the magic system works. You have both a health bar and a magic bar. The health bar automatically regenerates if you’re not taking damage (just like any other 360 game out nowadays) but the magic bar only fills up if you destroy enemies with bullets. Using spells depletes your magic bar, and since the only way to refill it is to shoot your gun(s), yon can see now that you will rely on your guns more often than magic in this game.
In terms of magic, there are several smaller spells that you’ll probably use often throughout the game, and then there are three super spells that really are only used on bosses since they use up the entire magic bar (regular spells use up maybe 1/8 to 1/4 of the magic bar).
The regular spells you have available include:
Ancient Wall – Allows you to raise a physical wall to block bullets, rockets, etc. It crumbles if it takes enough damage.
Element Shot – Each gun has a specific element tied to it, so when cast, it sets the element on the gun. For example, the machine gun will get fire bullets, allowing you to burn enemies to death if you shoot them with enough bullets. The chain gun gets a lightning element enhancement, which shoots lightning down on the enemy you’re shooting as well as any other enemies in the area.
Raven’s Panic – A very useful crowd control spell; when cast a murder of ravens fly around the screen and peck at the different enemies, allowing you to shoot them while they are occupied fending off the ravens.
Rose Spear – Spears rise out of the ground and impale anything in a circle around a rose that you throw.
Sacrifice – Uses some of your life/magic to restore life to injured humans
Willpower – “Force push” type spell where you can push any car or object in front of you into the enemy.
Calling down a bolt of lightning to take down stronger opponents
Super spells include:
Lightning – calls down a huge bolt of lightning from the sky to strike a large enemy.
Tornado – calls forth a large moving tornado that launches all ground units and objects into the air – knocking any flying enemies like helicopters out of the sky, as well as killing anything lifted up into the air as they die from impact. (A good crowd control spell)
Meteors – calls down a large meteor shower, destroying anything they hit, including large buildings. (When I cast this spell I run like crazy since everything in the area pretty much comes crashing down.)
You are able to level up all of the spells to level 3 with experience points, generally resulting in giving the spells stronger damage, longer effect time, greater radius, etc.
As you can see, the game mechanics are pretty fun for this game since you have a lot of combat options open to you. The problem is that there’s not enough levels for you to enjoy using your firepower and spells in.
The environments in the game are sometimes quite destructable.
Achievement System
This Achievement System implemented in this game is pretty much by the book and I have no major complaints. There are Achievements for beating each level, each difficulty, spending 15 hours in the game, and maxing out all your weapons and spell levels.
I would have liked a few more Achievements, such as getting all A ranks or S ranks for every mission in the game – things like that. That would have definitely added in some more play time for me, as I was content to beat some levels with just a B ranking.
The 15 hours played also was not accurately described. It’s actually 15 hours spent playing and continues don’t count. I had died plenty of times on higher difficulties and replayed certain segments over and over, but all of those unsuccessful replays didn’t count for the time played Achievement. When you actually beat a level, the time spent to beat the level is displayed. This time does not take into account any attempts you died on. I found myself getting close to beating the final difficulty of the game, and I was worried I wouldn’t be able to get the 15 hour Achievement after I did that, so I just let the game run for a few hours when I did other things. That way, when I finally beat the level, I would see a time of say, 3 hours instead of the usual half an hour.
Military soldiers will try to support Alicia, but they don’t really do much besides getting killed
Final Thoughts
The game was fun enough for me to play through five times and get the full 1000 Achievement points. Even then, I don’t think that took 15 hours. With the fact that I could keep leveling my character and upgrading my skills, I didn’t mind playing the same six stages over and over. Not everyone is going to enjoy this type of repetitive gameplay though.
I rate the game a C-. The game’s premise and mechanics were pretty enjoyable but its extremely short length and relatively poor graphics represent a poor value for a $50 game. Maybe there wasn’t a demo for this game since a demo would be practically 1/6th of the game! I have no major complaints except for its length and maybe its slight lack of polish.
As it stands now, I’d recommend this game to action/adventure fans if you can find it new for $20-$25. $50 is just too much to pay for such little content. However, I am hoping for a sequel to this game. The character is likable, the combination of guns and magic work, and the storyline is interesting. We’ll see though if a sequel actually comes out…
