Bullet Witch's premise seems decent enough. A babealicious witch who uses a six-foot long "Gun Rod" in lieu of a broom exhibits an impressive display of firepower, gymnastics, and magic as she confronts legions of monsters, demons, and zombies in a post-apocalyptic world. Things start to break down, however, as soon as you tear your eyes away from the cover art and actually start playing the game.

That's when you'll discover that Bullet Witch is an Xbox 360 title with a helluva lot more style than substance and where craftsmanship appears to have given way to marketing hype. This is lamentable because the game can be quite entertaining in parts. The fully destructible urban, industrial, and wooded environments deliver a pyrotechnic wonderland where our heroine's powerful spells wreak all manner of mayhem and where some imaginative boss battles add further fuel to the fire.

This... is my Broomstick

There's no multiplayer support -- unfortunate considering the game's massive Live potential -- so Bullet Witch relies entirely on its single-player experience for our approval. The core six-level campaign (which only delivers about half-a-dozen hours of gameplay, including a tedious hour-long end-boss battle) opens up in a suburban neighborhood overrun by demonic skeletal mercenaries who like to wear their victims' skin as clothing. As Alicia, the gun-toting witch girl who looks a bit like Ashley Simpson (post-rhinoplasty), you'll mow your way through a series of soft targets here while coming to grips with the game's shooting and spell-casting mechanics.

The story eventually propels you through a large urban city, some remote industrial sites, a heavily fortified forest, and then back to the city again. A series of arbitrary barricades and force fields -- created by some powerful floating brains -- force you along a structured and linear path and, along the way, you'll hook up with some earnest-looking resistance fighters who try to assist you in their pitiful mortal fashion (but mostly just get in your way). Every so often the voice of some mysterious mentor appears to offer advice or upgrade Alicia's spells to handle some of the more powerful boss enemies that stand in her way. The girl has connections.


So what went wrong? Well, it starts with some shoddy graphics and just keeps festering. Bullet Witch looks attractive enough from the right angles -- gas stations, cars, and tanker trucks blow up with aplomb -- but some chronic clipping and pop-up glitches scar the visual canvas at almost every turn. Dead bodies float in space, arms and legs sometimes pass through walls, and the dynamic shadows are uniformly coarse and blocky. Enemy combatants will sometimes appear out of thin air (they aren't telekinetic, the graphics engine rendering distance is just screwed) and, apart from the aforementioned bosses, there's precious little variety in their appearance.

Some timely, professional quality FMV cut-scenes advance the plot but, as in the game itself, the Japanese-to-English voice acting is largely cringe-worthy and the writing's not far behind. From the trite love interest subplot (between Alicia and good guy resistance leader Maxwell) to the inexplicably out-of-character WWE taunts of the demon army grunts, Bullet Witch's unique goth themes are irretrievably scattered and lost.