Genre: Action/Adventure
Publisher: Atari
Developer: AQ Interactive
Release Date: TBD

Humanity’s dusk has arrived. Following famine and global unrest that have led to millions of deaths, a race of demons have invaded Earth, killing and maiming everyone they can find.

On October 3rd, 2013, a woman named Alicia is brought back to life to rescue humanity. She wields magical spells and a massive weapon, half witch’s broom, half massive cannon, called a gun rod. She’ll travel into the heart of the demons’ territory to, basically, kill them all.

Bullet Witch, in short, is a game about a pretty girl with a huge gun killing every damn thing she finds. The Freudians in the audience can sit the hell down. We know, guys.

Bullet Witch is also a bizarre-looking third-person shooter from the Japanese developer AQ Interactive. You can really tell, in a way, from the game’s visual design; the similarities to both Gungrave (a high-energy shooter that’s high on action, low on anything that’s not action) and the Guilty Gear series (menus and character design that seem to be taken from the liner notes for a mid-eighties fantasy-themed hair band) are hard to overlook. Alicia herself looks like a gothic Lolita gone feral, whereas her enemies include demonic soldiers draped in human skin and giant floating brains with psychokinetic powers. Whatever else you can say about Bullet Witch, you aren’t going to mistake it for another game.

Alicia is equipped, as noted above, with a gun rod, which is basically a broom with a machine gun in it; it has unlimited ammo, but finite clips. As near as I can tell, that’s just an excuse to have a cool reloading animation. As a matter of fact, almost everything she does is an excuse to have her do something cool, from that reload animation (she conjures up a fresh clip out of nowhere) to her acrobatic jumps and dodges. This is the next generation of style for the sake of style in action games.

In the rare event that pure gunplay won’t finish the job for you, Alicia can cast up to nine spells. I’ve seen her conjure up a rune-covered chunk of rock as portable cover, as well as gesture and fry anything she sees with a giant bolt of lightning. Other spells reportedly include summoning a murder of crows, throwing deadly roses, or calling in a meteor shower. This is the kind of thing you resort to if the demons have brought a tank with them; the attack spells are high-powered, shiny explosive death.

There are no power-ups in Bullet Witch. Alicia’s health automatically regenerates if you can go for a few seconds without taking damage, and she regains willpower rapidly as you score kills. You can upgrade her spells, attributes, and gun rods, and gain new gun rods (such as a shotgun and a cannon), but all of that is purchased with experience points at the end of a stage. There’s nothing else to distract you from the serious business of shooting and/or beating every demon you see.

Bullet Witch is a purely singleplayer game with six nonlinear stages, set in and around a postapocalyptic city based on New York. You can roam wherever you want within each level, with lots of checkpoints. Atari, as of right now, has said there will be more stages available for download in the Xbox Live Marketplace, along with new costumes for Alicia, but they’ve yet to disclose whether or not you’ll have to pay for the privilege.

After going hands-on with Bullet Witch, I have to say it’s interesting, but it’s one of those games where you need to get through a slightly repetitive initial level before it opens up. Alicia’s extra spells and gun rods should give the game more variety and edge than it has in the demo level I played, which mostly consisted of emptying the machine-gun gun rod at demons until they fell over or exploded into clouds of gore.

Of course, this was an early, untranslated version, so there’s plenty of time for Bullet Witch to develop and improve. Either way, this is a visually interesting shooter with a lot of potential.