Bullet Witch

Bullet Witch is a third-person shooter where players control the witch Alicia and her unseen companion "Darkness" while navigating a three-dimensional post-apocalyptic world. The game's six levels are divided into semi-open environments, ranging from urban to country settings. Environments include destructible objects and combustibles that generate explosions when damaged. At the beginning of each level Alicia is assigned a variety of abilities and weapon attributes.

Alicia has a health meter and magic meter, both of which automatically regenerate over time. Restorative items to speed up regeneration can also be received from non-playable characters (NPCs) Alicia saves from attack.

In the wake of multiple natural disasters culminating in a demon invasion in 2007, Earth has become a wasteland, and by the year 2013 humanity is on the brink of extinction. Alicia Claus, a witch guided by a demonic power dubbed the "Darkness", enters a near-deserted American city. Despite the Darkness saying the city is doomed, Alicia helps the survivors and ends up helping local resistance forces led by Maxwell Cougar evacuate survivors. During her time there, she and the resistance are forced to flee from Omega—a powerful demon immune to magic and gunfire—and Maxwell asks for her aid in saving humanity. While they work together, Maxwell gives Alicia a journal fragment revealing that an archeologist performed a ritual to revive a loved one after she died in a plane crash—his actions opened a portal allowing the demons to attack humanity.

Alicia accompanies the resistance forces to the location of the portal, aiding them and further survivors along the way. When she reaches the portal's location, she discovered the archeologist still alive as a prisoner of the portal. Receiving the remaining journal entries from him, Alicia discovers that she herself is the archeologist's daughter and is only alive and able to wield magic due to his actions. Alicia is forced to kill her father to close the portal, although the remaining demons still control Earth.

Development of Bullet Witch lasted approximately two years, being handled by the same team who developed Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex for the PlayStation 2. It was the first game developed for seventh generation consoles by Cavia. The concept for Bullet Witch originated before the next generation of hardware had been revealed to developers, beginning its concept development for sixth generation hardware. After the developers were shown the Xbox 360, they were impressed with its development tools and additional features such as the Xbox Live functions, deciding to develop Bullet Witch for that platform.

While development for the PlayStation 3 was considered, the team had begun work on the Xbox 360, and decided to stay on a single platform to deliver the best possible experience. The game used both internal and external staff, with a team size estimated at being between 100 and 120 people. Between 20 and 30 programmers worked on the game.

Review aggregate site Metacritic was given a score of 55 out of 100 based on 59 critic reviews, indicating "mixed or average" reviews. Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu praised the atmosphere and spectacle, but noted difficulties during combat and handling the camera. Eurogamer's Oli Welsh negatively referred to the game as "Japanese fetish gaming in full effect", being satisfied with the gunplay and magic systems but finding most other aspects either poorly designed or lacking substance. GamePro was highly critical, faulting almost every aspect of the game's design, feeling that there was nothing good about the game and that it was not worth buying despite a promising premise. Joe Juba of Game Informer felt that the game had potential and praised the enemy designs, but its poor execution held the game back from being a fully enjoyable experience.

Greg Mueller, writing for GameSpot, praised the destructible environments and spell casting while faulting most other aspects of the game—he concluded that "Bullet Witch shows promise, but it ultimately fails to deliver anything more than a [forgettable] ho-hum third-person shooter". IGN's Erik Brudvig was unimpressed by most aspects of the game and highly critical of the gameplay and lack of content, calling it "short and shallow". Lewis Cameron of Official Xbox Magazine found the gameplay dull and repetitive despite liking the variety of attack options, and faulted most other aspects including the graphics and localization. VideoGamer.com's Will Freeman enjoyed the magic system and later levels, but criticized the graphics and its "basic" content.