Lollipop Chainsaw

I really did not want to review Lollipop Chainsaw, but when it showed up in the mail I knew I had to. Why wouldn’t I want to? For one, it looks immature and absurd from the commercials and previews. It is also one of those polarizing games people will either hate or love, and however you review it, you are going to make someone mad. But that is the job: you review games you sometimes don’t want to, and you do it fairly, setting aside your preconceptions.

The story is quirky, strange, cute, dirty and packed with pop-culture references. It opens in the bedroom of our cheerleader protagonist, Juliet Starling. It is her birthday, she is getting ready for school, and she is gushing about her boyfriend Nick, who she is meeting later. A few cut-scenes on, you head to her school to find it overrun by zombies and Nick nowhere to be found. After a dozen-odd battles you find him, alive, until he is bitten, at which point Juliet, a powerful zombie hunter, uses magic to sever his head without killing him so he can tag along hooked to her belt for the rest of the game. From there the story gets weirder and weirder, to the point that it just becomes irrelevant.

People argue about the graphics. Are they super high-quality next-gen visuals? No. Are they right for the game? Yes. It may look like My Little Pony threw up on it, all hearts, rainbows and bright colours, but that is the quirky style it is going for, what other game flashes hearts on screen as you slaughter zombies over and over? The one real downside is a grainy overlay applied over everything, which genuinely detracts from the style the game otherwise nails.

The sound is a mixed bag. On one hand you get great licensed music, Pac-Man Fever, Mickey, You Spin Me Round (Like a Record) and a dozen-plus other songs that set the tone of the action and fit the quirkiness perfectly. On the other hand there is the dialogue, which is bad, corny and sometimes downright creepy; some lines will make you laugh and others will make your skin crawl.

If you have ever played an arcade fighter, the gameplay will feel familiar. It is fast, full of button-pushing and genuinely fun, with light, heavy, physical and jump attacks feeding into combos you unlock as you go. You don’t have to be a combo expert, though, I got through half the game just mashing buttons before I got the hang of it. Once the combos clicked, the game progressed a lot quicker, and that’s when its rhythm really opened up.

Lollipop Chainsaw is more than what a lot of people, myself included, assumed it would be. It is incredibly fun, as long as the characters aren’t talking, or you have the dialogue turned down, and you can get past the stupidity of the story. Is it worth $60 at retail? Probably not. But when it drops to $40, it is a steal.