Lollipop Chainsaw provides gamers an opportunity to play as a teenage girl murdering hundreds upon hundreds of zombies. Is this proposition as perfect as it sounds?

Suda 51 is a complete pervert. In Shadows of the Damned you were fighting to get your girlfriend back by blasting through bad guys with your “Boner”, and in No More Heroes you were forced to recharge your lightsaber by jerking off the Wiimote as Travis Touchdown held it proudly between his legs. Now we have his new game Lollipop Chainsaw, an innuendo filled adventure about a cheerleader called Juliet Starling fighting zombies on her 18th birthday, meaning she’s literally as young as possible to still get away with sexualising her in every way and still be allowed to sell the game to Americans. Never change Mr. 51.

On the surface Lollipop Chainsaw should be absolutely lovable to everyone who’s ever played a video game ever. It’s about a cheerleader carving up zombies with a chainsaw, with her boyfriend’s decapitated head strapped to her waist filled with enjoyable characters, excellent dialogue and a rocking soundtrack. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to ignore the big issue with Lollipop Chainsaw, it’s a combat orientated game that just doesn’t have good combat.

Combat in Lollipop Chainsaw is reminiscent of God of War, Devil May Cry and Bayonetta but fails to be as good as all three. The biggest problem is that it simply does not feel like you hitting things with a chainsaw, rather than the satisfaction that comes from slicing a zombie in half from games like Dead Rising, Juliet’s attacks just sort of bounce off enemies meaning the game designers may as well have replaced her weapon with a stick or a soggy baguette for all the difference it would make. Juliet’s less effective hand to hand moves are actually more satisfying to use and the animation of those moves seems a bit smoother. Once you master the game’s evade button it’s pretty much over aside from 5 more hours of tapping the triangle and occasionally the circle button as regular enemies will struggle to even touch you.

The game overall has quite an archaic design, it feels like a PS2 game (sometimes it looks like a PS2 game). Other than the odd quick time event and mini game here and there, there’s not much more to it than “get trapped in a room full of enemies, tap buttons until they’re all dead, move on to the next room”. The game does sometimes tries to trick you that you’re doing something different, like with “zombie basketball”, which basically means insist of killing zombies you’re killing zombies but pressing the triangle button more often to get headshots. There’s nothing wrong with that as such, but it adds a feeling of familiarity to what is otherwise a wacky game bursting with personality, and as such drags down the overall experience.

The game does somewhat make up for this which each stage having its own gimmicks and traits, the standout being the arcade stage filled with nostalgic mini games and nerdy references. Worth mentioning that one of the stages (Stage 5) is just absolutely awful, it’s narrow corridors and closed off brown areas which contain wave after wave of boring tedious enemies, and there’s no explanation for it other than being out of ideas.

One standout part of the game is the boss battles, which the flow of the games narrative is particularly built around. There’s five main bosses of intelligent zombies based on different musical styles, as well as one big boss at the end that this review dare not spoil because it’s awesome. Every battle is memorable, fun and completely unique from the last (if not entirely unique themselves). The only issue with these fights is that they’re all a bit easy, especially with your boyfriend shouting out pathetic and unneeded hints that may as well just say “hey, maybe you should attack that thing”, and the camera isn’t a team player during ANY of them and often becomes more threatening that the actual enemy.

It’s notable that the game isn’t exactly a powerhouse technically. It runs on the Unreal Engine so texture pop ups aren’t necessarily uncommon, the game has a ton of explosions in it even though it has some pretty terrible looking explosion and fire effects. Load times are often a bit of a drag, and there’s one part where Juliet mows down zombies on a combine harvester and it just looks AWFUL, it’s just a muddy looking textureless mess. There were some sound glitches as well where dialogue would replay for no reason and different lines would play on top of each other, overall a patch really wouldn’t hurt Lollipop Chainsaw down the line.

Overall, Lollipop Chainsaw is too short, flawed, glitchy, dated and impossible not to recommend. The story, characters and general personality of the game are more than strong enough to carry the whole thing, and there really are some wonderful moments buried in it that are worth experiencing. The game’s shortness is kind of a blessing in disguise because it means none of the minor flaws ever break out into serious issues. Although the game isn’t perfect, it stays fun enough and it’s notable that there aren’t any really horrible parts of it like the Labyrinth in God of War 3 to make you not want to play it again on a different difficulty mode.

If nothing else, Lollipop Chainsaw is worth a rent and experiencing at least once, for what it is the ride is a lot of fun.

7/10