Lollipop Chainsaw

By: Robert Murphy

Ha-ha well I never thought in a million years that I would be sitting here writing a review for this game but I guess I was wrong so here it is my review for the ridiculous, booby bouncing, curse word spewing and rainbow spouting action game known as Lollipop Chainsaw. Now when the game was first coming out I will admit that I’d heard the games name before for two main reasons, one because the cosplayer for the games main character is one of my favorites (a girl by the name of Jessica Nigri) and second is it was that it was a zombie slaying video game with a busty blonde for a main character. So already you can tell that my male generated brain liked the game for all the male reasons and it was for that reason that I wasn’t going to purchase the game, I resisted, but my girlfriend being the girl she is saw it and purchased it and so here we are.

 Jessica Nigri cosplaying Juliet

For starters, I will say that Lollipop Chainsaw is unlike any other game I have played before and it’s ideas come straight out of something you’d see in a Grindhouse film like Planet Terror except that it isn’t as grainy but definitely as cheesy and obscene. The game follows the exploits of a bosomy blonde cheerleader named Juliet who is like any other popular girl in school; she is a skinny girl who thinks she’s fat and is dating a pretty boy on the football team named Nick. This all seems fairly normal until you realize that Juliet’s family is a group of zombie killers and now Juliet’s school is being overrun by the undead…oh and Nick is turning into a zombie so she cuts of his head before he can turn. This is all completely normal and rational; at least to Juliet as she must now fight to stop the undead from taking over her hometown with Nick’s decapitated head at her waist side. So at this point you can all tell that this game is pretty ridiculous and it is a game that knows this as well, in fact it relies on this and makes jokes about itself the entire you’re playing it. Alongside this there is a level of profanity, lewd behavior and sexual innuendo as well all come along for the ride and its pretty funny until it isn’t anymore. Sure I will not lie, I got a laugh out of the humor and lewdness for a bit but it got old very quickly as every five seconds a boss was shouting out that Juliet is a whore and how they’ll jizz in her rib cage when she is dead.

I like this for all the wrong reasons ha-ha

Now you’d think that you could get passed the annoying vulgarity and just enjoy the chainsaw wielding and bouncing cheerleader action, well sorry to say that doesn’t go very far either my friends. I have to say that from the start I had an incredibly hard time getting a combo to go together, Juliet does start off with basic moves but for better combos you need to purchase them throughout the game and from there the game gets easier to play. Sure the combos and hacking and slashing are repetitive, I knew it would be and I didn’t mind it but what really bugged me was how Juliet moves and her absolutely crummy locking on controls. Getting Juliet to move towards an enemy and lock on to said enemy was an extreme pain for me, for example in the first boss fight I would try to move away from the boss but still look at him to see if he was attacking and it was a disaster, I had to constantly keep moving the joystick back and forth and I almost threw the controller at one point. One thing that can be said for the combat and the story is that there are some exceptional tunes, at one point in the campaign I had the joy of listening to some Five Finger Death Punch and some other metal based tunes that kept me sane and content. As for Juliet, she isn’t all that bad and I think she would be more annoying of a character if not for Nick attached to her side; he is what makes the two work. Nick is constantly in fear of his situation that he’s in unlike Juliet who finds this whole thing completely normal, Nick though has plenty of witty one liners and sarcastic back chatter with Juliet and it makes for a great laugh.

The picture says it all

As for the enemies you’ll be chopping apart and generally dismembering throughout Lollipop Chainsaw’s campaign, there really isn’t a hell of a lot to tell you other than they’re zombies. Many of the enemies are fairly generic, some may look different for different sections you enter but other than that there really isn’t much that changes. There are some zombies with abilities such as breathing fire or some zombies have charge attacks that can knock you over but for the most part you get the same zombie slashing effect no matter what enemy you come across. There are other things like hidden collectables and mini games through the campaign that are meant to break up the monotony but these won’t really do it for you either. When you think hidden collectibles you think that they would be you know….HIDDEN, no not in this game in fact the collectibles in the game were often right out in the open and those that weren’t were not hard to find if you took a minute to look. As for mini games and other miscellaneous adventures we get short and pain in the ass events that usually will cause frustration rather than enjoyment. Take for example a mini game involving you shooting zombies while Nick rounds the bases in a baseball field 3 times to win the game for the “human” team, this seemed easy at first until you get zombies all over the field chipping away Nick’s health so fast you can’t even kill them all in time. So what starts out as something simple and probably meant to be fun, turns into another venture where I felt the urge to throw the controller again, oh and it doesn’t help that every time Juliet gets a triple kill on a zombie she enters a rainbow covered cut scene that makes you miss killing a zombie…every…frickin……TIME!

 Kill them with SPIRIT!

Not much else to say about Lollipop Chainsaw I’m afraid and I said before it didn’t have much hope to start with except for the fact that it appeals to the male mind set in its basic way by giving us a bouncy blonde to play as. This however, like most things with Lollipop Chainsaw got tiresome very quickly,  the overall theme of sex appeal, gore and general lewdness was fun for the few missions and then it got tiresome and I found myself skipping every cut scene because it was the same stuff all over again each time. What did keep me sane throughout the game was the surprisingly enjoyable soundtrack that the game had which feature some toe taping tunes and this coupled with the funny crap that came out of Nick’s mouth kept me going till I finished the game.

Good:

-Enjoyable tunes

-Nick’s sarcastic and quick witted one liners and conversations with Juliet

Bad:

-The horrible lock on made fighting unbearable at times

-The annoying and vulgar tone gets old very quickly

-Combat is what it is and that is simply hack and slash through waves of zombies

-Enemies aren’t very diverse

Scully Rating: 4.0 out of 10