Lollipop Chainsaw (PS3): Bad for all the right reasons.

I learned something very quickly when I first played Shadows of the Damned and that is if the game touts the name "Suda 51" anywhere on its packaging, then throw out any sense you might have that the game will have a complex compelling story, sympathetic characters, or any modicum of seriousness.

After SotD's "Big Boner" sequence and No More Heros' Travis Touchdown jerking off his lightsaber, I gathered that this game was going to be a non stop stream of dick and tit jokes. But all the trailers made me laugh, so I was interested. My only concern was how the combat might hold up. It was available to try at PAX East but I sadly couldn't get near to try it. So I've taken the plunge and picked it up. Lets see if it stacks up to my expectations.....

LOLLIPOP CHAINSAW: (PS3)

Our game opens up with an intro from our protagonist, Juliette Starling, waking up on the morning of her 18th birthday. She explains that she is a cheerleader at "San Romero" high and that today she is going to introduce her boyfriend Nick to her family. After doing a handful of shameful near nude yoga stretches and introduction of her family, she takes off on her bicycle to to meet up with boyfriend.

Only she finds out upon arrival that her school is now currently over run with zombies. She races in to find Nick, hacking and slashing zombies with her rainbow chainsaw and saving other students along the way. She heads to the main courtyard of San Romero High looking for Nick, where she is surrounded and ambushed by zombies. Nick dives in to make the save, but is bitten in the process. After admitting to Juliette that he "Kinda, sorta.. you know.. Loves her" she decides hack off his head with her chainsaw, and through a little incantation manages to keep his decapitated head alive. Needless to say, Nick is a bit confused by this. Juliette explains that she and her family are zombie hunters, and they take off to find the cause of the outbreak.

All things considered Nick, You probably could be worse off.

Now let me get this out of the way right now, shortly after all of this the villain is unveiled to be some dark lanky gothy kid (with a voice that doesn't match his character) who hates his school and the government.  This will probably be the pettiest gripe I have ever made in this blog so far, but the premise of this game is the popular cheerleader and her jock boyfriend have to slay through hoards of zombies so they can beat up the goth kid? 

Maybe its because it doesn't happen as much over in Japan, but isn't this the kinda thing that would get school shootings started? I was more of a nerd in school so I don't have much in common with jocks or goths, but I definitely wasn't one that fit in with the "cool crowd" either.  So because of this I find it a little annoying that this game plays into the worst of high school stereotypes. I know a couple of goths, and at least one or two of them are alright (sometimes).

I understand its satire and they are over blowing the personalities somewhat and this is a petty gripe but come on, couldn't some other high school stereotype been the villain? Snooty cheerleaders and douchebag bulling jocks are not people to be looked up to. And before people get their panties all knotted up, I fucking know not all jocks or cheerleaders are stuck up (although the odds aren't in their favor). But not all goths are raging psychos who are looking to shoot up their classmates either. Some of them just want school to be over so they can go home like the rest of you, so quit constantly vilifying them.

Seriously, why not just slap a Marilyn Manson shirt on him
 and name the school Columbine. Pfft, idiots...

OK, got off track there. As I said earlier, my biggest point of concern with this game was the combat. From the trailers I had seen and snippets of game play footage I could catch, the combat seemed competent but not fluid. All of the attacks had a very herky jerkey set of motions to them, and that made me worried. My next fear came into when I first started playing and the game generally divided into three attack buttons: Square for fast pom-pom attacks, Triangle to wing the chainsaw, and X to swing low.

It started off pretty slow and boring to me because it reminded me of Darksiders, which as far as I'm concerned has phenomenally boring combat. Giving a sword 6 different attacks but having the combos be: X, XX, XXX, XXXX, or in a pinch XX (Pause) X, is not fucking fun. This is not comboing, this is just button mashing. And yes, the game had secondary weapons but there were no combos that utilized both at once so there was no reason to level anything else if the sword is gonna do all the work for me.

As a cheerleader, Juliette's moves can get unnecessarily acrobatic and finesse
Although, it does make it fun and entertaining as hell to do.

Anyways, back to Lollipop. Despite a bit of dismal start to the combat, you quickly start picking up zombie coins which you can use in shops along the way to learn new moves or upgrade your health. The first few of them start off pretty cheap so its easy to get some new moves into to your repertoire quickly. Plus after you beat stages you can replay them for a better score and bigger rewards.

So after a few levels I found myself pomming a few people into a corner, leapfrogging over them before finishing with a spinning chainsaw sweep to take off their kneecaps. It started to move a bit more fluidly and I was having more fun with it. You are also rewarded if you can keep 3, 4, or 5 at a time with additional zombie coins or silver tokens (more for music and costumes, and there are a LOT of costumes {and thankfully you can unlock them by playing the game, NOT by paying 4.99 on DLC}).

As you kill zombies you collect stars to fill up a meter at the bottom, when its full you can trigger it and the game starts playing "oh Mickey" and your attacks do incredible damage. If you are faced with a lot of zombies, you can also do a slot machine game for various different attacks with Nick's head. Overall I suppose if I had to describe the combat, I would say its maybe a slower paced Devil May Cry if anything.

Once you start learning some tricks the combat really gets entertaining.

The game is presented pretty well for the most part. The graphics have this very interesting cartoony charm about them. Juliette has some lifelike qualities about her face and her reactions yet its all colored in what appears to be a thin layer of cell shading. It gives it a very comic book feeling about it, which is good considering that pretty much every aspect of the game is presented in a very comic book style. Although the game isn't without problems..

The game is broken up into about 6 or 7 stages of various settings, each with different types of zombies depending on the area you are in. These aren't just your run of the mill lumbering moaning zombies, these zombies just spout off ridiculous nonsense through the entire game. It wouldn't be a Suda 51 project with out them. Literally in the beginning of the first actual stage after the prologue level, is a group of football player zombies and the first words out of their mouth, and I'm not making this up are "Ten-Hut! Ten Butt Fuck!" Thanks Suda. Really doing your part to advance the legitimate games are art crowd.

Each of the main villains represent a different style of music with a stereotype of the genre.
Racial stereotyping apparently to Suda 51, is also hilarious.

But the hilarious dialog doesn't end with that, throughout the course of the game you listen to Juliette banter with Nick about their future, the zombie apocalypse, or just random bullshit. There is a handful of references to there films and a fuckton of pop culture references. One of my favorites is still Juliette discussing with Nick how they are going to have babies despite Nick's current handicap. Another great one is when Juliette explains her new catch phrase "What the dick?". There is also a hilarious section where you have to play through various classic games such as Pac-Man, Elevator, and Pong and the gamer exchanges there were funny as well (even if they hit a bit close to home {And I fucking refuse to believe that a hot blond cheerleader is a gamer geek.}).

Sometimes however, The action gets broken up too much for my taste. The game sprinkles in a fair amount of cutscenes and to the games credit there are a number of them that you can skip. But there are points in the game where Juliette will take phone calls from her family, and sometimes the dialog is funny or it can give you a tip but these are not skippable and it can be somewhat annoying because after I've heard them I just want to get back into slashing up zombies.

The other big gripe that I have about breaking up the flow of the game is there are too many load screens. TOO MANY. There are parts of the stage where you cut from one locale to another and you have to wait for like 10-30 torturous seconds. There are times were you want to just skip ahead of a cutscene and it drops you into a loading screen. And considering this is a game where it has time attack stages, having to constantly break into load screens is fucking annoying.

The levels are an oxymoron. As I said, there is only like 6 or 7 total stages in the game which makes it feel like its very short, but on the other hand the levels are almost 30+ minutes to play through and with all the breaks in the action they feel like they take forever. It some how fails to find a happy medium between the two of them. If they cut each of the levels in half the game would have felt much longer overall but not painfully long as I am playing each level.

The game is a little too easy. None of the bosses were difficult for me with the exception of the first one, and even that wasn't all that hard. If you are a fairly avid gamer I would suggest staring the game on hard mode, because aside from the length of the levels, the normal mode is a fuckin breeze.

"OK, just let him think he's eating me for a minute before I have to start faking it"

Last thing I'd like to touch on a bit is the music. The game kinda starts off with some poppy music that matches Juliette's personality, but as you start to get into fighting sequences its layered with a bed of hard rock and heavy metal, which I think is the exact kind of soundtrack you need for slashing zombies to ribbons in a game that's not designed to be scary.

There is a moment near the end of the game where you are charging towards a monster that is flinging cars at you and in the background is a fucking Dragonforce song. It was impossible not to grin as I played that sequence. It was a great selection of songs but even more so than that, there is a handful original compositions too from Jimmy Urine from Mindless Self Indulgence (who fucking suck) and Akira Yamaoka from Silent Hill fame (who's fucking awesome). All in all the game has a great blend of licensed music and original pieces.

Jimmy Urine also is the voice of one of the bosses. If that matters to anyone.

The big thing to take from this game is to accept it for what it is. The game is designed to be simple, mindless, stupid fun. You are not picking up Lollipop Chainsaw because you are expecting a deep exposition with complex character development and emotional twists. This is game to see a scantily clad cheerleader slash the crap out of zombies over a layer of awesome music with dick and boob jokes. The game has been getting near perfect ratings which seem a little high for me, but I was able to play it through and finish it and go back wanting more. Even now I still have the urge to go back and try to unlock the rest of the outfits if anything just  to see how it plays.

Ultimately, you may not want to drop 60 bucks on a title like this, but it knows exactly who its catering to and manages to deliver on the points it needs to. It may not be the greatest zombie game ever put out but it was certainly a fun ride the whole time. If you are tired of dispatching zombies with a shotgun or rifle, or just looking to play something fun without having the crap scared out of you, I'd say Lollipop Chainsaw will show you a good time.