A whole lot of ideas are crammed into Lollipop Chainsaw’s six-hour-or-so runtime. Its backbone is a pulpy, goofball romance between barely-18 cheerleader heroine Juliet Starling and her wayward, torso-less love interest, Nick. As Juliet cuts a fantastically mad swathe through brainless zombies at her high school and the surrounding town of San Romero, you’ll face off-kilter mini-game–esque oddities like zombie basketball, Pac-Man–like stages, and quick-time events where you’re controlling a zombie body attached to Nick’s decapitated head. While these brief respites from the combo-laden undead genocide are welcome, they’re never particularly fun.
Instead, you’ll need to glean satisfaction from slicing, dicing, and pom-pom bashing your way through various shuffler types in increasingly savvy ways, which yields big bucks and leaderboard-busting points. You can cash in your money on combos, stat boosts, and an array of extras, including concept art and music tracks. (With its rockabilly roots and fantastic licensed tunes, the soundtrack is Lollipop’s irrefutable standout.) You can even buy Nick Tickets, which unleash any number of special, silly area attacks — using your boyfriend’s head in preposterous ways — that’ll earn you max coinage.
Bosses require a little TLC in the chainsawing-them-in-half department. Help them out, would you?Lollipop teases us with a number of intriguing gameplay tropes — everything from driving a combine through a field of ghouls to a hippie stage with psychotropic mushroom levels. Problem is, none of them are deep enough to make the experience consistently satisfying. Even the game’s madcap boss fights almost always devolve into button-prompty combat against their inevitable three forms. No matter how you view the game’s potentially divisive depiction of Juliet (Is her giggly, panty-flashing, stripper-pole-swinging act crassly exploitative, or just cheeky, campy fun? Lollipop’s tone is frustratingly all over the map.), the gameplay seems to always fall just shy of being much more than it is.
Granted, Lollipop is clearly built for replayability. Leaderboards, level replays, and a special ranking mode are available for bragging rights and to possibly net a different ending if you manage to master your combos/zombie kills (which trigger “Sparkle Hunting” combo rewards for big coin), purchase every in-store item, and save your fellow students.
There’s definitely a specific, intended audience for Lollipop’s quick-hit gameplay — those who relish stylish score-hunting over the more fluid combo-complexity of the game’s closest cousin, Bayonetta. But a little less flash and way more substance would’ve made this slaughterfest more memorable for all gamers.
While a lot of Lollipop's humor is hit-or-miss, most of the character descriptions viewed in the menu made us chuckle something fierce.PUBLISHER: WB Interactive • DEVELOPER: Grasshopper Manufacture • ESRB: Mature • MULTIPLAYER: None • ACHIEVEMENTS: Slow trickle • COST: $60 • RELEASE DATE: June 12, 2012
+ Incredibly clever soundtrack with silly licensed tunes that suit the game’s theme perfectly.
+ Juliet and Co. are fantastically rendered in a cool, comic book–style aesthetic; plenty of collectibles to urge replaying the game.
– Gameplay feels weirdly shallow and never quite satisfying; uneven thematic tone; shooting segments have overly fidgety aiming.
? Anyone else get the feeling that the entire Starling family is kind of dense?
