Lollipop Chainsaw

Lollipop Chainsaw is brought to you by Grasshopper Manufacture and the mind of Suda51. You can tell right from the start with it's over the top action and silly but witty dialogue. You play as Juliet Starling, the middle child in her zombie hunting family. She carries a chainsaw that has the ability to turn into a machine gun and even a cannon she uses to shoot her boyfriend's decapitated head out of. At its core the game is a generic hack and slash, but all of these elements make it so much more fun.

Juliet's eighteenth birthday is ruined when her school is suddenly attacked by a zombie horde. Soon she and her decapitated boyfriend, Nick set out to stop the "Rock and Roll Lords" who command the zombie horde. Each lord is the embodiment of a different era of music (Punk, Metal, Pop, Etc). Each level of the game has a different aesthetic and music selections correspond on which lord reigns in that area. It's very easy to say that the soundtrack is one of the best parts of the entire game.

The combat starts off very simple four button system. Featuring a soft, hard and low attack as well as a dodge move that puts you behind enemies. When you hit a zombie with a hard attack you may chop off their limbs but you wont decapitate them for a few hits. The easiest way to dispose of the "zombie douchebags" is to use Juliet's soft attack which causes enemies to become dazed. Then finish them off in one hit with her chainsaw. Each kill gives you coin that you can use to buy items from the in-game store. These items include stat upgrades, costumes, usable items and combos. The more flashy your kills are, the more money you will receive. So the game urges you to buy combos and to use them effectively.

Lollipop Chainsaw has a kill counter system. After Juliet enters an area she has to kill a specific amount of zombies before the next area opens up. While reading this you probably think this is terrible but while playing it, I was never once bothered by it. The fun combat and dialogue between Nick and Juliet just completely hid the fact that I was doing the same thing over and over for hours. There are a few mini games such as Zombie basketball and baseball as well as a few arcade games. Which add a nice pinch of variety to an already solid zombie killing experience.

In my final comments I should add my minor gripes with the game. The game is fairly short. Only six levels and each are under an hour long. So I really suggest you rent the game for a weekend and play it. I highly doubt you will be disappointed. After completing it I really don't feel a need to go back and play it again. So unless you want to try to get the best scores in the levels, I don't see a lot of replayability here.

I did run into a few glitches in the game. In a few areas, cutscenes just didn't load which resulted in me having to restart from the last checkpoint. This only happened three times but it should still be mentioned. My final and largest problem with the game are the amount the times the game loads. While the load screens are pretty fast, it loads way too often. At a boss fight the game will load the beginning cutscene, then another loading screen after the cutscene, then after you finish the QTE to kill off the boss, there is another loading screen to load the cutscene of the boss dying. So in all about three loading screens for one fight. Now these screens aren't long at all, but they really break up the action and pace of the game.

Lollipop Chainsaw is a great spin on the hack and slash genre. It's fun combat, great music and funny dialogue put it slightly above the others. While you may not be playing it months from now, it serves as a short/fun departure from the more serious games on the market.