Nintendo Okie

Suda51 is well known for making bizarre games.  Killer7, No More Heroes and Desperate Struggle are all fine games that overflow with crazy.  Never one to run out of weird, Suda51 and his team have made another masterpiece of insanity.  The easiest way to describe Lollipop Chainsaw is to call it Buffy the Vampire Slayer ‘cept with zombies.  Since I love Buffy and am a fan of crazy, Japanese games, I knew I had to give this one a shot.  No surprise, it turned out exactly like I expected.

What You Need To Know
Lollipop is an action-adventure, arena brawler where you are locked in an area with a horde of zombies and you have to chop their heads off to proceed.  You play as Juliet Starling on her 18th birthday; how convenient.  Things start off as a normal school day but as Juliet is off to meet her boyfriend Nick, she realizes things are far more undead than usual.  In the process of fighting zombies, Nick gets bitten and Juliet uses some magic spell to save him; or his head at least.  With her chainsaw in hand and her boyfriend’s head on her hip, Juliet must fulfill her role as a zombie hunter and save her town from impending doom.  Lollipop is strictly single player with the only acknowledgment of the outside world being online leaderboards which tracks high scores on each level.  There are collectibles scattered throughout the world and there are upgrades, concept art, music and outfits you can purchase with medals you earn from playing.   The formula is well known but how well does the zombie slaying, pom pom shaker stack up against other games wanting your time and money?

I Can’t See… Oh, Never Mind
It’s 2012, folks.  How are we still having camera problems in video games?  I guess camera controls are harder than they look (get it?).  I don’t want to call the camera in Lollipop broken but I did struggle with it for the first few hours.  In most cases you have complete control of the camera but once you move the view snaps back to its default position.  Notice how I said most of the time.  There are sequences where control is taken away from you.  This typically happens when you have tight surroundings, probably to keep the camera from clipping through a wall.  Read more…