Some brief history – as this review is long – I’ve always been a fan of Grasshopper games. They’ve never been massive-budget blockbusters, but they’ve had some incredible ideas and interesting worlds that I’ve adored visiting in their games. Lollipop Chainsaw is where I’ve always been a bit torn. On one hand, the action is simplistic. On the other hand, the way the story is told is incredible, and the characters themselves are all just so charming. So when a remaster was announced two years ago, I was excited. And now, having played RePOP, I’ve got a greater appreciation for what Lollipop Chainsaw was trying to do all those years ago. But I’m not sure RePOP is currently the right way to experience it.
Lollipop Chainsaw follows Juliet Starling, a cheerleader at San Romero High School who is excited to introduce her boyfriend Nick to her eclectic family on her eighteenth birthday. Unfortunately, as the day begins, a zombie outbreak has occurred. But not just that – an evil goth kid named Swan has summoned five intelligent zombies, called the Dark Purveyors, to take over the world. It’s just as well that Juliet is descended from a long line of zombie hunters, thankfully, and sets off with her trust chainsaw to cut up some rock music-worshipping lords of rock.
At the time, Lollipop Chainsaw was an exciting prospect as it brought together No More Heroes’ Suda51 and James Gunn to create something truly bizarre and out there. Revisiting Lollipop Chainsaw today, the charm is still there. You can see the influences that James Gunn would eventually implement in his tentpole films like Guardians of the Galaxy and Suicide Squad. But Lollipop Chainsaw feels like so much more than the exploitative adventure it initially presents as. It’s a genuinely fun and subversive romp that had the perfect vibes if I could anachronistically use those words back then.
RePOP is a remaster of sorts that brings the game to modern platforms. The original game has been stuck on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 for almost twelve years, so RePOP feels needed. This remaster tweaks the gameplay to be much more accessible, especially to newcomers, and adjusts things so the game puts its best foot forward early. Much effort has been made to ensure players can access many more upgrades and combos earlier, which helps with the flow of combat.
The other enhancements are what you’d come to expect from a modern remaster – a higher framerate in particular – but the newly added RePOP mode doesn’t serve much of a purpose. It replaces the blood effects, which were already pretty cartoonish in the first place, with purplish flourishes instead. I suppose it’s an attempt to get newer players to try the game out, but it feels like a pointless addition and a glorified visual filter. What colour of fluid comes out of a person when you chainsaw them in half isn’t going to convince them to play a game where they otherwise wouldn’t. But that’s just my opinion.
At its core, Lollipop Chainsaw is a hack-and-slash adventure that sees you, as Juliet, mowing through enemies with a combination of attacks from your pom-poms, chainsaw, or both. The game does a pretty good job of introducing new abilities across its modest eight-hour runtime, and using a combination of these abilities is the best way to kill zombies efficiently. In terms of mechanical complexity, as a fan of the genre, I’d say it’s closer to something like Dynasty Warriors or No More Heroes rather than Devil May Cry or Bayonetta. It’s a simplistic combat system that is easy enough to grasp, though RePOP makes it easier to master.
RePOP has been tweaked to run much faster than the original game. Juliet moves quicker, and I could swear that her attacks come out quicker, too. Couple this with adjustments to the in-game shop, which goes as far as halving the cost of some of the better special moves. It’s clear RePOP puts great effort into giving you all the toys to play with early. Later on, you’ll even get a projectile weapon that needed to be cocked after a few shots in the original. Now, in RePOP, it can shoot continuously. It’s a much easier experience, which I’d normally lament, but I welcome it given how Lollipop Chainsaw is structured.
This is something I rarely would praise in a remaster. But despite the vivacious nature of the world and the incredibly tongue-in-cheek humour the game hangs its story on, Lollipop Chainsaw is straightforward. Encounters with enemies, while sometimes erring into the creative, feel they carry on for a smidge too long. It’s made especially worse if you die, as checkpoints are oddly uneven, and you’ll have to repeat a lot of it again. The game is fun in short bursts, and given how simple the combat is, there is just not a whole lot here beyond what you unlock in the first third of the game.
These moments are broken up briefly by sections where you can use your boyfriend Nick to control a zombie and make a path for Juliet. But they’re too few and far between and don’t do anything creatively interesting, though I appreciate the way Nick is used in the story to subvert the typical expectations you’d have for someone like him in a story like this. I can’t say much more without spoiling, so I won’t.
The highlight, like many Suda51 games, is the boss battles. Each of the Dark Purveyors is modelled after a type of rock music – a, once again, incredibly Suda51-like decision. The cast of bosses you’ll battle are all fantastic, taking inspiration from punk rock, Viking metal, psychedelic rock, funk and good old-fashioned rock and roll. They’re great little battles that carry themselves with such a huge visual flair that you almost forget about the key element of Lollipop Chainsaw that RePOP is missing.
And that’s the music. Almost all licensed music that appeared in the original Lollipop Chainsaw has been scrapped for RePOP, replaced with original pieces that quite frankly don’t suit the mood or feel of the original. We’ve all had that moment when we watch an older series on Netflix we love, only to see the music from key scenes changed to generic tracks that fail to capture the feel of the original. That’s RePOP’s problem, and while The Chordette’s iconic Lollipop plays as you shop for upgrades, all of the original music is gone. It’s a huge shame, given how integral these tracks were to the original vibe.
Thankfully, the voicework of the cast is still pretty fantastic, especially the star-studded ones. Michael Rosenbaum does a great job playing Nick, while Linda Cardellini, Michael Rooker and Shawnee Smith round out a great voice cast playing some of the Dark Purveyors. But you can’t discount the incredible work that Tara Strong does in bringing Juliet to life. She nails every line and makes me happy that they didn’t go the recast route like so many remasters sometimes do. Unfortunately, for some reason, all of the audio recordings are incredibly low quality, so this remaster feels especially lo-fi.
However, the missing licensed tracks are only one prong of a larger issue that RePOP carries – the presentation. There was real potential here to revive the original game with a more colourful and vibrant visual style to complement the hyper-sweet Lolita style the original developer was going for. Instead, while the game runs at a much better framerate than the original, many odd visual glitches bring down the experience. Lighting is all over the place, sometimes just filling the screen with a white glow to the point where you can’t see anything. Sometimes zombies disappear, and other times, students disappear but still speak their lines to Juliet after being saved. Heck, sometimes characters don’t speak their lines. I hope these issues will be fixed with patches, but it means RePOP is currently not the best way to play Lollipop Chainsaw.
Outside of the game itself, odd issues persist, too. Menus and load screens are blurry and compressed, looking like low-quality images your weird aunty downloads off Google and then uploads to her Facebook as her profile photo. The menus that let you scroll through your achievements and abilities are also barebones, with some even disappearing after selecting an item on them. It’s, once again, something I’m sure will be fixed with future updates, but it’s a strange choice to have such average-looking assets in a project that’s about bringing the best version of the original game forward.
This is a massive shame because RePOP is only a passable revision of the original game, which is arguably the worst way to play right now. The faster combat system is appreciated, as is the speedier framerate, but the myriad of glitches and missing effects that have reared themselves in place of them are not worth the trade-off. And that’s before we even consider what has been lost due to presumable licensing issues. If the worldview weren’t so damn charming, I’d be reticent to recommend RePOP at all. But there’s something here, and I hope it’ll eventually bloom into the remaster that Lollipop Chainsaw deserves.
