Lollipop Chainsaw opens with a young woman getting out of bed. The camera lingers on her body – her long computer-generated legs, her too perfect lips. She unwraps a lollipop and, again, there is over the top, suggestive imagery. Minutes go by before we see Juliet as a person, instead of a collection of body parts and Playboy allure.


“Would you be playing this if you didn't know who made it?” a friend asks when I describe the scene. It was a good question, and the answer is easily "no."

Designer 
Suda51 has been called the Quentin Tarantino of video games, as they share an affinity for pulp genres. He's made cult classics that get erected into canon for being quirky, idiosyncratic games that shine in a climate favouring generic power fantasies. He's best known for No More Heroes, a title about a schlub gamer who spends all his time at home playing with his cat, until he's accidentally mistaken for the world's greatest assassin. It's an incisive, crude, tongue-in-cheek portrait of gamers and the delusions we sometimes willingly buy into.


Juliet is a cheerleader who, by night, hunts zombies. When a Robert Smith wannabe summons the legions of hell into her small town, she does battle with the undead, her boyfriend's live disembodied head tagging along. The game doesn't lack for imagination. The setting has the slapdash, anything goes freewheeling nature of classic Sam Raimi fare. There are punk rock zombies and an Elvis several stories tall. One level takes place on a hippie commune with occasional mushroom-induced hallucinations. It's Suda51's patented flash and it works well to distance itself from the hordes of other zombie games out there.


But the game itself lacks momentum. While Juliet jumps around freely and beats on zombies with her pom-poms, using the chainsaw slows the action down, opening her up to attacks. The desired effect is to use quick attacks followed by heavy attacks, but the combat is a herky-jerky shamble. Doing well nets you more coins to unlock different combos and techniques that add much needed flavour, but why do I have to endure a half-sketched game to unlock something more fulfilling?     


All of it is made worse by the emphasis on Juliet's sexuality. The camera lingers back, allowing us a look at her cheerleader uniform (and, lest you tire of that, the option to buy more outfits with in-game currency is available). Classmates she rescues comment on how they'll masturbate to her later or call attention to her figure. What’s the message? I can see what Suda51 is trying to say: he's working in the sexploitation genre and calling attention to the various ways Juliet is casually debased by these comments. But it's all played for laughs or to titillate. There is even an achievement for successfully peeking up Juliet's skirt. Any message, if intentional, gets muddied and mashed until it's unrecognizable. You can't really make a game mocking objectification when that same objectification is used to sell more copies. At the end of the day, Juliet becomes little more than a living doll.

Rating: 2/5
Designer: Suda51
Developer: Grasshopper Manufacture
Platform: PS3, Xbox 360