I wasn't going to play this game but not as soon as I did, it was mainly because I had PS Plus for a month and it just so happened to get a PS Plus discount before it was going to come out so I decided to purchase it. I was also looking for a short and somewhat easy and relaxing game to play and this "remake" of Lollipop Chainsaw fit the bill, I never played the original game so this was going to be a fresh experience.
Before, I start talking about the game, there's been some people talking about how this isn't the most polished "remake" in the world but I didn't have much issues, outside of one game breaking bug which made me restart from a checkpoint and some audio issues, it was smooth experience for me, I suffered no crashes and it's certainly playable enough to get from begginning to end. Others might have different issues, but I had barely any.Anyways the game itself is "good" enough but it wasn't anything amazing and that's fine since I was expecting that.
The story and writing is dumb and over the top, I wouldn't consider it to be well written or anything amazing but it just seems to know what it is. Juliet did admittedly come off to me as a dumb airhead at first but her chemistry with Nick did make her a bit more tolerable since he's the one that tries to be normal in a story full of wacky and over the top weirdos.
There's also some crazy villains that don't appear much before hand and you basically by the end of every stage, they are okay but I wouldn't really call them memorable outside of their appreances and over the top personalities, they seem to follow the Cobra Unit logic from Metal Gear Solid 3 which is something I'm not that big on but considering how Lollipop Chainsaw's story is never as highly praised in my circles as MGS3 is just makes me tolerate the former more.
The gameplay is once again, just hitting on the realm of just "fine" but nothing standout. Juliet has light and heavy attacks which can be chained together, there is dodge command by hitting circle, there is a super powered up mode like Devil Trigger in Devil May Cry or a rage mode in a God of War game and there is a "Nick Toss" to do more damage based on a roulette wheel. Everything you see here has been done before and I won't criticize the game for being derivative since the combat manages to be entertaining enough on a service level to avoid being too dull but it's also suffers from the issues these melee combat games do is that, all you really need to do is just randomly press square and triangle together and dodge and you will be fine. On top of having a lot of healing items too.
One issue I do have is that enemies don't really have much in the way of telegraphed attacks with normal zombies, where I will be attacking and then get interrupted by a couple of zombies punching me because there was no visual or audio cue to get out of the way. You also can't cancel out of a combo into a dodge meaning since there is no telepraphed, I can mash the attack buttons and then cancel out when I randomly want to.
The stronger enemies fare a bit better since they have telegraphed attacks like the zombie football players but this leads me into another issue, in that the dodge is mostly fine but if you try to dodge and do a follow up attack, Juliet will do a dropkick instead of her chainsaw attack meaning that I can time a dodge, Juliet will do a dropkick and then it will take her 5 seconds to get up and then enemies will get free hits in as she is getting up. If the game wasn't so forgiving with healing items, this would make the game potentially very frustrating. The only part of the game I consider "hard" was the boss on Stage 5 since he had so many phases and moved quickly and I was worried that I wasn't going to have enough healing items for the final boss but there were some shops left on Stage 6 so it didn't matter.
Final issue I have with combat is that during boss fights or enemies who can dash around very quickly, there is no stinger or flying swallow equivalent so that means every time some enemies or bosses get to the other side of the arena, you are going to have run all the way to the other side to get there and then the enemy will dash again repeating the process.
Luckily the game isn't just combat but these non combat sections mostly are the bare minimum to break up the pace where they are mostly just QTEs, scripted sequences and mini games, they break up the pace without being overly frustrating that you wish they were over, except for the building climbing mini game.
There is the Chainsaw Dash but only the School Stage actually makes much use out of the mechanic, it mostly goes away in later stages.
That's prettty much the thing with Lollipop Chainsaw's gameplay, none of it is outright "bad" but nothing really stands out and it carried by it's over the top premise, writing and it's production values.
Overall, for a game I got at a PS Plus discount, I had a decent enough time with it.
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