According to those who have played it, the recently released remaster of 2012’s Lollipop Chainsaw is a janky and hard-to-play mess with performance problems, missing features, and bugs galore.
Lollipop Chainsaw Repop is a remastered version of the 2012 cult-classic action game starring 18-year-old cheerleader and zombie hunter Juliet Starling. The original was a campy but solid button-mashing good time with a surprisingly strong main character. As former Kotaku writer Ashley Bardhan wrote last year, Juliet is allowed to be “annoyingly talkative, sexual and competent, romantic and smart” and that “Juliet is not easy to categorize, but that’s what makes playing her feel so natural.” And if you want to experience this oddball game in 2024, your best bet may be busting out an old Xbox 360.
Lollipop Chainsaw Repop is a very bad remaster
On Thursday, the new Lollipop Chainsaw remaster launched on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, and PC. I downloaded it on Steam, but immediately felt like something was off as I played through the opening moments of the game.
Juliet seemed to move around unnaturally fast, with her feet sliding around the world like she was on ice. By contrast, many of her attacks felt agonizingly slow, making combat a bit of a chore. As I continued through the first few levels I ran into numerous bugs. Sometimes audio would cut out or the music would disappear. Dialogue sometimes gets cut off and I got stuck on enemies constantly. I also spotted heavily compressed loading screens with lots of pixelation.
When I tried to tweak Repop’s visual settings, I discovered the game only lets you change the resolution. When I tried to back out of that menu using the B button, I learned that you have to exit every menu by selecting the exit option. And while the game ran at a solid 60FPS for me, I was disappointed to find that the Tony Basil song “Hey Mickey” no longer plays when you use you activate your super mode after killing a bunch of zombies. All in all, it wasn’t a great experience.
Looking around online, I see I’m not alone. People have been documenting bugs and other problems in the remaster on places like Reddit and Twitter. One person compared the remastered game to Lollipop Chainsaw running on a PS3 emulator. The results? Not great. As I had thought, many of the animations in the game aren’t working properly. Some are faster than normal, others are running much slower.
Others online have shared bugs involving broken boss fights, Juliet not animating, and performance problems that make the game nearly unplayable. It’s a mess and a terrible way to play Lollipop Chainsaw. Players are hopeful that the game will be patched to fix some of these issues, but for now, I’d advise folks to stay away from this remaster.
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