After 11 years away, everyone’s favorite zombie-slaying cheerleader, Juliet, finally made her big comeback with Lollipop Chainsaw: RePOP. Unfortunately, our girl’s had some work done, and it’s not necessarily for the better, but, look, we’re just glad she’s back. There’s just not a whole hell of a lot out there that scratches this one particular Troma-fied itch of weird, wacky, and utterly, gloriously profane violence. There’s a few that get close though, so here’s eight ways to keep the party going even after Juliet stops cheering.
Shadows of the Damned (PS3/4/5, Xbox)
A no-brainer if ever there was one, but this gets a special place at the top of the heap due to the fact that it’s also getting a fancy remaster due out exactly on Halloween. It’s also $US15 cheaper than RePOP, and doesn’t mess with the core gameplay as much. Both good things.
Even beyond that, though, like most things with Suda 51’s name on it, it’s most certainly A Vibe. Kinda like a weirder/hornier/angrier Resident Evil 4, which makes even more sense when you realize this was Suda teaming up with Shinji Mikami for the second time. The result of that unholy marriage has a demon hunter named Garcia Hotspur hunting down the hellspawned asshole who took his partner, with the help of his trusty strawberry-loving sidekick/gun/torch/motorcycle, Johnson. It’s not as wild and ambitious as the original pitch—thank early-2010s EA for that—but there’s still a lot of fucked-up, freewheeling gothic demon slaying to do therein, all while a very pissed-off Latino swears like a goddamn sailor the whole time.
Mullet Madjack (PC)
Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s Ninja Scroll recently got a tiny theatrical re-release for its 30th (Christ…) Anniversary, and much as I hate becoming that person who says, “They don’t make ‘em like that anymore,” real talk: they kinda don’t. I like me a good complex narrative much as the next guy, but sometimes, I just like seeing fucked up mutants get graphically sliced in half while I bark and clap like the happiest homicidal seal. Look, we all have our thing.
With that in mind, Hammer95 Studios had mine and every other weeb-of-a-certain-age’s best interests at heart with Mullet Madjack. It would have won hearts and minds as it is, being deliberately stylized to look and sound right at home playing at one-thirty in the morning after a showing of Dominion Tank Police on the Sci-Fi Channel, except all the grisly, squishy violence is kept intact. But the old-school anime vibes are mixing it up with Hotline Miami-style flow state mechanics, as our intrepid mulleted hero Jack is forced to murder cyborg scumbags up every floor of a skyscraper, done for a live television audience of millions who will lose interest and cost you sponsorship dollars if you don’t keep it varied, violent, and fast enough.
It’s kind of a perfect, short-burst type of FPS experience that ratchets up the complexity and trickiness without ever tipping over into a game where you have to put more than three seconds thought into your next move. Move forward till you find something else on two legs, figure out if something in your hands or the environment can kill him, all while your bloodthirsty handler cackles her sick fucking ass off. Mullet Madjack’s a gem.
Gori: Cuddly Carnage (PS4/PS5, Xbox One/Series X/S, Switch, PC)
It was inevitable that as cozy games rose, so too did the number of games where you get to play as an adorable cat. As the number of games where you play as an adorable cat grew, so, too, did the number of games where the adorable cat rides a talking skateboard and slaughters armies of demonic robot unicorns. Actually, wait, there’s just one of those, and we are all blessed for its existence.
Gori: Cuddly Carnage should be the most irritating thing in the universe. It’s a game that thinks it’s hilarious that the talking skateboard can’t actually swear, where cute little unicorns twist and contort into the kind of fleshy, toothy, tentacled abominations only Kurt Russell is equipped to deal with. It’s like if you let American McGee make Stray in 2003, and all the funding was being provided by Spike TV. Somehow, despite how it sounds on paper, Gori is this year’s buried treasure of a game, maybe the closest actual kin to what Suda 51 and James Gunn were going for with Lollipop Chainsaw. It’s a game where an entire race of sentient supertoys go full Skynet and wipe out the human race, and our only hopes are Gori, the last surviving superpet, and his sentient skateboard, F.R.A.N.K., skating and grinding across what’s left of neon-bright future Earth. They’re slicing and dicing anyone that stands in the way of them, and the kindly scientist who created them and then sent them into orbit for their own protection when unicorn Judgement Day went down.
Somehow, despite all that, it never forgets to have a beating heart. The flashback cutscenes, in particular, are actually soft-hearted. Even during gameplay, Gori himself is still a sweet little guy who can still only talk in endearing meows. F.R.A.N.K.—despite never shutting the fuck up—gets a pass just because he’s such a legitimately supportive cheerleader for everything Gori needs to do. Also, sometimes, F.R.A.N.K. turns into a rocket launcher, an endearing trait for any true friend. If you ever played Metal Arms back in the day and thought it could use more kitty-cats, this should immediately be your goddamn jam.
Bulletstorm (PS3/PS4, Xbox 360/Xbox One, Switch, PC, VR)
Really, this recommendation could stop at the fact that the first trailer was set to Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Wish’. As we are all aware by now, Nine Inch Nails in a trailer iscruisecontrolforcool. Thankfully, the folks at People Can Fly were kind enough to actually make a game worthy of the honor.
At a time when every shooter was trying to be Gears of War, People Can Fly went, “Okay, but what if we used colors other than brown and gray, gave the player points based on how hilariously they killed their enemies, and the script read like we did one of those coma dream seasons of Archer as an FPS?” The result is not just one of the most hilariously brutal shooters ever made, but also one of the most brutally hilarious scripts ever written for this kind of game, a veritable treasure trove of bespoke profane turns of phrase from the minds of absolute maniacs, and bless it for existing. Many will die having never taken a helicopter and mowed down an entire race of mutants with a minigun while yelling, “Here comes Butterdick Jones and his Heavenly Asshole Machine,” but can it be said that they ever truly lived?
Bayonetta Trilogy (PS3/PS4/Xbox/PC [1], WiiU [1, 2], Switch [1, 2, 3])
Bayonetta walked so Juliet Starling could run, and Queen Bay did it in heels made out of guns. Having wrapped up her story just two years ago, it’s become increasingly clear just how special Bayonetta is in the landscape of gaming, as a complete package: A ridiculously-proportioned angel-slaying pagan witch with guns strapped to every limb, clothes made out of her sentient demon-possessed hair who, like Juliet, manages to be sexy and sexual as hell without ever crossing over into lifeless, sterile Real Doll territory.
That’s all before even thinking about the game itself, which has some of the most fun, varied combat in all of games, and some of the most pre-goddamn-posterous setpieces in the entire medium. For Crissakes, they yeeted GOD into the sun in the first game, and somehow they found ways to escalate from there. Bayonetta 3 has Madama Butterfly doing a Rei-in-End of Evangelion, taking a sexy bubble bath in the utter stratosphere, and flicking away city-sized enemies like a fly trying to land in her Moët & Chandon. Platinum didn’t invent over-the-top third-person action, but they damn sure went the hardest with it.
Oh, and, when you need a come down, play Cereza and the Lost Demon. That game deserves more eyes.
Deadpool (PS3/PS4, 360/Xbox One, PC)
Despite getting delisted a few years ago, this one’s got back on folks’ radar after Deadpool & Wolverine came out, which unfortunately means good luck finding a copy for under $US100. Still, if you’ve got the itch, the inclination, and the Merc With A Mouth’s Ultimate MvC 3 appearance just isn’t doing it for you, this certainly exists.
And even being just a middle-of-the-road hack-n-slash, the damn thing is just dripping in fourth-wall breaking one-liners and weirdo humor, from Wade fielding phone calls in his apartment from Nolan North himself, up to pitching the full game in the credits to High Moon Studios themselves by the end. Your mileage may vary on that, especially since the game’s working off of Wade Wilson’s far more obnoxious comics counterpart, more than Ryan Reynolds, but if nothing else, you do get a full-on adventure with Deadpool playing around with a far more varied number of X-Men than the MCU has seen so far.
Saints Row IV (PS3/PS4, 360/Xbox One, PC)
Really, this entire series fits the bill pretty well, but for some reason Saints Row The Third is the one that’s gotten most of the attention and nostalgia over the last decade or so. This ignores that its even-less-grounded successor is sitting right there, waiting for a remaster that still hasn’t come.
And it’s a damn shame because IV going for a cartoonish hybrid of The Matrix/Marvel/Mass Effect works like gangbusters, not just for the kind of open-world game that plays like Crackdown on, er, well, crack, but for grounding all of the Saints’ interstellar/interdimensional shenanigans in God’s-honest character development. The cackling veneer has you disarming a nuclear weapon while Aerosmith’s ‘I Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing’ plays, before landing in the Oval Office to become president, or buying a gun that shoots dubstep, or calling in Rowdy Roddy Piper to bring a rogue Keith David to heel. Keep playing, though, and you run into legitimately heartwarming moments, like Professional Shaundi and Tweaker Shaundi bonding by having a superpowered run together in the city, or reconnecting with Johnny Gat by doing a Professor Genki obstacle course set to ‘The Boys Are Back In Town’, or just how oddball and sweet a bunch of the romance options turn out to be (though Kinzie’s is just perfection). It’s maximalist chaos that doesn’t forget to still have a heart.
Sunset Overdrive (Xbox One, PC)
Oh, poor Sunset Overdrive. It’s had such a hard life. Launched on the original Xbox One in an absolute dead zone, just before one of the most chaotically stacked AAA holiday seasons in history, languishing while Microsoft slowly figured out that no, people weren’t going to be watching The Price Is Right on their console. While it did limp its way to a million copies sold, the game now sits in a horrible limbo, where Sony technically owns the rights to the IP, but Insomniac’s original contract for the game means Microsoft has exclusive rights to any sequels or ports. We can’t even get a PS5 port out of this, and Insomniac apparently being shackled to the Marvel machine for the next decade or so means we probably wouldn’t even if they wanted to.
So, right now, all we’ve got is the Xbox version, and the just-good-enough PC port of one of the most ridiculously fun open-world games of the last two generations.
Seriously, a game exists where you start out dismembering energy drink zombies with a gun that shoots vinyl records, and end up rail grinding into the stratosphere to murder a possessed inflatable corporate mascot, somewhere around the time King Buzzo from The Melvins plays a charity concert where he flies away like Mary Poppins, and Laura Bailey sings a punk-rock bard ballad during a post-apocalyptic D&D game where the king has forgotten how to get out of character. Somehow, this game did not sell 27 million copies. Shame on us.
This is, essentially, what Insomniac bringing that Ratchet & Clank spirit to an M-rated zombie game looks like. It’s wall-to-wall absurdities and smirking jokes, all while bringing the developer’s flair to the combat, and an exhilarating approach to traversal, much of which, unsurprisingly, wound up being good practice for Spider-Man. It’s never too late to experience The Awesomepocalypse, people.
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