Oh Tom knows a lot about B movies but I don't get how that is relevant to a game. There is a difference between watching a shitty film for 2 hours and playing a shitty game for 6 plus hours.
@f1b61eda3c86198be7a39f4d4a4b6cb6:disqus : I hear you, but I would respect his reviews more if he didn't just dash off a few small paragraphs and then assign an incredibly low score to a game. This is shoddy work, period.
Four paragraphs has been a "valid review" for as long as media journalism has existed. If you want an elongated instruction manual, go read IGN or GameSpot.
your review reads as if everything you learned from the game is from the trailers
its incredibly non-detailed and sounds like you're just trying to get attention on metacritic.
For all the derision in the responses here, this guy's not wrong. The game is fairly one-note. The attack combos are pretty much meaningless against all the one-off zombies, you can pretty much just run around in a circle mashing the strong attack button and sleepwalk your way through the game.
Beyond the joys of listening to a cheerleader scream "I'm going to rip-out your taint" and getting treated to a bunch of digital up-skirt shots, there's not a lot here to justify a purchase.
Yeah that is fair, it could have been longer but really you get the gist of what Tom is saying. The review tells me that this is a bad game and you should avoid it, a few extra paragraphs of padding won't change that message.
To summarise most of the replies in this thread...
"Your opinion is different to mine, therefore it is invalid."
Not being serious is not an excuse to be bad.
As far as I'm concerned, flagrant and nasty sexism is as valid a reason to give a game a 1/5 as bad graphics, poor handling, or boring gameplay. And I love reading Tom Chick, partially because he is willing to give a terrible review to a popular game (or a great review to an unpopular one). If you find that all your scores fall within the Metacritic average, it could just be that you're a hack. Something Chick decidedly (and thrillingly!) is not.
"Fatally" unimpressed? Did you somehow manage to write this comment from the grave?
Definitely better than Bayonetta at least.
Thanks for saving me a few bucks, Tom. Maybe I'll revisit this again when it's at the 19.99 mark.
Yeah, I love my B-movies. House of the Dead: Overkill is about as awesome an homage to B-movies as you'll ever find, and it's not even a very good game. It's just a lightgun game, for Pete's sake, and it's still totally awesome.
Mr.Chick, can you please articulate more on the actual combat's flaws? Was it not fluid? Did it feel ineffective against hordes of enemies? I feel you might need to describe this game's premise a bit more for some of us laymen
I'm a little confused as to what happened here - why did the internet hate brigade suddenly appear? I don't think I've ever seen that at Qt3 before.
It would be a bit nice if he could actually find a part that he hates describes for longer than 2 and a half clauses an then maybe people would see it as valid criticism.
NO ONE MENTION JOURNEY!
"If you want to play a shallow fighting game...." Funny you should mention that, considering your favourite game last year 'Bastion' was just that. Repetitive combat with little or no depth. No exploration or complex enemies to fight. If you apply criticisms to games such as these maybe there wouldn't be a massive disparency between the poorly-structured reviews, try not to show bias tomchick. Troll harder next time.
yo dumbshits, who the fuck are you?!?
Sure, it's fluid enough. It's just not very complex. You can use stuns to basically "farm" the zombies for money if you want to unlock new moves and particularly the costumes (you need special medals for these, which requires setting up combo kills). But it's nowhere near as developed as the combat in games like Bayonetta, God of War, Splatterhouse, God Hand, and so forth. It feels like a budget game in comparison.
Part of the issue is that there's very little variety in the enemies, and therefore very little need for different tools to fight them. It's a simple game with a simple combat system. This works fine in a game like Dead Rising, because there's so much more to the gameplay. But Lollipop Chainsaw has pretty much zero gameplay beyond the fights.
I'd say the combat system is about on par with that anime game Capcom released a few months ago. I don't even remember the name of that thing, but it was basically a lot of anime with occasional fighting breaks. Lollipop Chainsaw's combat is about as sophisticated as that thing, where combat was little more than a framing device for anime episodes. What was that called? Hold on...
Asura's Wrath!