Lollipop Chainsaw RePop, a refresh of the 2012 hack-and-slasher about a cheerleader fighting hordes of zombies, finally has a release date: September 25th. It also has a first trailer, showing it in action with the new, less violent "RePop mode".
As the video says at the start, RePop lets players choose between "Original mode", which maintains the grindhouse violence of the cult hit original, or the RePop mode which replaces some of that violence with "pop-art damage effects."
It's one of several changes designed to make RePop the "definitive version of the game", according to producer Yoshimi Yasuda. RePop will also have faster load times, support for 4K resolutions and 60 frames per second.
RePop was announced back in 2022 with a summer 2023 release window, but soon slipped into 2024. We haven't heard much about it since, and what has been shared has been cause for concern. Original developers Suda51 and Grasshopper Manufacture aren't involved, and neither is original writer James Gunn, who is fairly busy making superhero movies these days.
Perhaps most worringly of all, RePop isn't expected to include the original soundtrack, which included licensed songs from Skrillex, The Human League and MSTRKRFT, among many others. Yasuda has said that the original soundtrack will be replaced, and will only include "a few licensed tracks".
I never played Lollipop Chainsaw at the time, because it seemed the wrong kind of dumb. (For the record, Revengeance and Bayonetta were the right kind of dumb.) It also only got middling reviews, although its style and bombast seem to have earned it a cult following in the years since, like many Grasshopper games. Maybe this September is when I finally give it a go.
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