A good first-person shooter doesn’t need to look hyper-realistic, include actual military weaponry, or feature massive levels. Really, all a shooter needs to nail in order for it be considered damn good in my book is simple: Moving and shooting in it should feel great. That’s it. And sadly, recently released “Y2K arena movement shooter” Don’t Stop GirlyPop doesn’t accomplish that, despite a wild and memorable art style and soundtrack.
Don’t Stop GirlyPop is an indie FPS starring a super soldier of compassion and kindness trying to fight back an alien invasion of corporate-obsessed evil bastards who want to steal and exploit the very love you defend. So you do like any soldier of love and hope would: You grab a wild shotgun that you can freely bedazzle and start blasting fools.
The FPS is built entirely around moving fast and killing lots of enemies in various arena encounters. Shooting shit is 80 percent of this game, and on paper, that sounds like a great video game to me, a person who loves boomer shooters and most FPS adventures. However, to achieve max speed in GirlyPop, you must repeatedly slam, jump, and dash. And you’ll want to go fast in this new FPS launching on Steam on January 29, because the faster you move, the more damage you do and the more quickly you heal. The problem is that repeating this bunnyhopping-like maneuver requires pressing three different buttons over and over and over again, and it quickly started to tire my fingers out.
Worse, when I was at top speed during fights, I felt out of control and not in a fun way. Instead, it made fights turn into a blur of neon colors and random shapes. Slowing down, while it made combat easier to parse, also made me a sitting target. And you move so slow in this game when you aren’t bunnyhopping around that not speeding through fights and platforming sections is a drag.
Bad combat, but good music
And as I ping-ponged around the bizarre low-poly arenas that make up most of Don’t Stop GirlyPop‘s world, I often struggled to spot baddies as their models are often made up of thin shapes roughly collected into something that resembles an enemy. If I had a nickel for each fight that lingered on because a few flying bastards were hiding in the garish textures or low-poly environment around me, I’d have enough money to buy a small soda. When I did find them and shoot, I’d often be unsure if they were even taking damage until they died, making guns feel weak in the process.
But don’t get me wrong, I enjoy how GirlyPop looks! A lot. The mismash of 2000s-era tech and game visuals with bright pink colors and oddly shaped levels is a standout element of the game. It reminds me of some of the weird mods I’d play back in the day in games like Unreal Tournament and Half-Life. It’s just a shame that Don’t Stop GirlyPop sometimes goes too far with how much digital junk and neon it tosses on the screen, such that it can become downright unplayable until the action calms down a tad. A more successful example of a game tapping into this same era of gaming is last year’s Brazilian Drug Dealer 3, which isn’t nearly as hard to look at when combat happens.
©Kwalee / KotakuAt least, throughout all of this, the music slaps. A few of the battle tracks got stuck in my head long after I stopped playing, which is a very good sign that you’ve made some awesome tunes. I just wish the game’s later levels were as rad as the music. Instead, the more I played, the more I started to dislike my time with GirlyPop as areas became messier and harder to navigate, like I was playing someone’s first draft and not a finished level.
Don’t Stop GirlyPop is an example of a shooter that oozes style and has some cool ideas, like using a flip phone to communicate with your handler, a woman who appears in live-action video clips on your phone’s screen. But its visuals get in the way, and its combat is too focused on chaotic speed and screen-obscuring effects. Perhaps I could still enjoy all of this if the guns were satisfying to use and the enemies fun to kill, but more often than not, I wasn’t sure if I was doing well in a fight or if my guns were even hitting anything. So I’m sorry to say I stopped playing GirlyPop before the game ended. But hey, at least I’ll have the music to jam out, too.
English (US) ·