School Girl/Zombie Hunter review for PS4

Brace yourselves: I have some shocking information to impart. Ready? Here goes:

School Girl/Zombie Hunter is an incredibly stupid game.

Okay, that’s not that shocking. Or shocking at all. Really, if you were expecting a game called “School Girl/Zombie Hunter” to be anything but schlocky, B-movie-level trash, then that’s on you.

“But,” I hear you say, “what about Lollipop Chainsaw? That game sounded trashy, but it was actually surprisingly smart!” And while that’s a fair point, it overlooks a few key factors. First, Lollipop Chainsaw was written by James Gunn and created by Suda51, which means that there was some pretty impressive talent behind it. School Girl/Zombie Hunter, by contrast, was made by the people behind games like Drive Girls, Onechanbara, and Senran Kagurua, all of which exist primarily to show how far jiggle physics gaming technology has come.

Secondly, School Girl/Zombie Hunter is made for the kind of people who looked at Lollipop Chainsaw and were disappointed that you didn’t get to see the game’s heroine stripped down to her undies. In fact, School Girl/Zombie Hunter is made for the kind of people who’ll buy DLC that changes the undies into vegetables that (barely) cover up the eponymous school girls’ nether regions.

In other words, as I said before, School Girl/Zombie Hunter is a stupid, stupid game. But provided you can shut your brain off and appreciate it the same way you would, say, some Z-grade schlockfest from the ’70s, it’s not wholly unenjoyable.

I mean, you have to be willing to make allowances for extremely repetitive gameplay and middling graphics. Every level can basically be summarized as “Kill all the zombies until the time runs out,” and even if the game gives you a decent array of weapons with which to achieve that goal, they don’t differ from each other all that much. Zombies just kind of pop into existence in front of you, meaning you spend all your time just spamming the shooting button — which, truthfully, isn’t that bad a thing to be doing, since it distracts you from the ugly-looking environments. I’d say that the story or the characters make up for those downsides…but if you’ve read this far, you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that both of those things are lacking, too.

But I’d be lying if I said that I totally hated it. Sure, I could only bring myself to play School Girl/Zombie Hunter in small doses, and as I was playing all I could think about was how stupid the game was. But if you want mindless action that you won’t have to think about very deeply — and that you probably shouldn’t think about too deeply, for your own mental well-being — then this game will deliver that in spades.

Aksys Games provided us with a School Girl/Zombie Hunter PS4 code for review purposes.