Finally, the world’s first yassified boomer shooter. Originally, we started calling DOOM-style shooters ‘boomer shooters’ because it called back to the aged, hyper-masculine games of that era that seemed to be inspiring a modern resurgence of games in that style. In recent years, though, the subgenre has taken on a life of it’s own, fully removed from those retro inspirations – and in many cases, the people who play these games and the fanbases that form for them are a far cry from the traditional bro-gamer image that someone might tie to DOOM or Quake or Duke Nukem.
Games like Ultrakill and Neon White prove that nontraditional audiences are dying for nontraditional games that capture the style and essence they call home. It felt like the eventual endpoint for boomer shooters: to create a game fully built on femininity and glam in the modern Charlie XCX brat summer tone, rather than the all-too-familiar Barbie pastiche that “games for girls” immediately evoke. Don’t Stop, Girlypop! is unabashedly a game for the gals, made by the gals. While the spirit and style is there in awesome excess, though, I think the gals deserve a game with more polish and quality.
Don’t Stop, Girlypop!, in the best way possible, feels like a scrappy indie hyperpop zine lovingly made in Unreal Engine. From the moment you turn the game on, the bright, bubbly buttons on the menu evoke early-2000s maximalist web design. You press New Game, and suddenly you’re a fairy warrior named Imber being aided by an FMV companion who talks to you through a pink glam’d out flip phone – your mission is to defend your neon pink planet from the Tigris Nix corporation draining it of all The Love. It’s weird, and silly, and barely explained and hardly complicated – but also, like, yes girl, your gun is pink, and your phone is pink, and your enemies need to explode.
The game is maximalist and overindulgent and unashamed with its tone and style, and I can’t fault it for any of that. One of the things I love the most about indie games is their potential to be a canvas for expression and unorthodox art, and no part of the art here feels like a cruel parody – it’s all steeped in a sincerity and barely-holding-back-a-laugh sense of humour that is so charming.
Unfortunately, the game is way too rough around the edges to make up for that scrappy charm and style. From the start of the game, there’s an awkward sort of floatiness to…everything. The camera hangs awkwardly in cutscenes, and there’s a sort of unfinished vibe to the inconsistent way various early in-game tutorials pop up. Characters are voiced, but some of them sound like they’re hardly putting in any effort, while others are almost mute-the-game levels of annoying in how repetitive their efforts are.
Early on, you encounter a boss, your flip-phone companion summons some giant speakers, and loud hyperpop blasts all around you as you fight this foe. It’s an amazing moment on paper, but the pacing of the dialogue delivery, the lack of animated or sound-designed emphasis for the speakers appearing, and the awkward way the song restarts after the cutscene ends and the actual gameplay begins make it hard to fully appreciate the idea when the execution is so lacking.
Don’t Stop, Girlypop! has an interesting premise for combat – you’re supposed to never stop moving in this game, and you’ve got a huge speed multiplier visible on-screen at all times that goes up if you jump, dash, kill, grapple, or wave hop. Wave hopping, as explained by the game, is a unique forward boost of momentum you can trigger by jumping, ground-slamming, jumping back up, and dashing forward. I love the kind of frenetic, sweat-inducing energy that a shooter creates when you’re tasked with nonstop movement – it’s a big reason why I love Doom Eternal so much. In this game, though, while the idea is solid, your core movement fundamentals feel just a bit sloppy.
You move with snail-like slowness when your multiplier is at zero, making the start of each run or any moment you stop to listen to a story-focused audio echo feel a bit awkward. The wave hop, while satisfying upon successful execution, is just a bit too involved to be executed constantly like the game expects you to. And some mechanics like wall-running and grappling just straight-up do not work properly sometimes, leading to lots of moments where I’m just sort of mashing buttons to force out some helpful movement without a clear or consistent understanding of how I’ll move or how fast I am.
Guns are pretty great in this game, though. Don’t Stop, Girlypop! gives you a non-traditional set of weapons. Your most basic one is a stake-firing sniper rifle where your alt-fire is just a scoped zoom, but you’ve also got the magic wand. This acts like a cutesy gravity gun and pulls the nearest heavy object toward you so you can blast it at your enemy of choice. There’s also an uzi-style bubble gun where the alt fire lays down a barrage of harmless pink bubbles, and a single shot from your primary fire or any other weapon sets them all off in a beautiful cascading explosion. Finally, you’ve got a three-round shotgun with my favourite alt-fire of all – shoot out a slowly floating disco ball, and then hit it with your primary fire to cause gunfire and shrapnel to rain out in every direction. There’s also a heavy-hitting railgun you find later in the game, but by the time I found it, I was pretty set with the rest of my arsenal.
Unfortunately, you only get about 4 hours of campaign missions to spend firing these incredible guns and fiddling with the so-so movement options before the campaign wraps up. After that, there’s nothing else. No challenges, no endless waves, no remixed missions. It’s a short-but-sweet campaign, but the lack of any replayability at all is a bit of a bummer. All in all, though, I’m not sure how much I would have been clamouring to re-play Don’t Stop, Girlypop!. While there are so many fun ideas here, there’s a lack of polish across so many areas of the game that keep those ideas from shining as much as I wanted them to.
