Don’t Stop, Girlypop! Review

I’m a huge fan of boomer shooters, fluid movement, and comically obnoxious art direction, and Don’t Stop, Girlypop! manages all three, so as soon as I initially saw it some time ago, I knew I’d be giving it a look upon release.

Before I go too deep, I feel a need to address the elephant in the room: the art direction. This game looks genuinely insane; it’s an incredibly maximalist Y2K-inspired aesthetic, bright, loud, and leaning into being unbelievably overbearing… and I love it. While it’s not perfect, some textures don’t look the best, and generally comprehending what’s going on at any given time can sometimes be a struggle, it has so much personality that I can’t help but love it. There’s a clear passion going into the art here, and it’s charming, even if it’s rather garish.

The story isn’t the backbone of a good boomer shooter, and in this case, it’s a good thing, since I personally found it very lacking. It’s a very barebones anti-capitalist narrative, which I absolutely respect, but it unfortunately doesn’t really go even remotely deep into this plot, while still spending a lot of time slowing the pace down to sit through cutscenes and dialogue, which never end up being anything more than surface level. The dialogue itself wasn’t half bad, and the voice acting was also decent. All things considered, it’s not the worst, but it’s unmemorable at best.

On the other side of the coin, though, there’s the gameplay, which is something of a mixed bag. During the first 10 missions or so, I was in love; the movement was great, the weapons were fun, and the aforementioned art direction helped string the game along really nicely. During the third episode, though, cracks really started to show. I began to realise that of the four weapons I had at that time (Magic Wand, Shotgun, SMG and Sniper), the Wand and the SMG felt fundamentally useless.

The Wand functions like a Gravity Gun of sorts, picking up objects and throwing them to do a seemingly low amount of damage, while the SMG was just… not good. The damage is low, the alternate fire (firing explosive bubbles) is weak, and it doesn’t really excel at anything. The Sniper and Shotgun both do way more damage, work well at range, and the ability to switch back and forth between the two to skip reload animations means they do an unreal amount of damage.

This problem extends further into the game, too. Towards the end, you’ll get a railgun, a slow-firing but stupidly high damage weapon… While it’s technically balanced around being slow to fire, weapon swapping skips the cooldown, meaning you can dump a criminally high amount of damage in a short period of time, which completely breaks combat. I wasn’t having a particularly difficult time before I got it, but afterwards it became a joke (which is only worsened by the fact that I was on the hardest difficulty already).

The weapons in isolation are all really cool, though, and hopefully, with some post-launch tweaking, some of the issues I had could be ironed out. The core gameplay loop itself consists primarily of movement, as the higher your speed, the more damage you deal. This ties in with Wave Hopping, a movement system that gives you a speed boost by chaining movement options together, which is a really satisfying rhythm to get down.

Don’t Stop, Girlypop! was a lot of fun to play, but it has a lot of issues that became very apparent after just a couple of hours. Not only is it short (taking me around four hours to finish), but it lacks replayability, having no additional modes. There are a few secrets hidden around the map, but they aren’t incredibly difficult to find, and none of them alter the game in any particularly meaningful ways. They’re charming, but aren’t anything more than secret little quirks, such as big head mode or a retro filter.

There’s clear passion and care put into Don’t Stop, Girlypop!, and I’m genuinely rather disappointed that I didn’t gel with it as much as I’d hoped, but that clear passion also gives me hope for the future. None of the game’s major issues are things that can’t be fixed, and I’m hoping to see some post-launch updates potentially tweak and rebalance a lot of the issues to help it reach the potential it clearly has.