Review

How do you start to judge a game like No More Heroes? It takes inspiration from a number of different sources, yet is quite unlike anything you will have ever played before: it’s a free-roaming action adventure with a whole city to explore, yet is nothing like Grand Theft Auto; it’s a beat ‘em-up where you take on legions of identi-kit baddies before reaching an end-of-level boss, yet is nothing like Double Dragon; and it’s peppered with retro trimmings, yet is exciting and new.

The plot too, is as warped as they come: you play as a game’s designer named Travis Touchdown (surely 2008’s coolest name) a videogames designer who decides he wants to become the number one assassin in the city of Santa Destroy after acquiring a beam katana on the cheap. How convenient then, that Santa Destroy has a Top 10 list of current assassins, all you have to do now is find them and kill them!

Your introduction to the game includes a tutorial that will take you through all of the game’s controls which can be skipped if you just want instant action and to be honest, they’re so good you’ll pick them up in no time. Flicks of the remote are confined to finishing moves with the A and B buttons handling your regular attacks. The angle at which you hold the remote will determine high or low blows and movement controlled with the nunchuk. It all works fantastically.

When you successfully dispatch your first target and make it onto the Top 10 list yourself, the game opens up the whole of Santa Destroy for you to explore. In order to discover the location of each target you’ll need to perform odd jobs, such as mowing lawns or collecting coconuts, for cash and even some smaller hits to increase your rating. You can replay any of these as many times as you like, but you’ll probably be too eager to get to your next opponent and see what wonderfully bizarre quirks they offer.

The visual style will be instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with Grasshopper’s previous game, Killer7. It’s a highly stylised cartoon world but it’s the little things that really sell the style to you: like how the Top 10 list of assassins is displayed just like a Hi-Score table from an old arcade machine; the mini-map is a pixellated representation of the surrounding area and each kill flashes fruit-machine images onscreen to award you bonuses. If you’re a retro-gamer then you’ll find the attention to detail is second-to-none. Oh, and in-case you were wondering, I found the lack of blood in the PAL version actually improved matters over the crimson splattered US version.

No More Heroes definitely isn’t for everyone, it’s not quite in the same love-it-or-hate-it league as Killer7 as the gameplay is much easier to grasp but for some people it will be too strange. For everyone else, this is a brilliant, original and highly recommended game. After all, how many titles have the main character sit on the toilet to save your game?

About the Review

Platform

Nintendo Wii

Developer

Grasshopper Manufacture

Publisher

Rising Star Games

Released

14th March 2008