Enter the garden of MADNESS!
Editor-in chief Donald Ploth
Suda delivers a game that will warp your mind and invent the strategy/button masher genre. First off this game is a Wii game, and as we know Wii has motion controls. A fair share of games abuse and misuse the wii remote. This game however lends itself to the Wii and the motion controls could not have been better. Anyway back to the game, when you first select your difficulty your introduced to the main protagonist Travis Touchdown. He look pretty stylized with aviator sunglasses, a fohawk, red leather jacket with the collar turned up, and ripped up jeans but we find out he’s a lonely man when it comes to the ladies. The game take place in Santa Destroy where Travis is staying in the No more heroes motel. While in town he spends a night at a bar and buys some drinks for a pretty woman. She happens to be some type of spokesmen for an agency that ranks assassin in the U.S. That night Travis kills the 11th ranks killer and his hunt for the title of #1 assassin begins. Travis welds a beam-katana, which also happens to be the most amazing weapon in gaming history and you can get several different BK’s. Saving the game if pretty funny to because in order to save Travis needs to be on the toilet making...well lets say a #2. Travis is an avid movie watcher, He rents from his local video store quite often. At the begging of each "chapter" you find out that he is overdue each time for some type of snuff film weather its "How to please a woman in bed part 5" or "Raunchy armature interviews" he is always late on his film return. The other thing that unlocks each time you begin a "chapter" is a new par-time job. One of my favorite things about this game are the par-time jobs. They range from cutting grass to cleaning graffiti, and your payed by how much of each objective you complete. Now this "free world" that is supposedly in the game...its actually a bit limited and a little annoying because if you fail a job or anything you need to drive your schpeltiger back from the job site back to the employment agency then back to the job site to retry the job.(sounds as tedious as it is) Another thing that is quite annoying, while driving your schpeltiger you can use boot and jump but you can’t drive through fences or something you may think you could, yet trees are no problem, and if you try to jump a fence into an area that you can access don’t expect to make it....your looking at hitting an invisible wall and getting thrown off your hog and reversing direction. Hitting pretty much anything besides a tree will leave you feet away from your bike and the direction changed.
The beam-katana
Now to the meat and potatoes of the game, The fighting. You primarily use "A" to attack and you can stun an enemy with the "B" button. While stunned you can preform professional wrestling moves by waving the wiimote and nunchuck in the direction shown on screen. After preforming a "Death Blow" a small kind of slot machine thing appears on the bottom and spins on its own. Power-ups can be attained this way. Dark Travis is his alter ego and when you become him he yells "STRAWBERRY ON THE SHORTCAKE!!" It isn’t exactly clear to me why he yell this but I cant complain because Dark Travis is awesome. There are several diffrent things that will happen depending on what 3 in a row you get in the slot. Two that come to mind are those where Travis runs incredibly fast and one hit begins the death blow screen. Another is where he has a target and shoots fireballs out of his beam-katana that destroys the enemy. The Boss battles are 50% strategy 40% button masher and 10% hilarious. The game itself is riddled with humor; Its one of the few game that actually made me laugh out loud. Now here comes a few gripes I have with the game. Tho funny the game continuously breaks the fourth wall which I know a lot of players wont mind and I didn’t but it can get weird. The ending leaves something to be desired. (at the very end pick "the real ending" please) The schpeltiger is the clunkiest and most annoying vehicle in any game. Other then that it’s a pretty solid game. I could play this game over and over again so the lasting appeal is moderately high. If your looking for a fun experience and a blood bath this game is for you. The story is pretty cool and it is a long game (took me 10 and a half hours); In the end I would give No More Heroes an 8