KylieDog

User Score
6.0

Presentation - 7.5
Gameplay - 5.0
Value - 7.0

For those unaware the European version of No More Heroes was censored of the blood as well as some limb removal, well most of it anyway, you still see blood stains smeared about levels sometimes just never from anyone you kill.  Instead you get to disintegrate people into black ash which is apparently less violent.  None of this detracts from the gameplay much however so I wouldn’t bother importing a US copy if you was thinking about it.

The story for the game is pretty simple, you’re an assassin name Travis Touchdown who kills another random assassin and finds himself ranked as the 11th best in America due to it.  You need make your way to number 1 by defeating the 10 above you in rank, usually by killing them.  As a reward the sexy girl who is in charge of the rankings promises to sleep with you.   There is a bit more too it than this but I’m not posting spoilers. The entire story is a comical affair with various twists all included for added laughs.

The game takes place in the city of Santa Destroy, a city you are free to roam on your motorcycle or very slowly on foot.  Besides from collecting a couple of hidden items for side quests (will cover these later) or to wear the city serves no purpose other than making you drive about from mission to mission.  Only a handful of buildings can be entered and you cannot draw your weapon anywhere so there is no random killing of the public.  Every area of the game you can fight in is a separately loaded area that you need travel to.
Riding about the city going from mission to mission trying to earn cash soon becomes very annoying since there is just nothing to entertain along the way and some of the destinations can be quite far.  The collision detection is also quite terrible, often hitting corners of buildings or cars when you are nowhere near them.  You can’t steal the cars if you were wondering, you are stuck with the choices of your bike or, well, your bike.  Given the distances needed to travel walking is very unpractical.

As for the general progress of the game you won’t be simply rushing to each assassin to bump up your rank, oh no.  Each ranked fight costs an escalating amount of cash to be accepted and so you need do small jobs to earn some.  The jobs come in 3 varieties, friendly, assassination and random ‘free battle‘ missions.
Friendly jobs are jobs you accept and consist of doing handyman type stuff, collecting garbage, cleaning walls, mowing grass and similar things.  They are quite repetitive and easy to complete and so quickly become boring.  You need complete them however to unlock assassin jobs which are much more fun and as the name implies involves killing.  Assassin missions are much more varied than handyman jobs, you may need kill as many people as you can using your weapon like a baseball bat hitting baseballs at people, killing people only with wrestling moves (will go into these later), just outright slaughter as many people as you can in a time limit and many more.  Random jobs are usually you having to kill a set amount of people without taking any damage, you’ll find the entrances scattered about Santa Destroy once completing assassination missions.  All still remain very short and lack a ‘retry‘ option if you fail causing you to go find a completely different mission, a big oversight.

‘Ranking missions’ which you do the above jobs to unlock are much larger, once you arrive at your destination you will have to battle your way through waves of small time assassins until you finally reach the main boss, the Ranked assassin.  Each ranked assassin requires a unique approach and have there own style of tricks to deal with.  This is where the main challenge of the game is found.

All this talk of killing but no mentioning how.  Your weapon throughout the game is called a ‘Beam Katana’.  What is that you ask?  It’s basically just a lightsaber designed in a way so that George Lucas can’t sue.   Throughout the game you will be given various opportunities to upgrade your Beam Katana, as well as getting different types each with different attributes to them.   Before playing the game I expected you would use this by swinging the Wiimote left/right/up/down  and have the motions it reflected on screen.  I was wrong.  You swing your katana by pressing the A button, the Wiimote is used to determine if the swing is high or low by tilting it high or low.  Switching swings around mid attack is vital to killing ranked fighters.  The only time the Wiimote is actually used for slashing are for death blows where an arrow appears on screen indicating which way to slash.  You also can get caught in a sword clash where you are required to spin the Wiimote around in circles, allowing for a death blow if you win.

Besides your Katana you can also perform wrestling moves as an attack, wrestling moves require one or more movements by both the Wiimote and nunchuck simultaneously, the specific movements appearing on screen to copy.  Get it wrong or take too long and you’ve opened yourself up for attack by the enemy.  Against general bad guys they do little damage and are just fancy things to watch, it being better to just stick with your katana but against ranked bosses they can deal a great amount of damage so are important to get the hang of.
Early in the game when fighting normal enemies you can probably get away with just button mashing though against ranked bosses and some later normal enemies you’ll have to start learning combos.

Besides the missions for earning cash or ranks there are various side quests, some less beneficial than others.  Hidden around Santa Destroy are balls you must collect, for each seven you find you can hand them in to a character and in return learn something.  You may learn a new move, have enemies appear on your minimap and similar things.  As well as that you can train at the gym through various actions with the Wiimote and nunchuck, this can increase your max health, strength (damage done to others) as well as allow for longer katana combos.  Those are the only 2 real beneficial side quests, other side quests include buying videos that you watch to learn new wrestling moves (that aren’t really needed), or finding T-shirts hidden in dumpster bins for wear.  Yes, you can find/buy clothes for Travis to style yourself how you see fit but besides trying to look cool or stupid they have no affect anywhere in the game. 

You can also find ‘trading cards’ hidden throughout ranked mission levels, these do absolutely nothing the first time you play the game, on subsequent flythrough though regular trading cards get replaced with ones that allow you to view concept art from the games development.  These concept art trading cards are also hidden around Santa Destroy the second playthrough.  Why these were not accessible the first time you play the game I do not know.

Graphically No More Heroes isn’t hugely impressive.  This is partly due to the retro gaming theme which influences much of the level and HUD design keeping things simple looking, it is however partly due to a general lack of polish also.  The cel-shaded design works well for some parts, not for others.  The sound like the visuals is partly retro gaming inspired and works well for those parts, away from this though the music and voice over get too repetitive quickly.  One really cool feature that must be mentioned is just before every boss fight you will receive a phone call requiring you to lift your Wiimote to your ear just like a real phone and listen to the message from the speaker.

No More Heroes is a very enjoyable game but suffers greatly far too often from a choice of style over substance.  Quickly the game will get repetitive and just become a race between boss fights, the open city of Santa Destroy doesn’t contain enough to justify the size and slows the pace of the game down far too much.  Spending a minute travelling to a 30 second long mission just to spend two and a half more minutes driving back and forth to repeat it again is a terrible flaw in the design and reflects the game as whole.