No More Heroes
No more heroes is one of those games that rely heavily on it’s own personal style. It is a parody of gaming culture and a pretty good one at that, but like other games where style took the lead, everything else has the backseat. Sure, the presentation isn’t really bad and the gameplay isn’t poor, but seeing how much energy developer Grasshopper put into establishing the style, the mediocrity of it becomes glaring.
The player is tasked with guiding the otaku Travis Touchdown who runs around swinging a lightsaber in order to prove himself as the top assassin in the United States, and this is done in 3rd- person action scenes in different environments. These action scenes is the part where No More Heroes really shines, as even though they aren’t very complex or challenging, there is a nice and balanced array of attacks at your disposal and the usual swinging-wiimote-controls are implemented in an intuitive and fun way. Problem is, between these levels No More Heroes imagines itself being GTA and tasks you with completing a number of minigames scattered around a city.
Now, one of the big problems I had with GTA was that a lot of the time driving around felt really pointless as getting from point A to point B posed no real challenge but took a considerable amount of time, and in no more heroes this problem is even more apparent since unlike GTA there is absolutely nothing else to do in the city. In addition to this, it seems the developers ran out of steam and was in a hurry to complete the game since the missions you undertake become shorter and shorter the longer you get in the game.
No more Heroes is by no means bad, and the combat is likely among the better implementations you’ll see on the Wii. It is, however, mediochre and seeing as there are really good games to play in it’s stead I don’t see the appeal – unless the idea of a game making fun of itself is enough.