No More Heroes Review

The game title, of which many of you may never have heard of, has not much of a relevance to the game itself. It was created by Suda51 who also created Killer 7, so you can expect the same strange way of playing and off track storyline. You play as "Travis Touchdown", a noobie assassin who finds himself 11th on the United Assassins Association's League of hit men after assassinating someone to get some more money in his pocket. From this point on he is forced to climb his way right to the top, fighting each individual assassin above him one by one to eventually claim the number one spot.

Now this character doesn't opt for a simple weapon to kill his opponents, oh no, he opts for a more unconventional approach, by using a Katana he seems to have purchased off the internet. It's a brilliant idea as it is very unique and should give the player a great way of slashing with the Wii Remote. But the key word there is "Should". Instead, the player has to just press the A Button whilst holding the Wii remote in either a vertical position, or a horizontal position to place either a High or Low attack, and just a single slice of the remote to finish off your opponent. Although it sounds like a bad use of the Wii's Features, it doesn't work too badly and is great for people that fatigue easily as it's not as tiring to play when you are fighting multiple opponents.

The graphics are filed under the name "Cell Shaded", and look more cartoony than anything else, this suits the game well, but can be extremely annoying when buildings and cars pop out of nowhere and it takes Travis a while to jump back on his bike and get going again. The retro menus and quick loading makes this game one that flows rather well.

The storyline in my opinion is rather good. For each rank you gain, you receive a large sum of money that helps fund later ranking battles (As you need a certain amount of money to compete in each battle). When you obliterate your enemy after each assassination, you jump on your extremely oversized bike and complete side missions and jobs to gain the rest of the cash needed for the next battle. They are very fun to play, quirky sort of mini-games that make the most out of the Wii's controls. For example in a graffiti cleaning job, you have to shake the remote and Nunchuk to clean the walls. After completing jobs to satisfaction, you move on to higher paid Mini-Assassination Missions that take about 5 minutes tops. This can get a bit samey although moving from Assassination to Side Job to Mini-assassination.

Throughout the game you can collect and buy different items; such as new, more powerful Katanas; a new outfit, different video games to play at home, and new fighting attributes. As well as this, there is an extensive collection of trading cards of which there is 150. They are scattered around the map for you to collect, and to complete the game in full and view the special ending, you have to collect them all. The storyline is hilarious at times with each assassin being funny or weird in their own way. As well as this many players can relate to the main character very well. For example, Travis enjoys getting drunk, playing video games and swearing at random individuals as much as the rest of us.

The sound is something that really makes the game. If you were to play this game on a huge sound system with oodles of bass, then you would be astounded, its extraordinary how all the different sounds made buy the Katana and enemies are put together to make a great sounding game and one of the best in my opinion.

It is a very easy game to pick up and play as there is a small tutorial session at the start of the game to help familiarise you with the control system. Once you get going, it is very easy to continue.

"No More Heroes" is a fantastic game in many ways, but it lacks good graphics and replayabilty as if you complete it once: that's about it. It combines great use of sound and controls brilliantly and is quite a fun game to play. It would have been nice to have an online scoreboard sort of thing where players can compare hi-scores on each mission etc, but we can't all have what we want. Check it out guys, it's definitely a game to either rent or even to buy.