No More Heroes

Some of you may have heard of a little game called God Hand. God Hand was a criminally underrated beat-em-up game created by Clover studios that was absolutely genius in its simplicity because all you ever did was run around beating the crap out of people. No More Heroes reminds me a lot of God Hand because all I really want to do is run around beating the crap out of people with a lightsa- I mean a “beam katana”.

Unfortunately No More Heroes has found the need to dilute this experience with GTA-esque sandbox gaming elements that force you to run around playing dull mini games in order to make money to keep beating people as you follow the games main story. I really want to love this game because it’s doing so many things right. The meat of the gameplay is solid… It’s extremely enjoyable eliminating wave after wave of enemies and despite the fact that finishing moves rely heavily on waving the wii and nunchuck it’s one of the few games were this doesn’t feel awkward and forced. There’s a much bigger emphasis on gameplay rather than graphics which is something that really appeals to me in this “next generation” of gaming that’s trying so hard to shove realism down everyone’s throats. Also, the tone and humour of the game is so unashamedly over the top that you can’t help but smile.

Sadly there are lots of little things that kill the experience for me, like setting the focus of the game in a little town called Santa Destroy forcing you to drive around the city to learn new moves and earn new weapons, as well as buying new clothes and partaking in various mini games such as a variety of jobs like cutting grass and collecting coconuts, as well as various straightforward assassination missions that all earn you money. Don’t get me wrong… there’s nothing bad or broken about driving around the city, it’s just that it all feels so… pointless. I’d be so much happier with a more old school gameplay element here, cutting a swath through wave after wave of enemies and occasionally coming up against a bad ass boss from time to time. There’s also a really big problem with special moves, which use a slot machine style system that randomly picks from a selection of different moves, but due to the sparsity of the enemies and breaking up of the fighting, you always seem to power up right when there’s nobody left to fight, and it really takes a lot of the shine away from something that feels like it could be the most fun part of the game.


I can completely appreciate Goichi Suda’s efforts to mix the old school with the new here, and No More Heroes is definitely a good game, but in my honest opinion it’s nowhere near the kind of nine out of ten scores it seems to have gotten and this really frustrates me as I feel the game could have been so much more.

Hats off to Grasshopper for having the balls to continue making consistently unique games with a fantastic visual style and extremely off the wall plots in an industry full of companies just looking for the quickest path to making money by making games that are safe and sure sellers, but sadly No More Heroes feels like it could have been pushed just a little bit further outside the box in terms of gameplay, instead of conforming to a sandbox style that’s becoming so overused in this generation of gaming that it’s bordering on cliché.

Having said that, No More Heroes still kicks the arse off most of the big releases of 2008, thanks to a lot of obvious effort being put into the game just being fun to play before anything else, and in an industry full of so many shills looking to make quick money off games with zero effort put into them like Dark Sector and Shaun Whites Snowboarding, games like No More Heroes are always something that should be supported, so it’s definitely still worth a punt.