No More Heroes

No More Mini-games

Unfortunately, the open-world part of the game is a major flaw in the totality of the game.

There are two sides to No More Heroes – the action and swordplay that first seduces players and the free-roaming aspect that punctuates it. There’s only one real problem with No More Heroes that really truly bars players from harvesting every screed of enjoyment in this surreal adventure though and that is that these two sides to the game don’t really ever feel like they go together all that well.

Here, we’d elect to put the blame in the matter on to the city-roaming side of things because it’s this part of the game which feels like the much weaker side. Running around hacking people up is fun, but driving around on your motorbike is engineered to feel like more a chore than anything else.

The fact that players have to earn cash doing odd jobs too is a weak spot and we confess we don’t really understand the idea. You do jobs at the job centre to get money to buy assassination contracts to get money to buy details of ranked matches from Sylvia so you can get more money, then you do jobs at the job centre to get…it seems a bit circular and broken in its reasoning if you ask us.

The odd jobs themselves also clash horribly with the rest of the game. One minute you find yourself cutting down the tenth best assassin in the world while Travis delivers a startlingly deep and insightful soliloquy on the doubt niggling away at his soul. Then the next moment you find yourself collecting coconuts for a man standing not five paces away from a forest of palm trees.


You kind of get the impression that this entire game design aspect is a bit of a private joke with fans of martial arts movies like The Karate Kid and that Travis is being jostled between pro-competitions and waxing his master’s car. Unfortunately, what worked in the films as a way to humble and teach the protagonist only comes across as a banal way to bulk up the amount of gameplay.

Put simply, I don’t want to be collecting coconuts, pumping gasoline or picking up rubbish – I want to be plunged further into the surreal world of Santa Destroy and the various ranked battles.

Tossing in a load of filler mini-games like this seems to be de rigeur for Wii games and it really is a shame to see that holds true for games as good as this. The motorbike is a bit of a disappointment too and is Travis’ main method of transport. It’s a huge futuristic looking type of thing which at times comes across as more of a crippled Transformer than a roadworthy vehicle.


The problem with the motorbike though is that, cool as it looks and useful as it is for navigating the city at speed, it doesn’t really have much personality or charm. Using it to get from one side of the city to another is probably best described as being functional and utilitarian rather than being fun. There’s just no subtlety to driving the thing and knocking down pedestrians with it – it really does feel disjointed and dull.

Not that the pedestrians or other city residents have much of a personality themselves – the inhabitants of Santa Destroy all mope around meaninglessly doing nothing at all. The city never really feels alive or full like they might in Vice City or Saints Row and, though we’re not asking for a faction system to be forced in here, it would be nice of the pedestrians actually did or said something.

This is really what’s at the core of all the problems with the open-world side of the game – the mini-games and motorbike failings are nought but symptoms. The disease itself is a strange kind of half-life which seems to afflict the city of Santa Destroy itself. The player and the various characters they interact with are so chock full of personality and memorable, if cheesy dialogue that the city itself is cardboard cut out by comparison. Walking through a city that feels like it was only half-populated just isn’t fun.