Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes Reviews
There are plenty of amazing mindbending moments in Travis Strikes Again, but you have to work for them. If you're willing to play a decent brawler that's regularly interrupted by junky D-grade platforming to get to the madness, you'll get a lot out of it.
Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes is a welcome return of Travis Touchdown. Amidst the enjoyable gameplay is great storytelling and dialogue set in imaginative game worlds.
Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes is an interesting yet enjoyable side-step for the No More Heroes series. Suda and his team took a risk in offering a completely different experience from what fans have known, and it’s a trippy ride that only they can produce.
The best bits come in an interstitial visual novel that shows how Travis gets the Death Balls themselves; funny, self-aware, and styled with gorgeous retro-pixelated graphics, it’s the one part of the game that feels like the product of someone authentically giving a ****, an expression of the anarchic spirit that made Grasshopper’s early games feel like a refreshing breath of post-modern air in a frequently too-serious medium.
Travis Strikes Again is not a great game in the traditional sense, but if you are a ramen eating, pro-wrestling watching, anime loving, gaming nerd like Travis Touchdown, then you'll play it to the end nonetheless, and have a great time doing it.
If you love No More Heroes, or any work of Suda51's, then Travis Strikes Again is a must-play game.
Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes doesn’t invite you in. If you’re unfamiliar with the huge swatch of game history, Grasshopper’s catalog, or even games industry business gossip, this will come off as a less entertaining surrealist action game overshadowed by Suda51’s old work like Killer7 or even No More Heroes.
Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes might not exactly be the game that fans of the series were hoping for, but if you're want to catch up with your favorite assassin and are willing to accept changes made to the gameplay, you should find plenty to like here. This is a surprisingly complex game and seriously goofy sequel-ish thing, made with obvious passion and an undying love for the gaming experience.
Fans of Travis’ previous adventures may be disappointed by this down-scaling but in reducing the size of his vision, Suda has been able to finally begin adapting it for a modern market.
Not quite the glorious return we wanted for Travis Touchdown, for all of this game's desire to be weird it does a better job of making itself uninteresting.
If you like Suda51, there's enough here to keep you hooked. Otherwise, tread cautiously.
Touchdown's beam katana is back and will need to be recharged during combat.
The best way to describe the way Suda's games play is "energetic."
What would otherwise be a mess is beautifully brought together in Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes. While much more simplistic when compared to its predecessors, Travis Strikes Again is a fun and fast paced action game that commands your attention from beginning to end. It has a few pacing issues, especially towards the end and the co-op implementation might not be perfect, but Travis Strikes Again is yet another momentous trip through the wicked and warped mind of Suda51.
A disappointing return for Suda51 whose shallow, repetitive action is not helped by a relentlessly unfunny script and tired pop culture references.
TSA: NMH is a game I was looking forward to and, in all honesty, I can't say that it fully satisfied my longing for some Travis Touchdown action. As I've mentioned earlier, the game feels like a fun appetizer before the main course comes along. Thing is, we've been waiting for the main course for quite some time and I'm afraid that many of the fans might get up and choose a different venue.
In short, buy it if you're a fan of any of those things, maybe wait for a sale if you're not quite sure. But here's hoping we get a real No More Heroes next, because this just made me realize I really want that to happen.
No More Heroes: Travis Strikes Back is not a complete failure, and there's a lot to love here, but I'd be lying if I didn't say I was somewhat disappointed. While playing I skipped between being in love with the game's style and personality and sick to death of actually having to play. A fascinating experiment from Suda51, one I'm glad he made, but not the best game. Add a point to the score if you love Japanese eccentricity, take one away if you have no time for it.
Overall, Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes relies way too much on meta humor and very bland gameplay. Fans will likely have a lot of fun, enjoy where the story goes and like the overall experience, where as action or more hardcore players will likely find the shallow gameplay boring. More often than not, since the experience is more repetition than anything else, it doesn't take long to get bored and want to move onto other things. And, even if the games are different, it doesn't lead to the most satisfying of places.
Travis Strikes Again is an oddity, to say the least. Sometimes, it can be a lot of fun, but at other times, it can be a repetitive drag. The characters and writing are fantastic, but the game’s tendency to flip between different gameplay styles makes its quality inconsistent.
