Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes

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Were games scored solely for style, Suda51 would be the most respected developer on the planet. Grasshopper’s games are often pitched as ‘punk’, but Travis Strikes Again, like much of the developer’s work, draws from many subcultures, and on paper sounds like a mess of contradictions. There is punk here, sure. But there is also grindhouse, supernatural horror and nerd culture, to name a few. It is testament to Suda’s immaculate sense of style that his latest game just about gets away with it.

Indeed, the game has been built in such a way as to empower it. Series protagonist Travis Touchdown is seeking out the Death Balls, a collection of seven games for a mythical, unreleased and seemingly supernaturally powered console, Death Drive Mark II. His partner, Bad Man, believes his daughter is trapped inside; one of them must criss-cross the globe in search of the Death Balls, then bring them back to the console in their trailer-park home. They load them up and, since the console connects to the user’s central nervous system, are transported inside them, either alone or in co-op.

Aesthetically, at least, it’s finely handled. The Death Drive splash screen that runs before you load up a game is brilliant, a psychedelic, vaguely threatening spin on the classic Sega boot screen with some VHS tracking crackle thrown in for good measure. Each game has a bespoke attract video, main menu and narrative. And the lore surrounding it all is surprisingly deep, with a bookcase in Touchdown’s trailer holding an archive of a fictional Death Drive magazine, full of appropriately ’90s-style journalistic speculation of what the console, and its games, might contain.

If all that sounds like a recipe for some fourth-wall breaking, well, you don’t know the half of it. Our hero does not break it so much as drop a nuke on it – something that’s made clear from the minute you start the game up, when a caption explains that the game is “being developed using Unreal Engine 4, the noble and pedigreed middleware from Epic Games”. Touchdown picks the ball up and runs with it, exchanging metachatter with bosses, referencing the real-world game industry (“I bet Devolver is gonna buy the rights and make a sequel,” he muses after finishing one game) and constantly displaying his hardcore-gamer credentials. The game itself follows suit, invoking Suda’s back catalogue and paying rather sweet homage to one of the biggest indie darlings around in one of the later levels. Not every joke lands, but a fine localisation – particularly in the visual-novel style sequences in which Travis seeks out the next Death Ball – ensures the hit rate is higher than you might think.

Suda has claimed that this has been one of the most difficult games he has made, since it is essentially seven games that need to be balanced individually. That’s a bit of a stretch. While the aesthetic may change, and the camera repositioned – from isometric to top-down to high in the sky – each of the game’s component parts marches to the same core rhythm. It’s a familiar one, too, a simple, and dreary, hack-and-slash brawler using an energy sword whose battery must be frequently recharged. Suda may not think of this as a mainline No More Heroes game, but it certainly plays like one. Early on, enemies are simply blade fodder, despatched with a few sword swipes. But they quickly grow in complexity and power. Those with shields must be disarmed with heavy attacks, or by baiting them into using their protection as a projectile. Some charge at you and explode; others might teleport, spit electrifying balls, or attack in long combo strings. Your core moveset is only so much use against these foes, but skills, tied to cooldowns, will tip the odds in your favour. These are found off the beaten track in levels or dropped by bosses, and up to four can be set at once. Some are more useful than others, and we quickly settle on a loadout that sees us through the entire game(s).

While combat underpins all the games, there are excursions into other genres. There’s a drag-racer that’s notionally about changing gears at the right time and knowing when to use your single nitro boost, but you’re scripted to lose most races at least once so you can scurry through a combat maze in search of a gearbox upgrade. There’s an Asteroids- style shooter, though you don’t have to complete it, normal service resuming when you run out of lives. The real variety comes from what Suda and team build on top of those lightweight beat-’em-up foundations. You’ll solve rotating maze puzzles while being chased by a disembodied head; if it touches you it’s game over. You’ll see the screen steadily obscured by a corruption that can be briefly dispelled by hitting switches. Mostly, though, you hit stuff.

Far too much stuff, really. Almost all of the games outstay their welcome, none of those little mechanical twists justifying the 90-odd minutes you’ll spend exploring them. Fights are long, attritional and, since enemies spawn from the ether, you are never quite sure if the end is in sight. A miserly stock of lives, allied to a rather opaque saving system, mean that failure is often punished so severely that the best option is simply to start again from the beginning.

And for all Suda’s talk about balance, there remain a few too many kinks in the system. The final level zooms the camera out so far, and fills the screen with so many enemies, that you simply can’t identify the biggest threats. At one point we die after being corner-trapped and stunlocked by two powerful enemies we didn’t see coming until it was too late. Suda has a punk attitude to making games, so at this point we decide to adopt a punk attitude to playing them. We put down the controller, and walk away.

Does not break the fourth wall so much as drop a nuke on it – something that’s made clear from the minute you start