After a ten-year absence, Travis Touchdown is back.
Travis Strikes Again is the first entry in the No More Heroes series since 2010’s No
More Heroes: Desperate Struggle.
It’s also the last game to be released from Nintendo’s January 2017 Switch presentation.
So, was it worth the wait?
Well, that depends on what you expect.
Travis Strikes Again is a major departure from the rest of the series.
Where the first two games were 3D action adventures set against the backdrop of the fictional
city of Santa Destroy, Travis Strikes Again takes place almost entirely inside of other
games, but that isn’t to say it isn’t in any way connected to the mainline games.
In fact, Suda 51 has stated that this game is meant to be connected to the series, and
to a possible sequel.
There are also gameplay connections between the main series and Travis Strikes Again as
well.
You’ll still play as Travis Touchdown and you’ll continue to wield his beam katana.
You’ll still save on toilets ,find weird collectibles, and even perform the occasional
suplex, but there’s a lot that’s different, too.
Most strikingly, Travis Strikes Again is a top-down hack-and-slash, and it runs in a
4:3 aspect ratio, lending it an old-school arcade feel.
Aside from Travis, you can also take on the game as Bad Man, a baseball bat-wielding psychopath
who also happens to be the father of Bad Girl, the second-ranked assassin in the original
No More Heroes.
Bad Man intentionally plays similarly to Travis, with a bat in place of Travis’ beam katana.
You can also play as both Travis and Bad Man together in co-op mode, but we’ll talk a
little more about that in a bit.
The game’s hub is Travis’s trailer, where you can save, buy shirts using money dropped
by enemies, get faxes that help further the story along, hop into the Death Drive and
use your bike, the Schpeltiger, to collect more death balls, which are the format the
games Travis will inhabit are stored on.
Speaking of shirts, there’s a ton of them representing an impressive range of indies
from unreleased games like Wargroove to darlings like Minit.
There’s a few ways to get shirts, too.
The first is to buy them with cash as I mentioned before, but there are also Azteca stones littered
throughout each game world and certain shirts can only be purchased with those.
Perhaps the most bizarre of the set is the Unreal shirts, each of which prominently features
the Unreal Engine logo.
To get these shirts you have to find Unreal Engine tokens hidden in each game which will
automatically unlock new shirts for you to change into back in the bathroom at Travis’s
trailer.
Without venturing too far into spoiler territory, the core of the story is that Travis and Bad
Man end up getting sucked into six different games by using a mysterious console dubbed
the Death Drive Mark II.
Each game sports a different theme with its own unique gameplay twist, but the core fighting
mechanics remain the same.
In one game you’ll have to rearrange streets in a city to find houses to clear, Hotline
Miami style.
In another, you’ll have to race against opponents in a virtual version of the Schpeltiger,
Travis’ motorcycle from the main series.
These gameplay tweaks are little more than distractions from the main course, however,
which is fast-paced combat, and that’s a really good thing, because the combat works
incredibly well.
You have a light attack which can be held down to use repeatedly, a heavy attack which
has a bit of a wind up to it but deals a fair amount of damage.
You can also equip up to four chips to grant you skills, and finally there’s a meter
that fils up which will allow you to perform charge attacks.
The way this system is implemented is great.
You’re encouraged to use your attacks as aggressively as possible and the way you can
fluidly transition between attacks, dodges, skills and charge moves feels fantastic.
It isn’t just mindless hacking and slashing either though, you have a power meter that
each attack steadily chips away at until you have to recharge, and you’ll have to often.
In some games that might seem annoying or cumbersome, but here it adds an important
and much-needed layer of challenge.
This challenge is never more apparent than when you’re up against one of the game’s
bosses.
The boss fights are easily my favorite part of the game, as that’s when the Travis Strikes
Again feels the most like the original games.
Each boss is the main character of the game Travis has been sucked into, and in true Suda
51 style, before and after each fight a philosophical, albeit slightly unhinged conversation takes
place, and despite the lack of voice acting in most of the game, the writing is as witty
as ever.
As you progress through the game, enemies will gradually become more powerful.
There’s a level up system in place that’s similar to most RPGs in that defeating enemies
grants you experience which will in turn level up your chracter; the intersting quirk here
though is that levelling up is entirely optional.
If you’d like the game to be more difficult, you can simply opt not to spend your experience
points, leaving both Travis and Bad Man at level one for the entire game.
You can also leave one character at level one and max the other out, which is what I
chose to do, since experience isn’t shared between both characters.
Speaking of enemies, I found their variety to be a bit lacking.
Every time you encounter a new enemy, they’ll be shown in a brief cutscene, but there’s
only a handful of them, and even then, many are palette swaps.
I would have loved to have seen enemies that fit the theme of the game you’re in, but
instead you’ll be killing the same bugs in each game, most of whom have skulls instead
of heads.
Another weakpoint in Travis Strikes Again’s presentation is the manner in which you unlock
new games to play.
Every time you beat a game, you need to return your trailer, then go to the Schpeltiger to
start a sort of game within a game called Travis Strikes Back.
The problem here is that the term “game” is used incredibly loosely.
The Travis Strikes Back sections are essentially extended text-heavy cutscenes presented in
greenscale to mimic a DOS visual novel.
While the written dialog is often funny, these scenes overstay their welcome and distract
from the main attraction.
Speaking of overstayed welcomes, in some games pacing can be an issue.
At times during my playthrough, I felt myself wishing some of these games would just end.This
is particularly true of Life is Destroy, the one in which you have to rotate streets only
to find a house to have a short battle in.
Though there were some games I wish would have lasted longer, such as Coffee and Donuts,
a clear take on the Resident Evil series, albeit with a comedic twist.
At times some frame rate and texture pop-in issues occurred as well, but they were few
and far between.
I can’t talk about frame rate issues without mentioning co-op, however.
That isn’t to say co-op is a mess from a technical perspective, but frame rate drops
and hiccups appear far more frequently there than they do in single player.
With the right partner, co-op can be a whole lot of fun, but some things about it just
annoyed me, especially as I got into more chaotic fights.
For starters, while there’s no friendly fire per se, you can hit your teammate with
any of your attacks or skills.
This won’t do any damage to them, but if your skill stuns or electrifies, they’ll
experience those effects, leaving them open to enemy attacks and rendering them unable
to help you.
Oftentimes I found myself losing track of my friend despite them having a colored circle
around them and running into them in the middle of a crowded fight.
It isn’t a big problem, but I found it disorienting.
All the minor issues left me feeling like Travis Strikes Again is a game better played
alone.
By the time my ten-hour adventure came to a close, I was ready to say goodbye to Travis
Strikes Again.
It’s a No More Heroes through and through, that much is apparent in its writing and emphasis
on satisfying action.
It manages to retain a lot of familiar elements while completely changing its gameplay formula.
It’s a good game, but it succeeded more at making me want an eventual No More Heroes
3 than it did at making me love this new take on the franchise, but I kind of think that’s
what they were going for.
I like Travis Strikes Again, and though I’m not planning to go back to it after having
beat it, if you’re a fan of the franchise, I highly recommend you check it out.
Are you going to check out Travis Strikes Again?
Let us know in the comments below, and as always thank you so much for watching, and
make sure to subscribe to GameXplain for more reviews just like this one.
We’ll catch you next time, bye!