It's good, it's worth owning, and it's really cool, It's just not as good as you hoped
I was not looking forward to it, I had barely read into it, and from what I had seen I was not overly interested. After the positives I was almost forced into picking it up as January is normally a graveyard for terrible games that have been pushed out of the Holiday season so they can die a slow death in January.
As soon as I put it into the console the first thing that struck me as odd was how "un-Nintendo" the game was. Not to say Nintendo cannot be enjoyed by people of all ages but its not often that a title on a Nintendo console will be full of swearing and violence.
I was pretty impressed with the game play right out of the gates, not the same sort of mind numbing Wii-Mote swinging that a game like Red Steel offered.
The standard attack was a push button, with the finishing move being a swing of the Wii-Mote which was very call and result in my not grabbing my wrist in pain at the end of levels like I did in Red Steel.
The level layouts are often fairly odd, but they do suit the games sometimes strange art house mentality. The combat levels are excellent and I think very few people playing through the first combat stage would take any issue with the game itself.
Where the game "falls down" is the clearly tacked on traveling the city mode, where you can interact with no one aside from a few shopkeepers and is pretty well solely in play so you can travel from point A to point B in your often hard to navigate motorcycle thingy.
Then if the commuting was not bad enough, we run into a situation where you need to raise money in order to get into the next combat stage and this consists of a series of awkward and sometime just plain ridiculous fetch quests. Which feel like they were added on solely to make the gaming experience longer.
Had the combat streamed from level to level without this middle portion, I would have been much more pleased with the game, but these fetch quests take me back to the days where if I wanted an Ice Cream cone I needed to do chores around the house first, If I wanted Fetch Quests I would have played an RPG.
Graphically, it's really interested what was done. Sort of like Okami but not.
Wii cannot compete with PS3 and 360 graphically so to avoid comparisons the game is done in sort of a cool comic book style. Its pretty well over the top in every aspect from blood to bosses.
You will find yourself fighting the same thug over and over again in various levels but because of the type of game and the atmosphere that is helped by the graphics you tend not to care, the game is fun and interesting to look at but its not Gears of War, graphically.
The Voice acting and sound aspect of the game were really well done, the over the top voice acting of the bosses and your colleagues was wonderful, and the use of the Wii-Mote as a Cell phone was brilliant.
The developers truly understood how to develop an "atmosphere" which is something that in a world of "graphics, graphics, and more graphics" we tend to see less and less of, its an over the top story which is much like a cheesey action movie of the 80's but it takes a lot of work to give a game that sort of cheesey atmosphere on purpose so kudos for that!
When I look at the replay value of a game such as this, I have to ask myself two questions.
Was finishing it Fun? And was it Fun ENOUGH to finish again?
For me the answer is,
Sort of, and not really.
Once you have a series of saves prior to cool combat levels and have gone through the fetch quest aspect I could see myself going back and playing some of the more bloody and fun levels, but from start to finish again I just don't see it.
No More Heroes is a great game, and a game you truly do owe it to yourself to play and make your own judgments on, but based on what I have seen its not as good as you would be led to believe.