No More Heroes III Steam Review
No More Heroes III starts with an incredibly highly detailed Cartoon showing a young boy named Damon helping his adorable alien friend FU build a spaceship to return to his home planet, it’s really well done and invoked a sort of nostalgia from me. I was born in the 80s, so I could see the inspiration from films such as ET or Mac and Me. FU tells Damon he will return in 20 years, and he does exactly that along with 9 goofy-looking aliens. FU is no longer his cute fluffy self and is instead a tall, blue, boisterous, unpredictable maniac who decides it’s time to conquer earth.
Wanting to have a little fun, Fu settles for a game of Conquest and thus the Galactic Superhero rankings are born.
Gameplay
We play as Travis Touchdown, number 1 ranked assassin, hero and complete dork. To progress through the game, Travis must fight his way up through the Galactic Superhero Ranking to take down FU and save the world.
The gameplay loop will be very familiar to anyone who has played a previous No More Heroes game. You start each of the 10 episodes with one of FU’s alien pals serving as the boss. Before Travis can fight the boss. He must first complete three designated matches and pay the event organizers their entrance fee.
Designated matches are found on the overworld which makes its reappearance after being strangely absent in No More Heroes II and this time, not only do we have Santa Destroy to traverse, but we also have 4 different unique maps to Nitro-boost our motorcycle across.
Upon finding a designated match point on the map Travis will be beamed up to an alien ship to do combat against several smaller enemies. The combat is really where No More Heroes III excels and Travis has quite a few tricks up his sleeve this time around, from his iconic beam katana to his ability to summon a mech there really is a lot of variety on offer here and the fighting here feels the best in the whole series.
After the required three designated matches, Travis will need to head to the nearest ATM to deposit the entrance fee. If Travis is a little strapped for cash, fear not! Travis can earn additional money from undertaking several side quests including unblocking toilets, mowing lawns, litter picking (In alligator-infested waters), collecting scorpions, Trading cards and even lost kittens.
Once the entrance fee is paid, on to the main event, the Boss fights. These battles are fantastic, you never quite know how your fight will play out. The first boss can manipulate black holes, which eventually ends up with your fighting against him in a giant mech suit, it’s all quite bonkers and you never know which goofy twist or turn a boss fight will throw your way.
Each boss fight has its unique theme with memorable ones being a deadly game of musical chairs, A first-person horror section set in a blood-soaked Japanese school and an old-school turn-based RPG battle where you choose from a list of commands.
Once you beat one boss, its back to designated fights and griding enough money for the next encounter and I found in No More Heroes III I needed to grind a little less and always seem to have just about enough cash to progress to the next fight, which kept the pace of the game moving along nicely.
How does No More Heroes III PC version run?
I’m aware the PC ports of No More Heroes and No More Heroes II are a little lacking and are somewhat buggy, but I am pleased to say No More Heroes III runs well probably due to the Switch to the Unreal Engine. I used a Lenovo Legion 7 with an RTX 3080 / Ryzen 5800H combo for my playthrough and I was happily able to play at 1440p with no stuttering with all settings cranked up to high without a single crash.
The settings options are a little lacklustre with only preset configurations available instead of being able to fine-tune options with sliders etc, but it served its purpose well.
Compared to the Switch version, small levels of detail have been improved everywhere, textures have been sharpened and the lighting seems to be vastly improved. The slowdown, pop in and low draw distance of the switch version are now a thing of the past and the whole No More Heroes III experience feels a lot more polished because of it.
How does No More Heroes III run on the Steam Deck?
With very minor tweaks, I was able to get No More Heroes III running at a consistent 60fps and the game felt great to play, however, all of the game’s animated cutscenes would not display on the steam deck, leaving me with only the audio and subtitles. I tried various different versions of proton and sadly had the same result with all of them. I am hopeful this is something that will be fixed either in a patch or by a proton update from Valve.
A handful of NPCs wander around each of the overworlds, and they seem to serve no real purpose. A lot of them wear these odd hats and dress like they are rejects from final fantasy X. Some of the NPCs do have walking patterns etc, while others would just be standing still in the most peculiar places such as facing a dumpster or pressed right up against a garden fence and I couldn’t tell if this was by design or a glitch, either way, very odd.
The lack of cars is another thing I should mention, there are very few cars on the roads, same goes for the number of NPCs. This was probably more of a necessity due to No More Heroes III’s originally exclusivity on the Switch, but it would have been nice to have seen a little more ‘life’ in the overworlds as they do feel a little empty at times.
Although very enjoyable I must admit, on occasion, the fighting felt a little repetitive, especially when you are facing off against the same types of enemies a couple of fights in a row, but there is always something truly visceral and satisfying about landing that last blow and seeing the world KILL appear on your screen.
Another minor annoyance I must mention is the game’s inconsistent use of invisible walls on the overworld maps, especially in one of the later areas ‘Call of battle’. There were small knee-high sections of maps that I wish Travis would walk over, instead, I had to travel a long way around a small pile of rubble to get to the other side. This may sound like a very small inconvenience or that I am nit-picking, but it happened so often, I thought it would be best to mention it here.
Conclusion
In conclusion, No More Heroes III is more No More Heroes, and that isn’t a bad thing. It seems to pull the best from all three previous games while cutting some of the bloat from the previous games. The Boss fights, as always, are a delight and I genuinely looked forward to each one, mainly out of curiosity about what was exactly going to happen. Coming in at about 13 hours for the main story and many more for the side quests or New Game+ I would say No More Heroes III is well worth your money and had me grinning from start to finish.