I can quite guarantee that you won’t have played much of anything quite like No More Heroes 3.

Despite being part satire, part commentary on reality, part fanboy explosion of gamer culture, and part I don’t even know what the fuck I’m playing, the game somehow happens to be incredibly entertaining.

In Travis Touchdown’s final stand, players will go from the Thunderdome to Neo Brazil in a quest to stand at the top of the Galactic Superhero Rankings.

With your beam katana in hand, you will slice and dice your way through rogue androids, then take a shit in the nearest bathroom to save your progress.

No More Heroes 3 just doesn’t care. It doesn’t care if you pay attention to its ridiculous plot, its obnoxious characters, its ludicrous mechanics or its partially open world. It knows at some point it’ll hook you in, whether you’re pointing at the screen at a silly reference, looking giddy eyed at its retro enthused UI, or just having a blast taking t-shirts from Aliens.

It’s a game that manages to make sense but also be totally senseless and that is the Suda 51 charm in a nutshell. Because it grabs you in ways you’ll be familiar, like forcing you to eat between fights to conserve and build energy, travelling around on a motorbike to get to different points and going on ridiculous side quests to earn some special reward.

But it’ll also have fun at your expense, mocking gamer habits, our viewing culture, providing some half-assed dialogue or a purposefully poor acting performance, just to throw you off.

It is, simply put, the most polished, well presented, eclectic mix of randomness and entertainment I’ve seen in one package and it completely haunts my waking moments.

I love how you’ll suddenly turn into a power ranger mid fight and demolish an enemy with rockets. I love how your deathblow is an invitation to play a game of slots where you can earn money or absolutely nothing. I love how I can bump into someone who asks me to unclog a toilet as part of a side quest.

No More Heroes is kind of art. It doesn’t try to be like anything else while also being like a hundred different games. Its presentation is so refreshing and dazzling that you just can’t help but to get swept up in it. And mechanically it’s as tight as anything else in the genre.

Whether you’ve played the previous games or not, you’ll immediately be able to connect with what’s going on and feel at home as it can feel like you’re playing any major video game of the last twenty years at points.

The main aim, though, is to earn enough money to challenge each of the top ranked Galactic leaders and to do that you have to take on a series of designated matches of unique challenges in order to get their attention.

Oh, and then you have to earn enough UtopiCoin as an entry fee. The bosses range from annoying to hilarious, to sinister, and everything else in between, but each one has their individual quirks that mean they aren’t soon forgettable.

Couple this up with some really wild scenery, a bloodthirsty, revenge saga and a talking cat (because, why not) and you’ve kind of got an idea of what No More Heroes 3 is all about.

I guess what I’m getting at with this piece is, there’s no easy way to describe what you’re seeing but you’ll weirdly find yourself ok with after a short amount of time. You may not always be able to make sense of it, you may feel it gets a bit grindy once it gets into its flow, but It’s also such a stylistic game that you can’t help but feel impressed by what’s been created.

Even more impressive still is that this is ported from the Switch and looks really upgraded on Series X. From the dust clouds, to the character models, the amount of activity on screen at any one time and it all feels stable and relatively solid. Which, I hear, is a huge upgrade from the poor performance on Switch.

That said, it isn’t the most beautiful game you’ll find out there and at times the game really shows its rough edges with draw distance, pixelisation and stuttering screens. The game does also feel a bit grindy at points, with downtime between boss battles becoming a bit of a slog, and having to get money from side quests.

It’s not going to be for everyone either. Really, there will be people completely tuned out of this after five minutes, where others can spend hours. And as far as open worlds go, you’ll rarely find one so barren. There’s a bare minimum on the map to encourage you to go from place to place, which will neither convince open-world gamers this is a must-play nor delight fans of the series who’d rather it wasn’t there at all.

Verdict

No More Heroes 3 will regularly leave you thinking ‘what the hell did I just play’ but it’s vibrant style, cool presentation and quality handling helps reassure it was worth the time. Unfortunately, barren open world, grindy objectives and rough visuals bring the experience down just a bit.