No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle (Hands-On) (Wii) Preview

First thing to notice, is the world is now just a map with a menu taking you directly to where you want to go in the city, rather than driving around on Travis’ motorbike. This was a welcome addition to me since driving around the sometimes lifeless streets of Santa Destroy was not only cumbersome due to the bike controls, but extremely tiresome and was an unnecessary break from the action. After jumping into the action, I got round to playing through the 25th place assassin level, but before that kicked off there was a cut-scene inside the UAA office with Travis trying to flirt with the ever-so-lovely Sylvia Crystal . This level takes you through the halls of an American football stadium to eventually face the boss (Note: Spoiler Incoming), Charlie Macdonald, and his groupies. When hacking through the normal grunts, I noticed it was very all too easy to slash your way through without much thought, with only the larger fighters being harder to kill and taking more skill. Now, in this build it was lovely to see the death animation with lobbing off heads and slicing bodies in half to see blood spurt everywhere, giving a feeling of satisfaction. There’s still a slot machine that goes around with every kill you get, and if you get three symbols in a row you unlock a special power, so every now and then turning into a tiger and mauling your enemy’s faces off is a normal sight if you’re good at the game!

The general gameplay mechanics for normal fights work like the first game, so anyone who has played that will be right at home with this one. When you go into a boss fight, however, gone are the phone calls using the Wii Remote, and in are “sexy” cut-scenes with a phone call to Sylvia telling you to go and win the fight. Therefore, away I went into the fight against Charlie and all his ‘hoes’ (Travis’ words). (Warning: Huge Spoiler Incoming!) In this fight you go up against Charlie in a giant football player Mech with Travis’ very own Mech; Glastonbury. This fight takes place like a 2D fighting game with a basic move set, ‘A’ to slash, ‘B’ to jump (with pressing ‘B’ again equalling a jumping kick) and ‘C’ to launch a special move after you build up a meter on the bottom left of the screen. The fight was a little clunky, and it did take me three attempts to finish Charlie off, but it all ended in cool No More Heroes-style with a ridiculous special move, yet this time with button prompts, and a little cut-scene with Sylvia and the clean-up crew.

After I’d finished with Charlie, I sat down at Travis’ TV to find a nice little vertical shoot’ em up game based around the Bizarre Jelly 5 (Travis’ favourite Animé, which features rather buxom young Japanese girls…). I tried it on easy mode and went for Strawberry since she was the most well-rounded character on offer, and played the first level, which lasted about five minutes. Whilst short, the inclusion of a shmup is a complete stroke of genius and plays very well indeed. Upon completing the level, I unlocked a video of the BJ5 show, which was rather funny, mocking various Animé shows, such as Sailor Moon, and so on.

I did get to try out one of the mini-games available. Unlike in the original No More Heroes, Desperate Struggle’s mini-games are all 8-bit pastiches, and are all indeed very well put-together, rather like the old school NES-style RPG and Platform games featured in Square Enix’s DS Nanashi no Game FPS-horror releases. The one I got to try was a cooking game called ‘Man or Meat’. It’s a cooking game in the simplest of terms where you get a customer that asks for a steak in either ‘Raw’, ‘Medium’, or ‘Well-done’, which is indicated by a speech bubble with one of three different tones of Red/Brown. If you get it near enough to what the customer wants, he’ll say ‘Nice!’ in an 8-bit sound, and walk away filling a part of a bar at the top that you need to fill up to get to the next level, and if you get it perfect, the guy will say ‘Delicious!’, filling up twice as much of the bar. However, if you mess it up, the guy will make a muffled swearing noise, and throw his giant fork at your head, adding to the comedy factor and not filling up your bar. If you run out of customers before you fill the bar, it ends the game. Another mini-game on show was one where you must run around a stage cleaning up various bug-like creatures by sucking them up with your Ghostbusters-like back-pack. It is yet another NES-like game that could work perfectly well on its own as a small DSiWare release if Marvelous Interactive chose to make such a move.