Time to bring back Rock!
No Straight Roads – Nintendo Switch (PC/X1/PS4) – Released: 8/25/20 – $39.99
Short Review
Beat “No Straight Roads” and man was it fun but it is butt ugly on Switch
It is a beautiful mess on Switch, it is basically an action platformer with a boss rush. The characters are great, story is great (even though plenty of plot holes) and the jesus they poured a lot of life into it. The game feels like you are watching a Saturday morning cartoon. It is very short so yeah… don’t pay full price or wait for a sale.
I beat it within 3 sittings and maybe around 5-6 hours with a 1 of those hours repeatedly fighting the final boss. Only issue I had is to combat the shortness of the game, they made new tracks for all the stages with different themes like Rock, Vaporwave, EDM, etc. This makes it possible to play the stages with a variation of the song so you don’t get bored replaying stages again once you finish the game.
The music is absolutely amazing and flows well with the game since everything is time based. Enemies and bosses will attack you in rhythm. You play as two characters at once and the girl, Mayday, allows you to button mash while the guy, Zuke, forces you to time his attacks to the beat to do a combo.
This is currently my favorite track:
Also, if you are playing on a TV, it better have a game mode or there will be a slight hint of audio lag that results in you missing almost all parries. Once I finished the game I wouldn’t be surprised if I only hit 25 or less parries. Besides that issue, we got the elephant in the room… the Switch port. I have never seen a game with so much pop-in in the main hub world. Textures will load that seem inches away from the character and objects will pop-in that were a few feet away from your character. This doesn’t happen as obviously in the PS4, X1 or PC port so a shame it happens on Switch but the Switch is the least powerful and it stutters badly in the main hub world. They heavily optimized the stages and boss battles which is good but you spend several minutes in the main hub world every time you beat a boss.
This is Metronomik’s first game so I didn’t expect a ton but definitely need a little more meat on its bones. Currently the game has very few bosses and you will spend the bulk of your time replaying until you figure out their pattern. If you die during a boss battle, you start the entire fight over and one of the bosses took me around 15 minutes to complete. Then the final boss has you restart BEFORE the elevator so you are waiting as the final boss talks before you start the fight EVERY… SINGLE…. TIME…. and you can’t skip this cutscene, the only one you can’t skip.
The game is still a ton of fun and hopefully it sells well enough for Metronomik to produce more games like it. The game does end with loose ends but I don’t think they plan on finishing the story as Mayday and Zuke’s story is over. Would I recommend it? Damn right since it is a beautiful mess on Switch but definitely worth playing or at the very least watching a full playthrough. Like I said the game is like watching a Saturday morning cartoon with each boss chapter being its own short story and they aren’t really mentioned again once you beat them.
Final Thoughts
This is a very fun game but you are better off at the moment checking out the game on another console. Highly recommend the PC port as that seems to be the best looking and most optimized released after checking out YouTube.
My Gameplay Footage: And yes…. The game glitched at the very end of the video during the “Showstopper” transition.
Trailer:
End Credits
I am finally back because of this game but reviews will be heavily limited from here on out. A lot of life things happened in the last two years but I decided to come back since I am surprisingly still getting daily views often and getting hundreds of views a week. I see plenty of people still are wanting more reviews so I want to continue to provide. Thank you to the people who have been checking in and hopefully you enjoy the new reviews and give me a follow down below.
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