What about a run-based hack-and-slash that lags and feels like shit to play? That’s Hotel Barcelona, folks.

Even though this is advertised as a Suda/Swery tag team project, Swery’s White Owls team actually did the deed of creating Hotel Barcelona. Suda apparently helped Swery brainstorm the concepts at play, but once the game went into production, it seems that Swery took the helm and ran with it. White Owls is not known for his action prowess compared to Suda and Grasshopper Manufacture, and boy, does it show here! Something like Deadly Premonition or The Good Life can get away with having gameplay issues as the standout aspects are plot and characters. Hotel Barcelona is built around its gameplay and the roguelike loop, and neither of these are worth digging into.

The game’s baseline sin is its lag. Every action you take in Hotel Barcelona is a solid second after you press the button or move the control stick, except for when you’re in your hotel room ‘base’ by yourself. Even then, when you cross in front of an interactive part of the environment, there’s a momentary hitch. Forget about the combat-focused levels. Each new object on the screen adds just a hint more slowness, making combat feel like you’re trying to take swings at someone under water. Missions that take place during a rain storm are completely unplayable. At best, combat is mashy and unresponsive. At worst, it’s still those things but slower.

Dodging takes a good second to happen, so reacting to your opponent’s attacks is completely impossible. At the start of the game, you have no invincibility after getting hit, so enemies, especially huge bosses, can juggle you and kill you after a single mistake that you could have easily recovered from otherwise. You do get wake-up i-frames later, though! After the third boss. Halfway through the game. Great job.

As you defeat enemies, they drop body parts such as their bones and ears. These items can be used to upgrade your abilities, and there is some improvement to the gameplay once you get the ball rolling on these, but the lag keeps the game from feeling any more responsive! You’ll get more drops and other bonuses by completing challenges that are assigned to you when you enter a room, but that’s only in theory. At one point, I was asked to kill five enemies with ranged weapons. I pressed the button to fire a shot from the requested ranged weapon, and it immediately failed the challenge. 

These upgrades feed into the roguelike loop of Hotel Barcelona, as you travel through a small assortment of stages, slowly powering up and trying to beat the bosses. Each area is just a horror movie rip-off. You fight Jason Vorhees (he’s a baseball pitcher instead of a hockey mask guy, at least! …but still looks exactly the same.) at a summer camp, there’s a Xenomorph pastiche. The titular Hotel Barcelona obviously intends to evoke the hotel from The Shining. It’s not impossible to have fun with on the nose references here and there, but besides a few of the main cast, every aspect of the game’s world design is lifted wholesale from somewhere else.

I like the art, though! The style, anyway. All of the character art/talking heads look gorgeous, and are done by artist Hiroaki Hashimoto, who worked on promotional art for King of Fighters 2000 and beyond. But then the characters start talking, and hoo boy, I have no idea what the fuck SWERY and company were trying to do here. I think they were trying to imitate Suda’s style of writing, but very much are unable to in any way that matters. Pretty much everything about this game is an attempt to imitate Suda’s style that is a failure from top to bottom in that regard, save for good use of a guest artist.

Multiple characters seem to be worried about social norms and “how people are these days” in incredibly baffling ways, too. One of the first cutscenes is an assassin-type snorting cocaine off his girlfriend’s tits, calling the black main character an oddly racially charged nickname, getting annoyed at her GPS, complaining that the term “hitchhiker” is offensive, saying he hates bigots, then shooting the GPS for being bigoted because it annoyed him. Another character, the casino operator that allows you to upgrade your specific weapons randomly, is designed in a gender-nonconforming way, but the first words out of his mouth are “I identify as a man, I am not gay, bi, or trans.” I’m not offended here, just baffled.

Hotel Barcelona drops you into combat as soon as you start the game, and when that first impression had me muttering “oh, this is turds from a donkey’s ass” like James Rolfe within fifteen seconds of starting the game, there’s not much else I need to say. This is a poorly made video game, with nothing beyond its gameplay worth powering through to see. From the marketing I’ve seen, they’re trying to present this game as a challenging “git gud” experience and will probably try to say that game journalists just don’t get it and need to try harder. Gitting Gud at this game would be a waste of time. Don’t stick up for this.

The post Hotel for Dogwater – Hotel Barcelona Review (Xbox Series X) appeared first on Gamesline.

Travis Touchdown and his gaggle of…maybe friends (or maybe just hangers-on), have risen to the challenge of a powerful alien warlord named FU who wants to conquer Earth. FU’s human compatriot, a shithead executive named Damon Riccitello (who is explicitly based on the ex-EA exec with the same last name), stands by as Sylvia and the Assassin’s Association set up a tournament gauntlet of ten superpowered foes for Travis to kill in order to save Santa Destroy…AND THE WORLD.

This plot is basically it. The stakes don’t really change, and even said group of fellow heroes quickly fall to the wayside just to leave Travis and his cat Jeane (who is revealed to have been a boy this whole time, which makes Travis one of those “all dogs are boys and all cats are girls” people which is very funny to me) to interact with all the Galactic Assassins, also known as the Goddamn Superheroes. Each of the aliens has a fantastic character design, and are memorable visually, but usually come and go without much fanfare. Travis, however, is the major strength of the game, his one-liners and interactions with everyone else staying consistently fun throughout the entire game.

Other than the baseline fun of having Travis around, though, a lot of the script feels unfinished. Characters will pop in and out without any reasoning, such as a wrestler who was introduced in Travis Strikes Again who then just appears in the middle of a boss fight with zero fanfare or explanation. Jokes will get introduced and have no payoff. This feels like the first draft of what the game’s story should be, not the finished product, and this extends to worldbuilding as well. I know No More Heroes has often had off the wall character interactions and introductions, but here said characters too often amount to nothing, flowing into and out of the plot without changing a thing. Travis was changed by the assassins he fought in previous games. Here, they are nothing but stepping stones.

The open world has returned, and while it’s nice to go back around Santa Destroy and run laps as Travis, there’s somehow even less to do in this game than there is in the original. You can do a few jobs to raise money, such as cutting grass and ramming cars off the road, but otherwise it’s just planting trees and smashing rocks just to make a number go up. You don’t even unlock much for doing so, which is a far cry from the upgrades you’d get from collecting the pick-ups in the original.

The other environments you traverse are completely disconnected from everything else. They feel like they could have led into some form of parody or commentary, but instead say nothing. One area is called Call of Battle, which is a very obvious Call of Duty pastiche. There is nothing to this bit beyond the fact that the logo looks like the Call of Duty logo, the area has barracks and ruined buildings around, and it’s heavily brown. Like, really? The “military shooters are all brown” joke? In 2021? It’s a shame, since previous NMH titles made you feel like you got a good grasp of the exact kind of hellhole Santa Destroy is. The open world was kinda empty, sure, but it felt like it was on purpose. People wouldn’t be walking around freely in Santa Destroy; it’s a mess out there, and that was backed up by having you interact with the world, seeing the kinds of people who live and thrive there. Since you’re not actually meeting anyone from, say, Call of Battle, you don’t have any reason to care why it’s like that and who would live there. I also wish the map was a bit better in this game, almost entirely in the sense that there is absolutely no denotation for when you complete something. Oftentimes it just has the marker vanish, but I’d prefer knowing I’ve already done something before stumbling on it a few days later and questioning if I’ve completed it before.

The job minigames return, this time similar to the original game in being 3D instead of based on NES games. They work well enough, and it’s always a treat watching Travis suplex gators or do that weird pose he does while he’s turning the lawnmower. You gain money and upgrade points from this, which are only really used for upgrading your chips and stats when you’re not shoveling dough into the UAA’s hands for ranked match entry. T-shirts, a staple of previous games, are now regulated to aliens that hang out around the maps and bestow them on you for hitting different goals. A lot of the shirts rule, but there are way too many that are just Devolver Digital logos.

Much more exciting is the game’s UI style. Every scene transition, every button interaction has a loud, hilarious visual flair that no other game I can think of could pull off. I loved the logo bumpers as you transition into the text-based sections, and the credits that play at the end of each rank. There’s even bits that are incredibly lame that still got me, like a little Netflix parody between each rank that plays like you’re letting a series autoplay into the next episode on your TV. Suda and co. have been heavily influenced by American pop culture here, and there’s some fun bits to that, but it also leads to a huge problem the game has.

Undercutting everything is some of the worst pop-in I’ve ever seen in a video game. Every time an in-engine cutscene plays, and the camera moves, it takes a good few seconds for everything to load in properly. It looks awful, and it’s especially upsetting when all the character designs are so cool! I want to see everyone as they’re intended, not in a sloppy mess of half-rendered textures before it’s properly loaded. I hate how much this makes the confident art style suffer. This sort of thing happens with Switch games sometimes, but it feels worse here.

The gameplay, on the other hand, is far better than previous NMH titles, with the combat being more engaging than ever before. You have your light and heavy attacks, but new Death Glove abilities let you toss enemies around, dropkick them from afar, cast a slow area of effect spell, or summon a hail of bullets that rain on your foes for a time. I was hoping there would be just a BIT more to the combat, but it’s a huge step up from previous games. It’s not on Platinum levels of quality, but it’s certainly not as simplistic or button-mashy as the older games.

You can also add chips to the Death Glove to slightly change your stats. I wish they did more, but the ones I unlocked through normal play were pretty basic stat changers and not much else. It seems like there could be more substantial ones if you replay boss fights over and over to grind for the parts you need to craft for said chips, but who wants to do more grinding in a No More Heroes game than you already have to do in order to make the money for ranked fight entry? This one’s actually pretty good about getting you the funds you need without having to replay anything, so further grinding would just be a drag.

There are also a few transformations Travis can get, such as a mech suit that lets you shoot missiles at foes, and an upgraded version of said suit that lets you fight in space. The space battles aren’t bad, but aren’t much to write home about. Just some bullet dodging and aiming at weak spots. It is pretty funny to see Travis geeking out in a tokusatsu outfit, but it only adds a bit to the gameplay overall.

NMH3 also carries forward the history of No More Heroes games having absolutely killer soundtracks. This OST leans closer to Travis Strikes Again‘s style of music than the first two games, but pretty much every song is a banger and I’m looking forward to bumping the soundtrack all day. Probably the best song is the song that plays while you’re ordering sushi, which is a hip hop track called “ITADAKIMASU”, which absolutely needs to be in all caps, thank you very much.

From a story perspective, Suda so very much wants to make something like James Gunn did with Guardians of the Galaxy. The shot of the assassins that Travis is friends with near the end of the game, which I won’t spoil mind you, is very telling. He wants to see Travis fight Thanos, which has no real resonance with the attitude the rest of his franchises have set up. Before, it felt like Suda based his games on a style all his own: now it’s basically just James Gunn’s superhero flicks. It feels almost desperate? I’m not sure why Suda so badly wants to be Marvel now, when in the past he was so successful being punk.

On top of this, chasing after that Marvel style of story just made this game feel gutted. None of the bosses matter! Something I loved about the original NMH games was how each boss fight filled in a bit of Santa Destroy’s culture. You got a genuine slice of the insanity that was that city and that universe each time you fought someone, but here the characters are so detached, there isn’t anything to ground you. There are a few spoilery fights that take place alternatively to the aliens, but just three of the ten actually being worthwhile is a shame, especially when two of them are just callbacks to past bosses and the third is an extended plea to play Suda’s other games.

Even with these complaints, No More Heroes 3 still succeeds in enough ways to avoid complete disappointment. Travis can still carry a game’s writing on his back alone, his nerdy drivel turned up to the next level as he talks openly about real life movies and shows for once. This feels similar to how Travis Strikes Again talked about indie games, but it’s more direct and mostly about things other than games. Travis hangs out and chats about Miike movies a lot, which is a step up from anime (At least, in some cases. Can’t forget that Miike did that Jojo movie that nobody seemed to like!), but is still just as dweeby about it as he was about anime. Travis’ passion is palpable, and it’s what makes the vibe of the game feel a bit more of a shame, as you want that same passion to flow throughout, not just in sparks.

I felt a bit empty after finishing No More Heroes 3. I enjoyed a lot of what was put down, but I still felt like what was here wasn’t Suda’s best. I’m sure if I had played Suda’s other stuff I would’ve gotten a few more references here and there. However, even with more context, I still would feel let down by the overall vibe of the game. This didn’t feel as punk as it should; this felt like an attempt to become acknowledged by the same kinds of people that caused Shadows of the Damned to go so poorly. Suda shouldn’t want to be Marvel. He should want to be Suda. Travis Strikes Again was Suda, proud of using his platform to herald a new age of creators. There’s still something here, in fits and bursts, but it feels more like Suda wants recognition from the old guard that he should be giving a middle finger to.

The post No More Heroes 3 Review appeared first on Gamesline.

Travis Touchdown had to get away from the constant barrage of assassins trying to take his title of number one. Hiding away in a trailer in the woods, Travis is attacked by Badman, the father of No More Heroes 1’s Bad Girl. During their ensuing tussle, an evil game console Travis owns, the Death Drive Mk. II, activates, sucking the duo into the game world. The delinquent duo team up to gather the six “Death Ball” game cartridges, and after finishing the games, earn a Dragon Ball-esque wish. Entering each Death Ball title transports you into a different game world, but the general conceit is the same: the main gameplay of TSA is industry standard hack-and-slash combat with power-ups sprinkled in.

Initially, the pulled back camera and simplistic enemy design makes it seem like this will have less-polished gameplay than the original series, but that isn’t the case. NMH always had mashy gameplay, but TSA actually surpasses those games by introducing enemy variety. Instead of three or four mook-models you fight throughout the entire game, TSA has around ten different enemies, not counting bosses. These enemies also coordinate well with each other, making combat more challenging and fun than the previous entries. Larger, most heavy enemies will often be paired with quicker, weaker foes that forces you to split your attention. Enemy encounters often take place in designated battle rooms, and often the size (or lack thereof) of the arena plays into the fighters you’ll face. Some of the hardest fights I had were in tiny rooms with big enemies, or large rooms with quick, darting baddies that could hide behind objects. Travis (or Badman, depending on who you play as) can perform quick weak attacks and slow powerful ones, as well as jump and do a spot dodge. Additionally, you can equip the aforementioned power-ups to your character, giving you special abilities such as projectiles, healing, and barriers. All of these additions make TSA feel refreshing compared to the Wii titles, and on par with the indie games the title so often makes reference to.

This comparison is what makes Travis Strikes Again so intriguing. Suda51 has been making games with far grander scopes over the years, only occasionally dipping his toes in smaller releases (Y’all remember Black Knight Sword? Diabolical Pitch? No? Yeah me neither.) This time around it feels like Suda wanted to limit himself on purpose. There is an immense love of (mostly) Western indie games flowing throughout TSA. Travis and Badman can wear logos from Undertale and Hotline Miami on their shirts. Travis explicitly name-drops Devolver Digital multiple times. The Unreal logo is an item drop. It might feel a little manipulative, but after a while, you start to realize that Suda isn’t celebrating these things to kiss ass. It’s a sign of respect, a nod from one artist to another. Suda obviously loves these games, and he’s glad that the Unreal engine and publishers like Devolver can assist smaller devs in their quest to create great games. There’s a genuine joy throughout Travis Strikes Again, as Suda proclaims that these developers have wonderful ideas, and he hopes they get the same chances he gets when he’s able to experiment and get a sizable budget on something like killer7 or Shadows of the Damned.

In between action levels, Travis must collect the next Death Ball, which leads to visual novel segments with Travis traveling the world in search of people associated with the Death Drive’s developer, Dr. Juvenile. The writing in these segments is snappy and often fun, with occasional eye-rolls, but it wouldn’t be a Suda game without that, right? Constant references are woven in, from nods to Suda’s past work to characters muttering “Tranquilo” like New Japan wrestler Tetsuya Naito. All of Suda’s heart and soul was poured into these segments, and you can tell he misses writing more text-heavy games like The Silver Case. There are also multiple scenes of Suda bemoaning the current games industry, condemning the viciousness of development and venting frustration on how good ideas are often lost in the shuffle just to make a deadline or meet a sales projection. It’s here that Suda instead chooses to celebrate the little guy. His love for indie games is especially reflected on Travis himself in TSA, as our favorite otaku barely mentions anime at all, instead focusing his obsession on Namco’s MAPPY or drooling over how cool Hotline Miami is. Travis does occasionally say “moe moe kyun kyun” in the most horrifying voice I’ve ever heard, so I guess you can take the anime away from a man, but you can’t take it out of his soul.

Presentation-wise, Travis Strikes Again falters a little. I don’t think I’ve seen texture pop-in this bad on a game Nintendo had their hands in publishing ever, and the enemy design, as said before, is quite dull for the most part. Some of the levels are downright bland to look at, including rooms of pure nothing or bland streets with no decoration. There are times where you forget what the theme of the game you entered is because of how boring the level design is. The first level, “Electric Thunder Tiger II”, shifts between craggy cliffs and city streets with almost no rhyme or reason, culminating in a colosseum fight, for some reason? Occasionally there is some solid artwork, but it’s less often than I’d hope. There’s only so long the suburbia of “Life is Destroy” can last before I roll my eyes out of my head. The bosses are the opposite, however, retaining the charm and punk rock attitude you’d expect from No More Heroes. The team actually brought in UK artist Boneface for the boss designs, and their work is a definite highlight of the game. I was quite disappointed to find out that neither Masafumi Takada nor Jun Fukuda, composers of the previous two No More Heroes games, were returning to produce the soundtrack for this game, but the tunes serve their purpose and it doesn’t distract or annoy.

Travis Strikes Again is Suda proclaiming to the world what he loves, what he wants to work on, and who he wants to support. I don’t think I’ve ever played a video game that was basically a friendly note from a developer letting you know what’s up, but I loved experiencing it. Suda51 set a whole level of his game in a suburban neighborhood and had the boss be a serial killer just so he could make him do Yoshikage Kira’s poses during the boss fight, and that’s the kind of dorky obsession I come to Suda’s games for. When someone is genuine about their love of something, if it’s music, movies, games, or anything, that passion can be catchy and heartwarming. Travis Strikes Again oozes with Suda’s enthusiasm, and that love is infectious. Nobody else in the industry would pour this much of their tastes into a full release game, so even with its faults, Travis Strikes Again feels nothing less than special.

The post Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes Review appeared first on Gamesline.

The original game, which released in 2005, was a third person action-adventure on-rails shooter starring a group of assassins called the killer7. These assassins are all actually the personalities of one man, Harman Smith, and each personality has unique abilities and personalities. A variety of twisted and intriguing events unfold, and you as Harman/killer7 must take down a suicide bomber cult called Heaven Smile.

This release seems to be a very straight port of the game, with only an HD coat of paint applied to the release. At least now you won’t have to pull out your Gamecube or PS2 to play what many consider to be Suda51’s best game.

This re-release will come out “this Fall”, with no other consoles confirmed currently. I will say, I’d be very surprised if this didn’t come to PS4 and Switch, to mirror the original PS2 and GCN release of the game.

The post Suda51 Announces killer7 Port at Momocon appeared first on Gamesline.

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In case you’re confused over if this is actually a game or not, a writer for Playism has been teasing it on his Twitter and specifically calls it a game project.

Guys, it’s almost time: https://t.co/hLT2iaRIYz pic.twitter.com/akVtPRlN4k

— Nayan Ramachandran (@thetrin) August 22, 2016

We’re so close now…

So close to announcing Super Secret Game Project.

— Nayan Ramachandran (@thetrin) August 22, 2016

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