No Straight Roads is an epic adventure that hits all the right notes with its design, story, and deep gameplay design. Sadly, the coop mode is a complete disaster that needs more work.
Sometimes when you look at a game you can see what the intentions were. Metronomik, the developer of No Straight Roads, has put together a stylish concept that is more than just a musical adventure game. Let’s get right into this.
I was intrigued by NSR after watching the trailer months ago. Being a huge fan of Sayonara Wild Hearts, which redefined how far and deep a game driven by music and story could go, I was hopeful that NSR was going down the same road. And for the most part, it was traveling parallel to it. The positives of NSR are this, it’s a stylish game that uses good music and fantastic acting to tell its story. Our protagonists are two rockers named Zuke and Mayday, who are driven to tear down the evil organization of NSR, which has convinced a city of people that Electronic Dance Music (EDM) is life. Mayday and Zuke believe that rock still lives and go from EDM DJ to EDM DJ in hopes of destroying the EDM music scene and take NSR’s tyrannical hold down with it. You know the old saying, right? Rock never dies!
The story itself is beautifully simple and entertaining. Whoever wrote the script and picked the actors deserves a HUGE pat on the back, they are phenomenal and are the big reason to stay through this game. The humor and intrigue, mixed with the music that goes along with it (which should be moved to vinyl) keep you engaged and interested. I think that Metronomik absolutely nailed these aspects and properly made them the driving point.
The presentation side compliments the story. As I was streaming it yesterday morning for a few hours, one commenter said that visuals reminded them of a Cartoon Network show, and I honestly couldn’t agree more. The environments and character models were edgy and lush with color, sometimes even TRON-like. They set a rebellious tone for the characters, while at the same time are a visual delight for the viewer. You could tell that the developers put a lot of love into these characters and it shows. You won’t be disappointed with what you see, as it will make you feel slightly cooler than you should because you’re playing the game.
Equally as smooth is the gameplay design, which might seem shallow on the surface, but what lies beneath is actually quite complicated in its construction. It’s far more than a button-mashing musical adventure, not that there is anything wrong with that — musical button-mashers can be quite epic. Anyway, the gameplay design starts with our two characters, who are equipped with instrument-driven weapons. Mayday sports a guitar, which she can smash robots with, as well as jam out to badass door unlocking tunes. On the other side, Zuke has drumsticks to show off his drumming skills on enemies. Both characters can use super-jam-out specialty moves, which can be upgraded by gathering a growing fanbase (XP) and can unlock a multi-tiered skills tree.
The skills tree stretches out far for both characters, while also including a duet (rock duet) that allows for more powerful band moves to be pulled off. I was quite surprised that Metronomik went that far with these characters and that story, while also feeling the need to make the game much deeper. It was a surprise, but a delightful one that pays off. All of the above will certainly create motivation to do side quests (like collect energy containers to re-light the cityscape) and to explore every square foot of the city. The game is designed to keep you returning, even if it means fighting the same enemies again (they grade you on performance against bosses).
And that isn’t everything.
The game also features the leveling up of attacks, defense, and health through mods that come in the form of instrumental upgrades and stickers you find everywhere. This is just another deeper layer underneath a simple music game. To round out the design, the game features branching narratives occasionally, expansive home base elements, and encouragement to unlock trophies, display trophies (actual trophies, not PSN ones), which there seem to be plenty of in the game. The game is just big and it seems to want to keep you around for a long period of time. You have to appreciate that just a bit. Again, I didn’t expect the game to go this far.
All of this positivity is hurt by the game’s blatantly obvious imperfect — coop mode. The coop mode of the game is a complete disaster, almost an afterthought to an extent. I’m not sure if the time crunch of the release date did this to the game or that maybe Metronomik couldn’t figure things out (or didn’t test it enough in QA), but co-op is unplayable. While there are some glitches here and there in single-player (shakiness when going upstairs, sometimes breaking through graphics, etc.), coop magnifies those and adds some new problems. For example, the second stage of the game featuring the mermaid robot controlled by multiple people was irritatingly bad when my daughter and I played it. The level features moving platforms back and forth with the music that lie at a bad angle when you jump on them. I spent most of the time on this level exchanging death jumps with my daughter. The worst part is that if I missed the platform the camera would follow me down, while my daughter’s character would be left offscreen waiting for me to respawn. Sometimes we would both jump, she would make it, I would die, but the screen movement caused both of us to fall off because over and over again because it was so darn jarring. I think we spent 30 minutes trying to get to the boss when it should have taken us 10-15 (did that time with single-player mode). When we did finally make it to the boss, one of us fell off the board again and this time I didn’t die…I just kept falling…for 30 minutes…like Loki. I thought at some point the game would kill me, but I watched my slow fall, saw the entire level in a spinning cylinder, and felt at peace…being alive the whole time…until I stopped falling and kept living.
To make matters worse for co-op, the game also had a pacing problem between characters running. This meant that the lead character would actually run faster than the lagging character, which also meant that one of us would eventually fall off the screen and would have to use the HUD map to try and catch up. If we fell too far behind, the game would instantly warp us forward. Even the character would say, “WHOA” when this happened. To add insult to injury, the screen, when it was caught at an uneven distance, would jitter back and forth sporadically. It was hard to enjoy the surroundings when you couldn’t get your bearings on them.
All of this happened only in co-op. The single-player mode didn’t have much in terms of glitches. Long story short, avoid coop. It’s not fun at all.
Hopefully, Metronomik can create a patch and work out the bugs over the next few weeks or months because my goodness the single-player game is absolutely good, and playing this game with a friend or child would be a blast. There’s a lot of hard work put into this game, which you can instantly tell from its visuals and deep gameplay design.
Overall, No Straight Roads is an epic adventure that hits all the right notes with its design, story, and deep gameplay design. Sadly, the coop mode is a complete disaster that needs more work.
