Suda51 is a mad little developer, like that kid at school who’d picked his nose and eat what he found. Then ten years later you find him running NASA, running for president, or developing a bunch of weird games. He’s credited with a lot of the games you think are a little weird and don’t have the words to explain what it is. I’d suggest using Suda’s name as an adjective to pen what kind of game it is. “What did you just play?” says one. “A Suda51!” replies another with either horror, glee, confusion, or all three crossing their face.

Last week, I played a Suda51. Now that I think of it, it could sound sexual in some contexts. I played a Suda51 game sounds much better. Now last year I played Suda’s Killer7 for the first time, and it was strange to experience the madness of the man in a gimp suit, shooting naked suicide bombers, and swearing when the wrestler headbutted the bullet out the air.

My previous experience before that was of his Lollipop Chainsaw. It’s a game about an 18-year-old woman who’s dressed as a cheerleader with the head of her disembodied boyfriend and who, of course, chainsaws some zombies. Just a Friday night in Newcastle.

My only other experience of Suda is in his 2013 Hack-and-Slash game, Killer is Dead. Where the first boss is a young woman, who looks like Alice from Alice in Wonderland, who transforms into a young woman with a spider for an anus and dances on the ceiling. Now, why am I referencing several games I’ve played or covered, either here or elsewhere, before? Because that’s all Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes happens to be.

As for the plot, a relative of one of the people Travis killed in a previous game is now sent to kill him. Travis lives in a tin foil trailer in the woods, and after a confrontation, both Travis and this relative get sucked off into the world of a gaming console. They must complete the console’s six games, in order to escape the curse.

Six games? What’s this, the Sega Megadrive (Super Gam*Boy in South Korea) with the CD and 32X upgrades? Nonetheless, with Travis being trapped in a console, the game often breaks the 4th wall, mentioning other games, developers, publishers, and pop culture references. The first of which is in the trailer with Hotline Miami playing in the background.

So that brings us to the gameplay. Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes is a Hack-and-Slash affair. There may be six individual games to beat, but each is the same Hack-and-Slash gameplay like the one before it. Well, that’s not entirely true. There’s a game that’s just a Tron reference, and I’ll be damned if it is not. Your bike is a bit slower in the race though, so to upgrade it you have to run off hacking and, indeed, slashing to get an upgrade, ride the bike a bit faster, and then move on to another game of hacking and slashing. I have to say, it’s just a bit boring.

However, the gameplay is never the point of a Suda51. You are almost always looking for the weirdness of his influence on the game and how it is slightly perverted. The issue is just how tame Travis Strikes Again really is. Yes, you gesture your lightsaber like a teenager before falling asleep, but that’s to be expected. Yeah, to save your game you sit on a toilet with a bar displaying the words “Now saving” across Travis’ little sith lord, but you don’t get a peek at his round behind before the bar covers his junk. Again, it is all tame.

Granted, I’ve spoken about some Japanese developers being slightly strange around women. Take Kojima’s character Quiet, for example, who “breathes through her skin” according to Kojima. Yet, there’s hardly a woman to be abused or oversexualized at all here. There are maybe four women total in the game, including a slightly sexualized anthropomorphic fox, as well as a slightly sexualized horse with long lashes. Three of the women, however, are within a backstory/text adventure thing that consists of about 10 minutes of reading before and after every game. Nothing is provoking in any of it.

I’ll return to my point of games being referenced because that’s all Travis Strikes Again is. The first game you play, Electro Thunder Tiger II, is provided to the man trying to assassinate Travis by Dan Smith of the Smith Syndicate from Killer7 and, in the preceding scene to the assassin getting the game, you see the from Killer7’s lobby from Dan’s perspective. Every T-shirt Travis wears ranges from YIIK, Hollow Knight, Hyper Light Drifter, Minit, Wargroove, and Enter The Gungeon. There’s also references to Shadows of the Damned, Killer is Dead, and several more games produced by that quirky little madman, Suda51.

In conclusion, as a Suda51 game, it is one of the tamest of his games. While Travis Strikes Again is fun for a Hack-and-Slash game with many references back to Suda’s other games, I don’t believe that’s going to grip everyone or hold anyone. The thing is, it provides a teasing taste of next year’s No More Heroes 3, which I don’t believe is an exciting sell to anyone other than Switch players. With Travis Strikes Again releasing on PS4 and PC last week, unless you already own a Switch, this isn’t going to convince you otherwise. If you already own a platform the game was on, why pick it up on another platform half a year later?

A PS4 review copy of Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes was provided by Xseed Games for this review.

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Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes

$39.99 USD

6.5

Score

6.5/10

Pros

• Fun References and In-Jokes

Cons

• Repetitive Gameplay
• Not a Great Standalone Game
• Just a Bit Dull for a Suda51 Game