It looks and sounds like nothing else out there

No More Heroes looks and sounds glorious, and it does it with a style all of its own. You already know about the stark yet vibrant cel-shaded graphics, but those are just the jumping-off point for the game’s almost confrontational approach to design. What we’ve got in No More Heroes is a big melting pot of incongruous videogame aesthetics from right through the history of gaming. Far beyond being eclectic, No More Heroes is almost visually chaotic, throwing together current-gen 3D with effects not seen since the hey day of 8-bit computer gaming. It really shouldn’t work, but it does, and it looks brilliant in both senses of the word.

Flouting accepted game design logic, NMH has no respect for the idea that blocky pixels, primary colours and bleepy ‘70s arcade sounds were a means to an end that we’ve now moved on from. No More Heroes just loves being a videogame, and it shows off that love every step of the way as it wallows in garish videogame imagery from every era. On-screen prompts sit day-glow, pixelated, and unashamedly 2D throughout the game’s 3D world. The soundtrack is littered with the kind of jubilant little bleeps and bloops you’d expect to hear in a NES game. At the end of every successful mission you’ll be greeted with a deliciously old-school arcade high score table which disintegrates into a black and white vectored star field, just like the original Star Wars coin-op.

The sense of affection for games in No More Heroes is immense. It spits at the cinematic aspirations of other games and gleefully revels in what it is. It’s a game, with a gamer as its lead, which is made for gamers. The tone is set right at the beginning when Travis directly addresses the player as a player and it never lets up. Screw your pretensions of realism and your desires to be a movie. No More Heroes is a game, and it’s belligerently proud to let you know it.

Of course, we need to play more of No More Heroes before we give you a full verdict, and we won't be getting our hands on the completely finished product until February 2008 (a fact that makes us excited and infuriated in equal measure). So far though, things are looking great. In terms of both art and attitude NMH is in a league of its own, and is one of the freshest games we've seen in a long time. It remains to be seen if the gameplay can hold up for the entire running time, but so far we're really enjoying it. If the final game can match what we've seen so far, then there's going to be a new entry on the Wii's 'must have' list very soon.