No Straight Roads

 PC
User Score
7.4

Mixed or average reviews- based on 86 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 59 out of 86
  2. Mixed: 9 out of 86
  3. Negative: 18 out of 86

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  1. SaraLee99
    Aug 31, 2020
    3
    I played the game first on Switch then later on PC (Do NOT buy the Switch version)

    Gameplay 3/10: I bought into the hype of the idea of a rhythm based action game when I first saw the trailer and now I'm feeling disappointed. Movement and combat feels stiff and the gameplay is a chore outside of the boss battles. At first I thought this was going to be a boss rush game but then    I played the game first on Switch then later on PC (Do NOT buy the Switch version)

    Gameplay 3/10:
    I bought into the hype of the idea of a rhythm based action game when I first saw the trailer and now I'm feeling disappointed.

    Movement and combat feels stiff and the gameplay is a chore outside of the boss battles.

    At first I thought this was going to be a boss rush game but then the game also has you do other stuff that feels rather pointless and not polished. Such as, exploring a rather empty city, fighting the same 3 robot minions over and over again and talking to npcs that just say a few lines of dialogue.

    The ending also doesn't really feel satisfying or worth the effort of completing the game. The final stage being an endless wave of the same 3 robots that you have already fought many times. Honestly, the ending just feels rushed / lazy.

    Ohh and there are bugs. Lots of bugs in the game. I was going to give this a 5 / 10 but bugs and crashes bring it down to 3 / 10.

    Music 10/10:
    Easily the best part of this game. I don't need to say too much, just play any of their soundtracks on youtube and you will get what I mean. I will probably continue to listen to the soundtracks for the next few weeks.

    Visuals 4/10:
    I hear a lot of people talking about the visuals but honestly it doesn't work for me.

    I love the character designs and the eccentricities of the world but unfortunately there are a lot of blurry textures and muddy colors in the game.

    There are also way too makes blinking lights on the stages when you are trying to focus on the combat. It makes it too distracting to focus on the gameplay especially when you being bombarded with 3 - 4 attacks all coming from different directions.

    Its even worse on the switch, with the smaller screen size and downgraded textures (seriously, why would this kind of game have visual optimization issues when BOTW can run smoothly on the Switch?)

    Story 5/10:
    Story is decent. Its a pretty linear story with no branching paths or alternative endings. Its not bad but its nothing to write home about. If anything, I do enjoy the witty dialogues but the voice acting needs some improvements.

    Conclusion:
    Overall, this is not an experience that I would recommend. It would probably be enjoyable to watch on youtube though, so you can fully enjoy the music and cutscenes while not having to care about the gameplay.

    Because I bought the game first on Switch, then on PC, thinking it would be better there, I am giving this review a 3 / 10.    … Expand
  2. AllNewSuperfake
    Aug 26, 2020
    4
    "No straight roads" is a very stylish rhythm game with two problems: You have to like it's style, and it's not you who is abiding to the rhythm.

    You just hack and slash your way through waves of enemies that are attacking to the rhythm. The music is more a distraction from what you are supposed to be doing; it will actually make the fights easier if you tune down the volume. Which    "No straight roads" is a very stylish rhythm game with two problems: You have to like it's style, and it's not you who is abiding to the rhythm.

    You just hack and slash your way through waves of enemies that are attacking to the rhythm. The music is more a distraction from what you are supposed to be doing; it will actually make the fights easier if you tune down the volume.

    Which fits the general theme and story, meaning that it doesn't make any sense at all. It's all very quirky and joyful and colorful, except of course for the constant condecesion for music that is not "rock", which is ironic given the very quirky and very joyful soundtrack that has nothing to do with rock, and you are at no point the one performing it. So have a look at the oh so quirky and joyful and colorful videos out there and check if you like the style (and the music), because the gameplay is repetitive and, even though it's trying really hard to hide it under quirky and joyful and colorful effects, not innovative at all.

    It is obviously tailored for parties and coop and might perform better if you are surrounded by inebriated people.

    They might also be more forgiving about the glitches or outright crashes. Which, if you don't like the style and the music, can be a plus.    … Expand
  3. KennKun
    Sep 2, 2020
    4
    As it stands, No Straight Roads is not a $40 experience. In short, it seems like the aesthetic was given way more attention than the game itself. The game feels like it had heart put into it, which makes me sad to leave this negative review, but I hope it will inspire the developers to learn from their mistakes.

    The music is great and adapts to what's going on in the gameplay. The    As it stands, No Straight Roads is not a $40 experience. In short, it seems like the aesthetic was given way more attention than the game itself. The game feels like it had heart put into it, which makes me sad to leave this negative review, but I hope it will inspire the developers to learn from their mistakes.

    The music is great and adapts to what's going on in the gameplay. The character designs are creative and their animations are expressive. The writing is funny and entertaining. These things make the game look polished at first glance, but underneath, it's riddled with bugs and poor gameplay.

    The voice acting is a little rough. The characters have heavy accents, which isn't inherently a problem, but a lot of voice lines are unintelligible or delivered with an unnatural intonation. Some lines are delivered fantastically. Some are absolutely awful. It is worth noting that every line of dialogue in this game is voiced.

    I encountered visual and dialogue-related bugs constantly throughout the game. I encountered a black screen bug frequently in the home base area. If you manually skip lines of NPC dialogue early, whatever system automatically advances the dialogue ends up affecting the next line of dialogue instead, possibly skipping the next line. Characters in cutscenes sometimes start speaking too early, causing them to talk over each other and breaking the lip sync. This happened during the cutscene right before the final boss, so I quit the game because I didn't feel like I was experiencing it properly.

    The concept of the core gameplay is great, but it was not executed well. The gameplay claims revolve around the idea that enemies attack to the beat of the music, but their attacks are not grouped and patterned in an intuitive way. This makes it very difficult to track the pattern of more than one or two enemies at at time, and there can be over 5 at once. As a result, the enemy attack patterns don't feel learnable. Sometimes the enemies can be out of your vision, but you may still be in range of their attacks or very close to being in range. Enemies that shoot projectiles are especially bad; the trajectory of their projectiles is not clearly telegraphed, and the projectiles will probably hit you before you even realize the enemy exists. Some boss attacks don't feel like they are synced to the music well; visual cues tend to serve you much better than audio cues. Attacks often come out on musical beats that aren't noteworthy, making them feel like they're "off". Others have noted a lack of enemy variety, but given the game's inspiration from rhythm games, more intuitive arrangement of enemies and obstacles would have made the attack patterns more engaging and made the lack of variety a non-issue.

    The game is also very short, consisting of only 6 or 7 bosses and around 4 or 5 gauntlets. You'll get maybe three hours of real gameplay, and the rest of the game is filler. If you don't plan on replaying the game at the higher difficulty levels or to achieve a higher score, then there's not much content. The poor gameplay mentioned in the paragraph above makes replaying the game at a higher difficulty a very unattractive option.

    No Straight Roads is full of bugs and has unintuitive gameplay, making playing the game a pretty rough experience. The game is also extremely short. The game looks pretty on the surface, but it's unpleasant to play. I don't feel like the experience was worth $40, even if there weren't any bugs, due to the game's short length and its failure to cleanly implement its core mechanic.    … Expand
  4. DoresThoms
    Sep 1, 2020
    3
    This game has great music and characters but sadly falls short on almost every other aspect.
  5. Clean
    Aug 31, 2020
    2
    The game looks promising initially but as of this moment the game is just not finished and has a lot of problems. I bought the game on launch day and my experience was buggy with multiple crashes. The last parts of the game also feels rushed. The final boss repeats the same attacks for every phase and the ending sequence has you repeat the same filler gameplay that you've been doing forThe game looks promising initially but as of this moment the game is just not finished and has a lot of problems. I bought the game on launch day and my experience was buggy with multiple crashes. The last parts of the game also feels rushed. The final boss repeats the same attacks for every phase and the ending sequence has you repeat the same filler gameplay that you've been doing for the last 4 - 5 hours. Its like they did not know what to do with it so they just slapped something together to ship the game. That said, the music is great though just not really on par with the quality of the gameplay. Makes it less worth it when you can just listen to the music on loop on youtube.… Expand
  6. LeonJohnson
    Sep 1, 2020
    0
    Ambitious idea but really bad execution. There's just too many hiccups in this game to let this one pass...
  7. Rhaeleden
    Sep 4, 2020
    0
    I really hope the developers take the time to fix all these gameplay issues because they are hard to justify given the $40 price point of this game. Even without all these bugs, the price for the game is still questionable given the relatively short and unpolished gameplay.

    Some people are saying that this game is made by a small team but if you pay attention to the credits, there is at    I really hope the developers take the time to fix all these gameplay issues because they are hard to justify given the $40 price point of this game. Even without all these bugs, the price for the game is still questionable given the relatively short and unpolished gameplay.

    Some people are saying that this game is made by a small team but if you pay attention to the credits, there is at least 100 people and several studios involved in the making of this game. It's certainly not AAA but that is a MASSIVE budget for an indie game. Additionally, the Metronomik team has assistance from a big publisher and has also received the Epic Games exclusivity grant.

    With the amount of people involved as well as the pricing of the game, I feel that this game needs be compared with other action games of similar price points especially if games like Psychonauts ($20) and Child of Light ($15) are considered non-indie. I wouldn't mind paying $40 for this kind of game if the gameplay actually is good. But as it is right now, the lack of content and quality in NSR's gameplay makes it difficult to give this one a pass.    … Expand
  8. Drogramirez
    Sep 20, 2020
    3
    Like other reviewers have mentioned, the story and music is good but the gameplay is very very bad.

    Combat is stiff and clunky. Hitting enemies feels like you are hitting a rock. They don't have any pain animation or hit feedback. They just continue doing whatever they are doing while you are hitting them which makes the gameplay feel really unsatisfying. Movement is also not tight and    Like other reviewers have mentioned, the story and music is good but the gameplay is very very bad.

    Combat is stiff and clunky. Hitting enemies feels like you are hitting a rock. They don't have any pain animation or hit feedback. They just continue doing whatever they are doing while you are hitting them which makes the gameplay feel really unsatisfying. Movement is also not tight and the jumping is floaty. The camera is fixed during battles and often placed at poor angles that looks cool to watch but doesn't play very well. One of the main mechanics in this game is that you can play music to transform objects but you don't really do much with this mechanic. There are not many objects that you can transform. Most of the time, the transformed objects will either shoot something or do something that is not clearly explained to the player - either way they will do some damage to the enemies. It's not as creative as say, Nintendo games where you must use the the core mechanics to solve puzzles. Here there are no puzzles to solve, you just need to hit everything. There also isn't much gameplay involving rhythm - sure the enemies all attack to the beat but that's about it.

    There's also a city hub which you are supposed to explore that feels very weird. The game is called No Straight Roads but all of the roads in the city are straight. The whole city is basically one straight path from start to end. There also isn't much to do in the city unlike other games where you can buy items, help npcs, play mini games, find secrets etc. Wish there was more more stuff you can do in the city that could expand on the world building. In local multiplayer mode, the camera only focuses on the first player which means that the second player cannot explore the city.

    Not to mention, the game is very buggy and unfinished. Although a lot of the bugs are visual, it really detracts from the experience because I would expect more polish from a $40 game. In almost every stage, there's always objects clipping against walls, textures that look muddy and objects popping in while missing vfx. In some cases, cutscene and dialogue audio is out of sync and sometimes the game crashes. Some gameplay sequences end abruptly leaving you to wonder whether there was supposed to be more but was cut out.

    The level designs are also very bad, especially for the security levels. A lot of the segments are repeated and the placement of the props feels awkward. Like for example, there are trees on top of a concrete floor, spotlights appearing out of nowhere, street lights not arranged properly, giant props that are not meant for human-size characters and many more. It looks like the level designers just randomly put props around the levels without thinking. The lighting is also very rough and the colors are off in certain sections. For example, the Sayu stage on the first platform, you can tell that the color saturation is very different from the rest of the stage. In addition, a lot of the levels have this extremely flashy colors and mirror-like reflective floors which makes it very difficult to focus on the gameplay.

    Overall, this game is either a hit or miss with some players. If you play the game for the music, visuals and the story, you might have a good time. For me, its a miss though. Because I prefer a much better gameplay when I'm playing a game and I expected more from this game. Like many people said, this game actually looks more fun to watch on YouTube than it is to play. Also it would be better if the game is $20 instead of $40.    … Expand
  9. Pyrowolf2
    Aug 30, 2020
    4
    La verdad esperé demasiado del juego pero voy a poner los pros y contras ahora que ya lo terminé

    Pros: El estilo y diseño de los personajes es tremendo, el humor, las voces y la música también, es algo que se nota de principio a fin Contras: El gameplay es malo, el plataformer tiene camaras muy malas y tampoco se notan las sombras como para saber donde vas a caer, la historia esta    La verdad esperé demasiado del juego pero voy a poner los pros y contras ahora que ya lo terminé

    Pros: El estilo y diseño de los personajes es tremendo, el humor, las voces y la música también, es algo que se nota de principio a fin

    Contras: El gameplay es malo, el plataformer tiene camaras muy malas y tampoco se notan las sombras como para saber donde vas a caer, la historia esta hecha para infantes, si no sos un niño la historia se te va a hacer muy mala, los bosses algunos estan bien hechos, otros directamente son un bullethell con ritmo, el problema es que te podes hacer combos pero no te dan ningun momento para usarlos, es pasársela esquivando para ir dando dos golpecitos

    Conclusión: La realidad es que quería sentir el rock con este juego pero no me movió ni un pelo, no la sentí, fue totalmente olvidable, es para un público infantil solo que no te lo dice en ningún lado, no es un mal juego para los niños, pero si tenes de 15 para arriba recomendaría pasar de largo, en mi opinión

    Pd: no le desconté puntos por los bugs, estos después se resuelven con parches    … Expand
  10. Sacchin
    Nov 16, 2022
    0
    I love the music! I found this game on a whim while listening to some game ost and to my surprise the whole game has only slaps.

Awards & Rankings

70
#70 Most Discussed PC Game of 2020

Critic Reviews

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Metascore
73

Mixed or average reviews - based on 12 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 6 out of 12
  2. Mixed: 6 out of 12
  3. Negative: 0 out of 12
  1. GameSpace
    Nov 22, 2022
    75
    No Straight Roads is a game with beautiful visual and musical design, filled with side-tickling humor and banter, spectacular battles but with a pretty average gameplay overall. It will take you roughly 5 to 7 hours to beat the game, but you will likely get a lot of enjoyment out of it.
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  2. Malditos Nerds
    Sep 3, 2020
    60
    The art, the music and the characters are all beautifully composed to deliver a pleasant audiovisual experience, but it's in the gameplay aspect that this game starts to fall apart. No Straight Roads has a lot of ideas, but most of them don't go well with each other, especially in combat, and when they do go well together it can be a bit difficult to understand what's going on on screen.
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  3. GameSkinny
    Aug 31, 2020
    70
    You really need to play No Straight Roads. While the gameplay isn't amazing, the presentation is, and it's flawed in some truly interesting ways.
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