No Straight Roads

No Straight Roads looks great, sounds great, and has great characters- but it has major gameplay issues that bring down the whole experience.

Bright, colourful and completely insane. No Straight Roads is like nothing I have played in recent memory and I enjoyed my time with it. It may be a bit much for some and at times it has a few performance issues but overall if you are into weird games, brawlers or rhythm games, give it a shot you might like it. Let's rock!

The game’s exuberance helps to smooth over its rough spots, like the awkward parrying mechanics, imprecise hit boxes, and messy camera angles that come as a result of being unable to lock onto enemies. That’s because No Straight Roads stays true, above all, to its themes.

If it's clearly imperfect on many levels, No Straight Roads still manages to make us happy with its clever use of music and its colorful world.

Impeccable in its soundtrack, offering some inspired boss fights and really enjoyable to play, No Straight Roads is therefore convincing in its core proposition, except for a few readability concerns during more heavy clashes visually and soundly.

No Straight Roads succeeds in blending its unique art style and wonderful soundtrack with its gameplay mechanics. However, those same mechanics often face annoying issues that hinder the flow of combat.

The musical dystopia of No Straight Roads is the way Metronomik uses to face the authoritarianisms as a whole. Themed boss fights and beautiful art style create a potentially explosive recipe, but the monotony of the enemies' attacks and the low quality of the platforming negatively affect the experience.

While No Straight Roads‘ floaty combat occasionally frustrates, its strong sense of self is commendable. Terrific art direction and musical composition add flourish to a game that otherwise may have been too easy to miss out on.

Not bad, especially as far as the story is concerned. A good concept, but it isn't enough on its own and No Straight Roads falters a bit in its execution. Dumb AI is the main culprit, but the fact that the actions on screen aren't always synchronized well with your input certainly doesn't help matters.

No Straight Roads is such a good game in concept, but the mechanics hold back this gorgeous adventure from being something great. The world feels empty, and the level designs become a repetitive mess. However, if you can look past that, then you are rewarded with some stand-out character writing and fantastic animation work. Call me when No Straight Roads gets its own Netflix series.

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.

No Straight Roads is an overambitious game that tries to do many things and fails to impress with any of them. Despite fantastic world-building, loveable characters, and great voice acting the game fumbles in the narrative department and suffers from noticeable and frequent technical issues. Lacking gameplay polish also makes No Straight Roads more of a flop than a surefire hit.

While I appreciated the stylish, neon-soaked city and the fantastic soundtrack, No Straight Roads switches between brawler, platformer, and rhythm concepts, but fails to deliver a memorable experience overall.

For such a short game with so many issues, it seems crazy to recommend No Straight Roads. The story is overly drawn out, almost feeling like it was intended for a longer game, the levels are to be endured and the underlying systems meant to bring depth are just kind of there, staring at you, begging you to yell “Freebird” so it can go on a long tirade about jerks in the audience. Even the climax of the game felt tacked on. The boss fights, however, show flashes of well-designed brilliance. The game is designed to encourage experimentation to get the most of these parts, and then pushes the player into more elaborate variations that add to the challenge and fun. These parts make No Straight Roads an easy buy when it’s on sale, but it’s too bad that there’s more filler than killer here.

In some ways, No Straight Roads might have worked better as a cartoon than a video game, as its colorful characters and quirky writing outshine its somewhat by-the-numbers gameplay. Still, it has a solid presentation that makes it worth at least a weekend playthrough, and there’s plenty of charm for those looking to rock out.

No Straight Roads is a visually charming rhythm-action game that slips on its (sometimes) confusing gameplay ideas and lands on the slightly-above-average level.

It’s not a bad game, and if Metronomik updates it to address my concerns I would be glad to get back into the groove of things. The story is engaging and the music sticks in my head for hours but poor controls and bad camera angles have ruined what should be a fantastic game.

Unfortunately, everything surrounding these boss fights feels a little half-baked. The light exploration we mentioned is basically a dozen small areas, with one or two for each boss. There are collectibles and secrets around, but the in-game rewards for finding these things doesn’t feel worth it. This is particularly problematic as many of the secrets need late-level unlocks to access, and the threshold to reach them requires massive amounts of grinding.