2.5/5 ★ – bokonon764's review of No Straight Roads: Encore Edition.

No Straight Roads looks cool, but it plays pretty poorly. It’s a colorful and creative indie game from Malaysian developer Metronomik; it’s got potential, but ultimately just feels too messy to really enjoy. I stumbled across this game while looking for good rhythm games to play. It’s not necessarily a rhythm game, but it certainly has some rhythmic elements, and also centers around music. It’s a sort of combat focused platformer. Everything in the game moves to the rhythm of the soundtrack. This is a concept that is hit or miss. Honestly, the combat is pretty terrible and really drags the potential of this game way down. You bash enemies with a guitar or drum sticks, essentially rinsing and repeating with each area. You have ranged attacks, but you can only use them on certain enemies, which is super fuckin lame. No Straight Roads is a little too reminiscent of Double Fine games, specifically Brutal Legend and Psychonauts. I don’t think it’s a bad thing, Tim Schafers influence is all over the gaming industry, and I definitely don’t have a problem with that. Although, No Straight Roads feels a bit derivative. There’s also this kinda lame idea of “EDM vs. Rock” thing I’m not a fan of; as if one style is better than the other. It’s something I would’ve eaten up as a kid, but it just annoys me here. Brutal Legend does a similar thing with metal and hair metal, but this is actually a cool idea, as hair metal is pushed as the commercial, sell-out genre, which it very much was the monetization of heavy metal music. The game does present a different message at the end of the narrative, but not in the cleanest most satisfying way. But healthy enough. Also, for a game that talks about how great rock is, there’s really not a lot of great rock in this game. The EDM stuff on the other hand, is pretty rad. Maybe that’s because I’m more of a rock fan so I’m harder to impress? I don’t know. The music in general is solid. The character design is pretty excellent, especially Mayday, one of the games playable characters. Su Ling Chan kills the voice role; actually, all of the voice acting is great, it’s one of the games best features. This is one of those games that just plays too bad to get good at. When I started, I liked it enough to soft plan on getting the platinum, and beating every challenge the game had to offer. But as I went on, it just felt so fuckin janky; the parry system is pretty weak, hitboxes are extremely loose, and for the amount of evasion options provided, there’s just way too much chaos on screen. Not to mention, there are some truly awful sequences. I’m thinking mainly of the truly horrendous DK West rap battle rhythm game. Not only does it play poorly, but the rapping just sucks, no other way to say it. I’ve played in quite a few rock bands in my life. There’s a part of me that wonders if the creators of this game have very little experience playing in rock bands, or if their experience is just different than mine. There’s an authentic vibe that just isn’t there for me. It’s a feeling I get pretty often across various forms of media. The feeling that writers and creators don’t understand their subject matter like I do, or have no experience with it but are still enthralled by it. But maybe I’m just so full of shit I can’t see past my own perspective. It’s a difficult feeling to navigate. Overall, I would say this is worth a play for some people; if you’ve never played a Tim Schafer game, or you’re not a somewhat jaded musician/music fan. The voice acting, artistic design, music, and concept are all objectively great. Just maybe not for me.