No Straight Roads is an action game that has a music theme to it. It’s not a rhythm game, but music plays a large role in its gameplay, in particularly, rock music. The games follows siblings Mayday and Zuke, a guitarist and drummer, respectively. They live in Vinyl City, where power is provided via music, and so a good performance is critical. In their audition to provide a good show and qualify, they are rejected by the panel due to their distaste for rock music. Only electronic dance music (EDM) is allowed.
The siblings goes through Vinyl City taking down each of the panelist one by one, gaining popularity and fans in the process. The combat is simple in that each character can strike, dodge, jump and parry. Mayday has stronger attacks, while Zuke is faster and can chain together combos. The enemies move and attack in time with the music, so you are supposed to use the sound cues to determine when to dodge or parry.
Hitting certain enemies will drop projectiles that Mayday and Zuke can pick up and fire off at enemies that are out of reach. Furthermore, each character can transform specific objects that appear in the level. These objects can range from support items to offensive items.
Despite trying to be stylish and fluid in its combat, movement and attacks feels clunky. There is something off with the jumps and attack animation, and it is most evident when exploring around the city. It’s not a game built for platforming but that’s what some levels require. Both Mayday and Zuke’s jumps and dashes take you further than you would expect, and faster too, often causing you to overshoot. Likewise, pressing the attack button doesn’t automatically cause Mayday and Zuke to face their nearest enemy, and thanks to the fixed camera angles during combat, you can often miss.
The game is effectively a series of boss rushes, although there are smaller sections before most bosses that you can fight mooks in. The boss battles themselves each have individual gimmicks which are different to each other. However, a lot of them has the same issue of not properly displaying how much progress you’ve made. You can be spending five or ten minutes doing the same things, but the boss’s health bar doesn’t go down so you’re not sure if you are supposed to do something else to trigger something (chances are, you are doing the correct thing, but it’s just dragged out to be at least fifteen minutes long).
The game has a unique aesthetic, where the proportions of the characters are stylized. It feels like that the character designs are better in 2D, it’s just that the game is in 3D. So the 3D models looks somewhat off. Mayday is also one of those characters that is loud and keeps on talking. The game tries to be funny, and it works around 50% of the time as it can get cringey or coming off as trying too hard.
Unfortunately, all the style in the world cannot hide the gameplay flaws of the game. The loose combat combined with unrefined platforming and gimmicky bosses makes it hard to enjoy the game at times. It’s a shame because there are so many moments where it almost clicks, showing what the game could have been at its full potential, but it is constantly held back. While the soundtrack is absolutely fantastic, it’s only in the story theme because it’s barely there in the gameplay.
It’s not a long game, taking only around six hours to finish the story, plus a little bit of exploration. Having the story be Mayday and Zuke taking over Vinyl City one district at a time, when it comes to the end, it can portray them in a less than positive light. The style of the game has a lot of exaggeration, which can be okay but it leaves many thing way too obvious or cringy.
While you’re left free to roam, the world isn’t that big, each new area you unlock can be explored in a few minutes. Finishing the game unlocks harder versions of each boss (the normal difficulty is fairly easy), and you’d have only unlocked a tiny portion of the skill tree. Although unless you really enjoyed the gameplay, you’ll probably leave it at that.
Overall, No Straight Roads is an average game. While it might seem quirky and stylish at first glance, there are a lot of flaws. You can’t fault the music and what it is trying to go for, but unfortunately, the gameplay is too loose and unrefined, while the humor can be hit and miss, which can ruin part of the game experience.
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