Developer/publisher Grasshopper Manufacture

Format Switch

Release Out now

Boutique action game developer Treasure once proposed a theory: if the climactic boss fight represents the most exhilarating moment in any videogame, then any game composed primarily of boss fights would surely be the most exhilarating yet. Alien Soldier was the result, and the game – one of the last to arrive on Sega’s Mega Drive – remains a design masterclass. Its foundational principle has since appeared in varied shapes, from Fumito Ueda’s stately, dour Shadow Of The Colossus to Goichi Suda’s No More Heroes, a high-fructose series built around a succession of battles with screeching pantomime villains.

No More Heroes III follows the template established by the series’ 2008 debut: a series of climactic fights with unforgettable assassins, interspersed with unhurried interstitial downtime. Here you knock around a city so devoid of life that it borders on a satire of the sumptuous open-world games that have come to dominate in the years since the previous instalment.

You again play as Travis Touchdown, a character who embodies two opposing archetypes: the American cool guy, all leather jacket, shades, Fonz-slicked hair and lithe physique, and the loner Japanese otaku, in his grotty bedsit surrounded by capsule toys, unable to parse the world and its challenges in anything other than videogame terms. Ever primed to be the protagonist in someone else’s drama, Travis is drawn into a plot of galactic proportions: the return of an alien being, FU, to Earth to reunite with a boy, who, 20 years earlier, found him crash-landed in the woods and nursed him back to health. Now both alien and boy are fully grown and, together with FU’s entourage of interplanetary supervillains, seem set on world domination. Travis believes he is the only one who can stop them.