{"id":20556,"date":"2020-10-16T00:01:20","date_gmt":"2020-10-16T00:01:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/?p=20556"},"modified":"2020-10-04T11:27:12","modified_gmt":"2020-10-04T11:27:12","slug":"no-straight-roads-ps4-switch-xbox-one-pc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/2020\/10\/16\/no-straight-roads-ps4-switch-xbox-one-pc\/","title":{"rendered":"No Straight Roads (PS4, Switch, Xbox One, PC)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Mayday and Zuke are in an indie rock band and they live in Vinyl City.\u00a0 Mayday is the guitarist and Zuke is the drummer.\u00a0 The city they live in is powered by music, provided by the NSR power company.\u00a0 Musicians can audition to be part of NSR, but when Mayday and Zuke try out, they are rejected.\u00a0 Later they find out their power output was higher than anyone else\u2019s, and that NSR is withholding power and electricity to everyone except the very elite.\u00a0 And now they\u2019ve banned rock and roll, too!\u00a0 Mayday and Zuke decide to use their rock music to rebel and take back the city for everyone in No Straight Roads.\u00a0 It\u2019s kind of like a video game version of the 80\u2019s song, \u201cWe Built this City on Rock and Roll.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s a 3-D platformer with an emphasis on multi-tiered boss fights and music timing gameplay.\u00a0 The game is available on most current consoles and PC, but reviewed on PS4 here.<\/p>\n

You control Mayday and Zuke in 3-D space as they run around the city and hijack concerts from the other NSR members.\u00a0 You can switch between the two characters at any time, or you can play co-op.\u00a0 I wasn\u2019t able to do that due to social distancing, but it sounds neat.\u00a0 Mayday uses her guitar to attack and is focused on strength, while Zuke is weaker but uses his drumsticks for combo moves.\u00a0 Both characters can run, jump, attack, collect music notes and fire them as projectiles, and use special moves.<\/p>\n

The flow of the game works like this.\u00a0 You explore a part of a linear city until you reach an end.\u00a0 Then you jump down to a new part of the city and find one of the NSR members having a concert.\u00a0 To hijack their concert, you must play a short platforming section before reaching the boss.\u00a0 The bosses you fight are the meat of the gameplay.\u00a0 They have multiple forms, and take a good while to defeat.\u00a0 Most of their attacks are timed with the music, but there are also usually picture cues as well.<\/p>\n

The bosses represent different music types, such as an intergalactic techno DJ, a Hatsune Miku-like virtual idol, a child prodigy park concert piano player, a robot boy band, and more!\u00a0 Each fight also tells a small story, so it kind of reminded me of Psychonauts a little.\u00a0 Depending on how well you do after the fight, you\u2019ll earn a rating and a number of fans.\u00a0 Use the fans to upgrade Mayday and Zuke\u2019s skills.\u00a0 You have unlimited tries to keep continuing to defeat the boss right where you left off, but your rating will suffer if you do that.\u00a0 But luckily this means that players of any skill level can at least see the game to the end.\u00a0 Which is good because the game is really hard!<\/p>\n

After you beat a boss, you\u2019ll be able to explore a new part of the city and start the process over again.\u00a0 You can also replay old boss battles to get a better rating and more fans.\u00a0 Hidden in the city are batteries that you can collect, and when you have enough, you can use them to power up things in the city to get even more fans.\u00a0 You can also find hidden stickers to put on your instruments to give you temporary upgrades, too.<\/p>\n

The game does have a few problems, though.\u00a0 One is that some goals and objectives and just gameplay points are sometimes unclear at first, so the learning curve is a bit steep at the beginning.\u00a0 I appreciate them not spoonfeeding the gamer too much, but there is a difference between that and good instructions.\u00a0 One example in the game is a rap battle mini-game with Zuke\u2019s brother.\u00a0 You move a couple of hands while icons scroll down.\u00a0 But what they don\u2019t tell you is that you have to AVOID the icons, whereas in every other music game you\u2019re supposed to run into them!\u00a0 There\u2019s examples of that all throughout the game.\u00a0 Another big problem is that there is too much story and exposition.\u00a0 I felt like I watched the game just as much as I played it.\u00a0 Luckily the story and characters are charming, but I could\u2019ve done with a bit less prattle.\u00a0 Other minor problems include floaty jumping controls, but luckily you don\u2019t need to do too much precise platforming here.\u00a0 And Mayday\u2019s voice actress couldn\u2019t decide what accent she should have.<\/p>\n

But despite the problems, I still saw the game to the end.\u00a0 It\u2019s not a perfect game, but you can really tell the developers put their heart and soul into the project, and you don\u2019t see that much anymore.\u00a0 So if you enjoyed platformers and story based music games from the 2000\u2019s era, you may want to check out No Straight Roads.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Kid Factor:<\/strong><\/p>\n

No Straight Roads is rated E-10 with ESRB descriptors of Alcohol Reference, Fantasy Violence, and Language.\u00a0 You hit cartoony people and monsters with guitars and drumsticks, and fire music notes like projectiles.\u00a0 After battles, the characters in the story scenes look a little scuffed up, but that\u2019s about as violent as it gets.\u00a0 In one cutscene, a character breaks a bottle of wine, and near the end of the game, a couple of characters say a bad word.\u00a0 Reading skill is needed for the text, and younger gamers may find it too difficult.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mayday and Zuke are in an indie rock band and they live in Vinyl City.\u00a0 Mayday is the guitarist and Zuke is the drummer.\u00a0 The city they live in is powered by music, provided by the NSR power company.\u00a0 Musicians can audition to be part of NSR, but when Mayday and Zuke try out, they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":20524,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-game-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20556"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20558,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20556\/revisions\/20558"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}