Game Review: No More Heroes: Heroes' Paradise

Billy O'Keefe - Mclatchy -Tribune News Service

For: Playstation 3

From: AQ Interactive/Marvelous Entertainment/Konami ESRB Rating: Mature (blood and gore, crude humor, intense violence, partial nudity, sexual themes, strong language)

Price: $40

If you wanted to love "No More Heroes" on the Wii but couldn't get around its logistical roadblocks, the least interesting news about this overdue port may also be its best news.

Before we continue, let's restate that: "No More Heroes: Heroes' Paradise" is a port of the first "Heroes" game. The game's new developer and publishers haven't dramatically remixed it or spruced up what ailed it back in 2008, and while the graphics benefit greatly from the high-definition bump, that's exactly what they are - a high-definition presentation of visual assets from the Wii version. It suffices just fine, in no small credit to a unique graphic style seen most commonly in motion comics, but you won't be floored.

If anything - following an opening sequence that gives you an enticing taste of "Paradise's" combat, mainline mission structure and storytelling flair - you might be confused. Because between those missions lies perhaps the worst open world design ever devised, and it arrives on the PS3 fully intact and still seemingly incomplete.

"Paradise" mandates that you take jobs (minigames) and side missions to fund your career as an up-and-coming assassin, and it spreads those tasks out across a huge map that's perplexingly empty between destination spots. Driving through town once is, thanks to motorbike controls that give "stiff" a bad name, a bit of a chore. Doing it ad nauseam to play so-so minigames that eventually allow you to get to the next mission is just tedious, and "Paradise" missed a major opportunity to just do away with the open world or at least make it skip-able via menus.

As with "Heroes," though, what lies at the heart of this barren environment is what makes "Paradise" worth the trips through it. The game's combat - doled out with your fists, feet and a beam katana that by any other name is an off-brand lightsaber - is simple but fun in an outrageously violent B-movie kind of way. The satisfaction of ripping through an army of no-name thugs is matched on a different scale by the mainline missions' final encounters, which bring some terrifically weird character designs to a head with tense (if often unwieldy) one-on-one fights.

The boss designs work in tandem with monologues, dialogues, style choices and anything-goes narration to create a world that's confidently capable of pulling double duty as a heart-on-sleeve spectacular and a fearless self-parody. Completely unrelated influences come together to create discordant harmonies in "Paradise," and the glee with which it all happens makes it easy to appreciate the game's stylistic misses almost as much as its hits.

As should be no surprise, "Paradise" supports the Move controller in the same fashion that "Heroes" supported the Wii remote. But a lack of refinement in this area means that the camera issues that plagued this control scheme once plague it all over again here. There's no 1:1 fidelity between the Move wand and the katana, and the annoying motion needed to recharge the katana is actually less responsive than it was on the Wii because the Move wand wasn't built with jerky movements like this in mind.

Fortunately, "Paradise" had the good sense to include compatibility with traditional controllers, and the second thumbstick does wonders with its allowance of manual camera control and increased responsiveness with regard to certain finishing attacks. Playing this way undoes some of the novelty that made "Heroes" special in its first incarnation, but if the novelty of the Wii remote has already long worn off, it's hardly a loss.

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Copyright 2012 by Mclatchy -Tribune News Service