Hands-On With Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes – A Familiar Punk In New Territory

Siliconera got to spend some hands-on time with Grasshopper Manufacturer’s upcoming action-adventure hack and slash, Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes, featuring our favorite otaku assassin at GDC 2018.

In Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes, Travis and Badman, the father of Bad Girl, will find themselves drawn into a possessed video game console. Unlike the previous games that had Travis take on a bunch of assassins, this time he’ll be fighting through various games.

The demo at GDC 2018 was played with separate Joy-Cons so players were able to try co-op with just one Switch. Those of you who played previous No More Heroes games shouldn’t have any trouble jumping right into this one, as you charge Travis’ Beam Saber kind of like how you did on Wii by holding the L-stick down and shaking the remote to go into Charge Mode.

However, you’ll want to always make sure that your Beam Saber has enough juice to keep going. When it is out of energy you’ll do very little damage (sometimes even 0 damage) so when that happens you’ll need to take a break from hacking and slashing to recharge.

The controls are pretty intuitive and easy to pick up. You press A to dodge, Y for your regular attack, and X for a stronger heavy attack.

Skills are performed by holding down L plus pressing other buttons. The Player-2 character, Badman, also has a cool Cyclone Spin attack. You’re also able to equip different skills to match your play-style.

Other than hacking and slashing your way around the games within the possessed video game console, you’ll get to collect coins. These coins are used to get different T-shirts for both Travis and Badman.

Suda51 is collaborating with several indie developers who put elements of their own games into Travis Strikes Again, so there’s a lot of variety to expect from the title. While the game is different in many ways from the previous No More Heroes, Travis is still the same familiar punk, which is evident in the unique text that was only available to see at GDC 2018. You can check out the images we took below in an amusing exchange between Travis and Electro Triple Star:

We’ll be sharing more on info on Travis Strikes Again later, including an interview with Grasshopper Manufacturer founder and creator of No More Heroes Goichi “Suda51” Suda.

Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes releases in 2018 for Nintendo Switch.