No More Heroes is flawed, but is also one of the most quirky, stylized, and all around memorable games you can buy...
STORY - You play as Travis Touchdown, a cocky punk who signs himself up to be an assassin after a few too many drinks. Travis is determined to become the number one assassin in Santa Destroy, and to be such, the 10 other top assassins have to be taken down.
GAMEPLAY - No More Heroes is two parts on-foot action, one part driving, and one part mini-game madness. Each one of these parts ranges from superb to pretty bad in gameplay.
The mini-games come in the form of jobs that you have to take on in order to get enough money to buy your next hit contract. The mini-games usually come in the form of mashing buttons, or carefully timing button presses. While these mini-games are fairly basic, and might get old after a while, thanks to some merciless time-constraints, they can get pretty frantic as you try to get as much cash as possible.
The driving in this game is easily the worst part. You get a free-roaming world, but there's really nothing much to do IN the world except to go from level to level, there's almost no interactivity (save knocking down trees, and people). But even worse, the bike that you use doesn't even handle well. The collision detection with other vehicles and buildings is pretty bad (as the hit-boxes are bigger than the actual objects), and the bike is also a bit too sensitive to crashes, and you'll find yourself flying off your bike quite a bit.
But, of course, where the game really displays its greatness is in the on-foot combat. The combat has a surprising amount of feature for how simple it is. You only use the A button, B button, shakes of the Wiimote, and the Z button during combat, but you can pull of everything from attacks, executions, blocks, lock-on, stuns, area attacks, and wrestling moves all with those few buttons. One thing that I particularly liked about the combat system (which most may not like at first) is the fact that your basic attack centers around the A button, and once you get your target down to almost no health, the game will pause and prompt you take shake your Wiimote in a certain direction. This all in all feels much more rewarding than just simply shaking the Wiimote throughout the entire fight does.
At the end of each action segment, you'll encounter a boss. Each boss has extremely quirky, and crazy personalities and the conversations between them and Travis at the beginning of each fight are hilarious. Each boss fight is great, too. They all have their own patterns and weaknesses, but it's the overall presentation of these fights that make them one of the game's highlights.
Travis can also chill at his apartment, giving you the opportunity to save, restore your health, customize his clothes, watch TV to learn new wrestling moves and...play with your cat, which doesn't really do much.
GRAPHICS - No More Heroes at times seems awesome in how artistic it is, but at other times seems like the graphics style was implemented out of sheer laziness. Where the game looks great is during the closed levels, all the environments, and models are detailed, and the color pallets look great. Where the game doesn't look too great is within the open world. In the free-roam environment, the models (especially cars and pedestrians) look pretty bad, and the buildings all have very similar color pallets, and in addition there's also a huge draw-distance problem. No More Heroes is graphically great overall just because of its awesome style, but in the free-roaming world, you can see some big flaws in the engine.
SOUND - No More Heroes has good sound. The voice-overs and music are appropriately over-the-top and cheesy. The sound effects are also very good, and there are great Wiimote sound effects, but some sound clips (i.e. enemies' dieing yells) are repeated quite a lot.
VALUE - No More Heroes will take you a fair amount of time to beat (maybe 12 hours), and is surprisingly repayable, due almost fully to the awesome assassination stages, but there is also plenty to go around and collect.
TILT - No More Heroes is a great game all in all due to good mini-games, superb combat, a quirky story, awesome characters, good sound, and fairly good value. But, it's not without it's flaws, as the graphics in the open-world suffer quite a bit, and the driving in the open-world is pretty bad. But, all in all this is one of the (if not THE) best action game on the Wii.