No Straight Roads (Xbox One)
Back when No Straight Roads released in 2020, its electric rock and roll personality, colorful characters, and stylish music-inspired environments and battles made me jump in and play it shortly after its release. Usually I would wait for a newer game to potentially get any patches or updates, but I had thought this indie game would have been safe to play. However, after seeing audio sync issues in cutscenes, slowdown during seemingly mundane gameplay segments, and even having scenes entirely skipped as they didn’t load properly, I decided to wait to try again later down the road. Now in 2023, some of the issues have been addressed… but there are still moments of dialogue not syncing with mouth movements pretty egregiously to the point characters spend longer miming than talking, the game crashed twice, and the slowdown near the game’s start still wasn’t addressed. However, it was an improvement, and besides the crashes gameplay was almost never negatively impacted, meaning No Straight Roads still had room to win me over with its incredible imagination.
In Vinyl City, music is converted into energy through a special device known as a Qwasa, and in order to search for promising artists who can power the Grand Qwasa to a considerable degree, the record label No Straight Roads hosts televised auditions. Mayday and Zuke are two young artists who rediscover the genre of rock and roll after most of the city had shifted to playing electronic dance music to power the Qwasa, but the two believe the different genre might help with the city’s power issues and thus form their own band Bunk Bed Junction. However, when they play, they are soundly rejected by NSR despite being a strong and viable power source, NSR aiming to keep their stranglehold on the city through the idea that only EDM is reliable enough to keep Vinyl City running. A power outage does undermine this claim some, and the revelation that the backup generators for the city only feed energy to the districts run by the NSR artists inspire Mayday and Zuke to switch from wanting to join them to trying to start a revolution against them.
Right off the bat, Mayday and Zuke are excellent complementary protagonists. Mayday, voiced wonderfully by Su Ling Chan, is an effervescent in-your-face optimist with her head in the clouds but an unflinching devotion to her belief in the righteousness of her rock and roll mission. Zuke on the other hand is far more reserved and down to earth, Steven Bones bringing a relaxed demeanor to his normal speech but able to crank up the emotion when something truly is personal or important for the drummer. Mayday being the emotionally open idealist who has energy enough for the both of them gives the game a strong source of vivacious forward movement on top of many delightful and fun interactions between her and other characters, but Zuke is not a mere counterweight. Zuke has the truly deep connections with characters the two encounter, history with other musicians both in and out of NSR providing some more layered interactions rather than the constant quest to beat EDM artists to prove rock’s benefits in bringing power back to the people. NSR’s leader Tatiana, voiced by Priscilla Patrick, features a much colder and clinical performance that contrasts the rebellious energy of Bunk Bed Junction well, and since many of the EDM artists under her are more eccentric and sometimes even a bit sympathetic, having her at the top of the ladder with unreasonable demands keeps the quest important enough to continue pursuing while still avoiding any cartoonish evil since her desire is more to maintain order over Vinyl City rather than directly harm anyone.
Sadly, not everyone has an absolutely fitting voice performance, although most of the time it is the less important characters you only briefly chat with in Vinyl City who can have stilted or unusual deliveries. Most of the EDM artists who serve as major antagonists have solid voice work and are diverse not only in the subgenres they embrace but each have a pronounced theme and concept to make seeing the next one in line more captivating. Sayu is meant to represent cutesy digital idols, but the idea is explored in a rather intriguing space. The virtual avatar itself is a pastel pink mermaid with hearts for pupils and adorable catchphrases, so already her boss fight is able to pull from an undersea visual direction, but it layers in suitable color choices on top of the battle clearly taking place inside a digital space. However, during the actual fight you find the team responsible for cultivating this non-existent idol contributing in different ways to the battle. The designer will attack you with their mouse cursor, the motion capture artists might stumble and make Sayu go on the fritz, and the assets will shift as the fight that at first mostly consists of avoiding hazardous areas continues to try and make Sayu more and more adorable to discourage true direct aggression. Almost every boss battle is the product of multiple intersecting ideas that make it deeper than just a representative of a specific style of electronic dance music, the evolving fights also able to introduce new gameplay complications on top of just being conceptual delights. When the game’s first boss is already hurling planets at you to a beat it feels like there could be a tall wall to climb, but imagination sustains each new encounter, and while some like the robotic boy band group 1010 and the neoclassical child prodigy Yinu are a bit simpler in their fight concepts than their company, they still bring new ideas to the table that ensure none of NSR’s artists feel underwhelming or lacking in the concept department.
When it comes to how the fights unfold, No Straight Roads does sometimes favor ideas about presentation over the actual interactive substance. Much more of a boss battle’s excitement comes from moving onto the next phase where they whip out something new appropriate to their theming, but during the actual combat section things are often fairly straightforward. Mayday and Zuke can be played either in co-op or with one player switching between them as they embrace the different battle styles they feature, Mayday attacking with slower but stronger guitar strikes while Zuke is a zippier combo-focused character. Both can fire music shots at enemies so long as they’ve scooped them up off the ground, and one way a few bosses do suffer is they lean a bit too hard on the shooting. Shots home in on targets so there’s no thought in using them and collecting the ammo is usually something that will happen as a matter of course after avoiding enough attacks or taking out weaker enemies. When you can get in and strike there’s still usually periods of waiting for an attack pattern to complete until you move in, the bosses fighting in rhythm but also repeating their patterns until you’ve damaged them enough to move onto the next attack they’ll be repeating for a while. Rarely does it dwell too long on an idea thankfully, and there are some options to speed things up like attempting the risky parries of pink attacks that can sometimes be hard to gauge the timing for or utilizing abilities you unlock over the adventure. Healing is also something your abilities are good for and some provide a way to shoot a target when ammo isn’t around, but many fights aren’t too difficult and if you do manage to die, boss encounters aren’t so hard to retry. There is a ranking system for doing well that translates into fans for the band that then help you unlock new moves, so if you do fall you can choose a full boss retry where you’ll likely know the moves well enough to succeed or you can continue on at a deep penalty to your ranking if you do just want to close it out. Harder difficulties can be unlocked, but the story doesn’t let you play them until you already know a fight well enough to make the increments either possible to tackle or instead focused more on absurd performance as the later difficulties are more extremely demanding than neat twists.
No Straight Roads isn’t all boss battles even though the creative presentation alone means it could have almost rested on those laurels, but the city exploration between each battle is interesting too. Each district controlled by an NSR member is themed around them, these giving you time to drink in the style and design approach the character focuses on. The abstract works of a psydub artist make for a striking district while Sayu’s is more commercial and focused on the technological forwardness that lead to such a character concept existing. Oddly enough after defeating a boss you then enter another part of their district for another dose of their aesthetic after having already conquered them, but these spaces also let you collect Mini-Qwasas that can help you light up the city some more and earn extra like new musical tracks for boss fights. Boss fights are set to the default rhythm which can be a bit disorienting, but other tracks like the Christmas mixes gives everyone a festive look to match the new instrumentation to some already excellent music. No Straight Roads’s main theme is already catchy and strong but unsurprisingly the other artists all draw out their associated subgenre’s style well thanks to involvement from real artists in that space.
Exploring the city is also an opportunity to talk with other characters to give Vinyl City some room to build up a history and personality, and while it has technical issues elsewhere, No Straight Roads also has some pretty surprising visual ambition. When you speak to a character, their 3D model spins towards the screen and turns into a 2D piece of art seamlessly. When you upgrade your instruments the characters smack their guitar or drum off to the right with some strong energy before it appears in front of you so you can attach the beneficial stickers that admittedly don’t feel like they really up your output too much. Cutscenes are presented in a variety of styles as well, lip-sync for the 3D character models actually good when the audio doesn’t have its alignment issues, but you also have posed 2D art that has some strong dynamic posing that again can layer a lot of energy onto characters like with Mayday’s over the top stances even during normal speech. Full on 2D animation is used at parts as well such as in ads playing in the backgrounds of districts as sort of primers on how the EDM artist presents themselves, the exploration’s simplicity sustained by these extra touches.
What isn’t quite as captivating though are the stretches before a boss fight where you face some simple drones. Drones attack in a rhythm so you need to time your dodges or jumps to avoid their attacks, but the same enemies are repeated throughout, barely iterated upon, and already fairly basic in how easily you can smash them and move on. Some platforming in these portions can at least ask for some movement where you need to listen to the background music to make sure you don’t jump right before your destination moves out of the way, but beyond giving you more time to see the upcoming boss’s visual aesthetic, these feel pretty shallow and always like they last a little too long. One break from the usual combat types does succeed a bit better than these bland stretches of easily trounced enemies, that being the few encounters with Zuke’s brother DK West. DK West brings forth an underlying Malaysian cultural identity found in pieces throughout a game that otherwise happily mixes in every inspiration it can. DK West not only speaks mostly in subtitled Malay, but his musical style is a competitive form of singing similar to a rap battle known as dikir barat. His verses are in English which is fortunate since you’ll be playing a rhythm game during them and couldn’t follow the subtitles, the player controlling a large colorful hand that glides up a street towards West and needs to dodge the hazards in its path in time with the music to reach him and then smack the shadowy figure West conjures. This is actually one instance where single player is significantly more difficult because there are times that require you to dodge with both Mayday and Zuke’s hand, but the interactive play is not as important as what is actually happening story-wise. Zuke and DK West spit verses at each other that dig deep into the past of the drummer and ends up not only building a more personal connection with an already rich setting but allows for a few moments of genuine emotion to crop up elsewhere as we better understand Zuke. Again the actual interactivity is mostly so-so but the narrative ideas are sound, but DK West’s battles are more reflex based than regular fights and not as clean design-wise so it can feel a bit like you’re playing only to hear the songs here rather than at least having novel if not too challenging ideas for battle variations like with the the NSR crew.
THE VERDICT: No Straight Roads deserves to be better. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have the technical fortitude or engaging action that would allow for unqualified enjoyment of excellent content elsewhere. A wellspring of imaginative and uncompromising style, animation, and battle concepts certainly allows for forgiveness to cover up the not too damaging glitches or basic drone battles, and the personality and identity of the world still draw you in with ease even if you know a boss might be more visually captivating than they are exciting to actually fight. Mayday brings life and humor to the story while Zuke gives the plot room to explore some more serious relationships with the antagonist group who are entertaining to get to know both through their themed districts and evolving battles, everything in place for a stellar musical adventure save for some absolutely vital fundamentals.
And so, I give No Straight Roads for Xbox One…
A GOOD rating. No Straight Roads unfortunately built its own barriers to being the kind of personality rich, aesthetically strong, musically engrossing action game with memorable and distinct characters players would love to embrace. So many of its conceptual elements blend together well into a rock and roll narrative that can easily captivate a player, and having moments like exploring the city to add some more relaxed moments between bombastic and extravagant boss battles was the right move to let you take in the atmosphere and setting details of Vinyl City while basking in the aesthetic of the upcoming musician. Those stretches in running up to a boss where you do busywork with bland enemies add very little, the platforming probably superior to those hollow bits of combat and perhaps a lead-up where you only move forward through a rhythm based environment would have been preferable. Some greater substance to how bosses are actually damaged would definitely add some more zest to the actual participation in them, many feeling more like they’re meant more to display their creative concepts than fights that value your input greatly. Some greater focus on continuously being able to deal damage between the dodging could do a fair bit even if it would require much more durable foes to match the increased involvement, but like in most parts of No Straight Roads’s design, art comes first. That art is superb in many parts, the game doing a solid job with its rock revolution narrative, but mostly its the art direction and excellent soundtrack that keep this adventure afloat. The big fights almost always have something to keep you interested without doing anything too bothersome or weak as well so you can usually enjoy the audiovisual experience, but the game side of things leaves something to be desired while technical stumbles can also impact how you enjoy parts that aren’t interactive.
Definite efforts were made to make the gameplay work in No Straight Roads, but really the appreciation should lie in all its successes elsewhere. If anything, the game is a bit like the plucky indie rock band at its narrative’s center. Its rougher than what you get from big names and you have to accept its blemishes, but what it does deliver is something bursting with personality and exciting ideas, something you end up drawn to because it has a vision even if it can’t realize it due to its own limitations. The balance it achieves still favors its successes, and since its difficulty is usually not too high it can be appreciated by those who want to spend more time with the artistic side of the experience. While not a smash hit, it would be a shame to skip on No Straight Roads just because the roads it takes to delivering its spectacular vision are going to be rather bumpy.