Back in the Wii days, NMH was the shit. It was quirky, but had pretty fun gameplay to go alongside the quirkiness. After the Wii, the series went largely dormant, other than a top-down action game that I’ve heard nothing good about (and the gameplay I saw looked shit) so I didn’t play it.

So this one finally came out, People were a little bit excited for it. I was too. I just took a while to finally jump into it. So let’s talk about it! This might not be a long review.

Developer: Grasshopper Manufacture
Publisher: Grasshopper Manufacture/Marvelous Inc.
Release date: August 27th 2021
Platforms: Switch
Genre: Action

So the story starts with Damon finding a small furry alien called FU, who he helps build a rocket to send him back to his home planet. Damon then becomes a rich company owner, and sets thing up to welcome FU, who is set to return at some point. FU does end up returning, and decides to fuck up Santa Destroy and take over the world. Of course Travis Touchdown sees that and decides to fuck up the aliens, which the UAA gets involved with, ranking the top aliens and having you climb the rankings. There’s some side things going on like Damon hiring his own assassin to kill someone, and there’s some really weird crazy shit that happens near the end that makes… no sense at all.

The usual quirkiness of NMH is here. In-between chapters there’s parts where you look at Travis and his buddy talking about the movies of actual real-life movie director Takashi Miike…. I am not familiar with him myself. Not sure.. why? Every kill is followed by Silvia in weird costumes (usually referencing pop culture stuff) coming by to clean things up. You can still make money by mowing the grass which… whatever? It’s normal now. And of course the cutscenes are all weird and kinda random, making a bunch of references and breaking the fourth wall kinda stuff. It’s really not a serious game.

Graphically this game looks kinda awful. It’s pixelated to all shit so I assume it has dynamic resolution but it’s always low. There’s actually really wild texture pop-in, sometimes for things that are pretty close to the camera. I feel some of the meh-looking parts are probably intended, but some of them have to be either a lack of optimization, or a limitation of the Switch. At least the framerate has been largely stable for me, I rarely got any big noticeable drops.

I’d say one disappointing thing, without spoiling too much, is the opponents you fight. It’s an alien invasion game where you… kill the top 10 leaders of the aliens… But then about half of them you don’t even end up fighting, you get kill-stolen several times, changing your opponent from a maybe-interesting alien to  just another earthling assassin like the previous games. Most of the boss battles are okay, there’s s0me exceptions though.

So gameplay… Before battles, you have to do a few things. Namely, there’s 3 “designated battles” you need to do (there’s more than that in the very small open world, some are different colors so if you already got the red icon you mean doing another red one may not help (say, if you need a red icon and 2 blue icons). Doing the designated battles gives you money, WESN and materials. Once you have the 3 battles you need done, you finish gathering money and you can go to an ATM to pay for the right to fight. Doing all the designated matches usually gives you enough, so just do that. There’s other sidequests you can do like mowing grass, shooting giant alligators and… other stuff I don’t remember. It’s kinda boring. Then once the ATM is paid, you can keep doing random stuff, or head to the battle. In the previous games, I recall there being levels before the boss battles. Here there isn’t, you get a sushi place to restock on sushi and a toilet to save, and that’s it, battle time. Weird.

There’s actually one exception about bosses not having levels, there’s one that does. It’s an indie horror game inspired first-person game where you only have a flashlight, intercut with a couple fights… it’s really dumb. There’s actually no horror, making the choice of having this level being like that… kinda random. I actually don’t know why. Those games thrive on a lot of darkness and jump scares, this one is too bright and has no scares at all, jump or otherwise. Very odd. Maybe they forgot they had this in the game and left it in by mistake?

Fighting is pretty simple. You have light attacks, heavy attacks, jumping attacks. Pretty simple stuff. You have a dodge button, if you dodge attacks at the right timing (there’s a purple effect that pops up to let you know the timing), time slows down so you can mash the shit out of enemies for a bit. Sometimes attacks clash, you need to wave the joy-con around to win a struggle thing (or spin the right analog stick if you’re playing in handheld) to win and do a big attack. Travis’ sword takes energy as usual, you can hold R and wave it up and down to charge it (if the charge dies you can’t hit enemies anymore). A stunned enemy can be suplexed (which also recharges the sword). Travis’ death glove has some special attacks it can do. The death kick teleports you to the locked-on enemy and kicks them in the face, making them fall down. There’s a slow-down one (which you can stack on top of the dodge slow-down). There’s one that sets up a small area that shoots anything within it for extra damage. And there’s death force, which is the force and lets you throw enemies away. It’s nothing too complex, combat is a lot about dodging in time, and trying to get killer slashes to hit several enemies at once. If you kill someone, a slot machine goes off. If you get 3 of the same symbol you get a bonus. It can be money or WESN, but it can also be a “kill everything” special move, a buff into the robot mode, mustang mode which is basically auto-win, and invincibility… basically, if you randomly get something good from the slot machine, you can win for free. Thankfully bosses generally don’t end up giving you slot machines so you have to actually fight them (except one boss that gives you the robot power up, that battle can be won by mashing, it’s dumb).

The only thing to really talk about is powering up. The game doesn’t actually tell you about this, you have to end up in the laboratory (either from the stairs outside the motel, or going down the pole in Travis’ motel room). If you skip that (which I did for a few chapters), you do the fights weaker than you should probably be. In the laboratory, you can build chips to add to the death glove, which will have some buffs and nerfs (stuff like “Increase your attack but take more damage”). This requires materials and money. Even finishing the game, I didn’t actually find all the materials and honestly I couldn’t actually build more than, like, half the chips. Then there’s an arcade machine. There you can spend WESN to power up your HP, Attack, energy (so your sword lasts longer), decrease the cooldown of death skills, and special attacks which… suck, other than the last upgrade on that list, so just ignore it unless you have extra WESN to waste.

And that’s it. Do chores, do designated fights, fight the boss, rinse and repeat, be confused on the second to last part of the story because it makes no sense… eh.

Overall

NMH3 was… fine? The quirkiness is still there but feels subdued… and I say this about a game where Travis Touchdown has a rap battle against a scantily-dressed pop star before killing her in a battle where she uses giant plushies that shoot lasers. Maybe it’s not quite that it’s subdued, but that it can’t really do anything to surprise you anymore, pretty much.

The combat is fine. The lack of levels is… weird. The presentation is fine. It looks kinda like shit on Switch, so later ports should at least improve the graphics a bit.

A big disappointment to me is the alien thing. It’s a big alien invasion story where Travis is gonna fight aliens the same way he took over the assassin rankings before, but a bunch of the battles you don’t even end up fighting the actual alien you’re supposed to, just fighting a regular earthling instead. And some of the battles are actually ridiculously easy, or some of the gags just go for too long.

If you’re a big NMH fan, obviously I think you’ll enjoy this one, it’s much of the same. If you’re new to the series, I’d recommend playing the first one before touching this one. I’m fairly certain it’s better.