Probably one of the more underrated and stylish games, No More Heroes 3 sees the return of the legendary otaku assassin, Travis Touchdown, as he faces the evil Prince FU and his 9 alien underlings. Take up your beam katana and perform insane combos in this hack and slash adventure. And with an open world to explore, there will always be something to do! But, how does this game run on Deck? Let's dive in!
Thankfully, since No More Heroes 3 is a Switch port, the game runs extremely well when set correctly! From our first look, we were able to hit 60 FPS most of the time with a 3.5 - 4 hour battery during battles. This is super awesome considering how cool the game is. The open world, however, changes things a little bit. Here, we got a lot more slowdown when loading in assets, which is a constant Unreal Engine issue, so to mitigate this, we turned the FPS down to 50 and anti-aliasing to Medium, as well as a GPU Clock Speed Frequency of 1300. This seemed to fix a majority of the issues and still felt smooth. Even with that, there were some weird issues though.
First, I would use Proton GE 7-37 as this bypassed an initial issue I had saying No More Heroes 3 needed .Net installed. Second, my game started out in another language entirely. To fix this, I had to launch into the 3rd party configuration launcher (boo) and make sure the language was set to English.
This leads into the third weird thing I noticed, the controller scheme. You HAVE to use the specific one auto set to it, if you try changing the keys, it won't work. I ended up making the left touchpad act as a mouse and the left touch to act as a left mouse click. This is the only way to interact with the launcher as the touchscreen wouldn't register.
It also seems as though regardless of which Proton version is chosen (I tried Proton 7.0-4, Experimental, and GE 7-37), some of the cutscenes don't work. This seems to be only for pre-rendered cutscenes as some of the others do work. So be warned, until a later patch or some Proton update, you won't be able to view all the cutscenes. The audio does still work for them, just no visuals.
Apart from these issues, the gameplay does work. If you are willing to look up and watch the cutscenes online, No More Heroes 3 could be a really great experience. But there are some major caveats which, if you are willing to overlook, could be a great game on Deck!
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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When you are in control, No More Heroes 3 runs like a charm. But there are some weird issues and broken cutscenes.
