No Straight Roads: Encore Edition

No Straight Roads: Encore Edition is a third-person action game built around a single central conceit: music is power, and the genre of that music determines who wins. You play as Mayday and Zuke, the two-piece rock band Bunk Bed Junction, auditioning for NSR, a monolithic entertainment corporation that runs Vinyl City on EDM. They reject you. You decide to tear the whole thing down. That setup sounds like it could slide into eye-rolling rebellion clichés, but Metronomik mostly earns its premise through sheer stylistic commitment and a cast of genuinely strange, memorable bosses. The combat is the most interesting thing here and also the most divisive. Attacks, parries, and projectile deflections are all loosely synced to the beat of whatever track is playing during a fight. You are not punished mechanically for being off-rhythm in the way a pure rhythm game would punish you, but landing hits in time rewards you with visual and audio feedback that makes the whole thing feel alive. Each boss encounter is essentially a bespoke mini-game themed around a musical genre, a DJ who works in classical, a virtual pop idol, a jazz duo, and so on. These fights are the highlight of the game and pack more creativity per encounter than many action games manage across an entire campaign. Mayday plays as a close-range brawler, Zuke as a drummer with ranged kit, and switching between them in co-op (or solo with AI partner) adds a small layer of strategic choice. Where the game wobbles is in the spaces between boss fights. Vinyl City is a hub you explore to unlock upgrades, talk to NPCs, and find collectibles. The writing in these sections is charming enough, and the world has genuine lore depth if you hunt for it, but the open traversal segments lack the momentum of the fights themselves. Some side objectives tip toward filler, which is a shame when the main encounters are so tightly designed. The upgrade system is functional but shallow compared to what the genre label of RPG might lead you to expect. You spend currency on stat boosts and passive skills, but there is not a lot of build expression or branching here. Do not come in expecting Disco Elysium-style character customization. What the game does exceptionally well is audiovisual storytelling. The soundtrack is original, genre-spanning, and genuinely good, which matters enormously because you will be listening to each boss theme on loop for the duration of that fight. The art direction is bold, drawing on graffiti aesthetics and neon-soaked concert lighting in ways that hold up on a monitor or TV. The Encore Edition adds quality-of-life improvements and additional content over the original launch, making it the definitive way to play. At its best, No Straight Roads is about fifteen hours of a creative team clearly having a blast, and that energy is contagious even when the game around it is uneven. If you like character-driven action games, care about music integration beyond surface-level beat-matching, or just want something that looks and sounds unlike anything else in your library, this is worth your time. If you need deep RPG systems or a long campaign with real mechanical progression, temper your expectations accordingly.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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