10 Video Game Developers That Stupidly Ditched Popular Genres

4. Travis Strikes Back: No More Heroes

The Change: High-octane hack n' slasher to top-down action adventure.

No More Heroes. Easily an endlessly recommendable franchise that wears fourth-wall breaks on its sleeve, stars a guy called Travis Touchdown and gives you a makeshift not-lightsaber called a Beam Katana.

Gameplay hung somewhere between Devil May Cry and Wario Ware, combat involving a hefty amount of smashing enemies into red paste, interspersed with swipes, button prompts and minigame mechanics for specials.

Naturally, when it was confirmed almost a decade later that NMS was returning - and on Switch - the community rejoiced... only to find Travis Strikes Back is nothing like its predecessors.

Where before there was OTT action, now we had boring, repetitive, animation-devoid combat. Where a sense of humour and set-piece kills like tackling a boss with a mile long gun were memorable as hell, we had... the same square rooms and enemy types used over and over, and over again.

Something feels so drastically "off" with Travis Strikes Back, even though Suda 51 was involved.

Thankfully we're getting a proper No More Heroes 3 and Suda has talked about "listening to fans" more this time.

Probably for the best to be honest.