This to me feels like what you get when you grab the worst parts of 1 and 2 then mix them into one game first of all lets talk about maybe the best thing in the game, the combat, it's good! sadly it's brought down by the mediocre encounters that the game can throw with just no thought put into them that can feel from tedious to kinda frustrating but the core is pretty good and honestly i found it enjoyable for most of the game, the bosses are alright, some of them are pretty good while some are just basically nothing you'd think the game that removed levels from the equation would atleast try to develop some amazing bosses that'll keep you coming back to them but no in most of the fights that just isn't the case.

The story is super fucking vapid. Nothing of note really happens and at times it feels like there is barely a story with an ending that just does NOTHING for me it just feels like oh wow look we are so crazy haha, also personally i'm not really interested in SUDA51's other games and the stuff where a returning character from the silver case appears and says his little speech was basically cringe inducing to me since, it felt completely unrelated to anything and just a little "Look it's the character you like guys!"from SUDA I honestly doubt even people that like his other games could've gotten much enjoyment from that, it says a lot that the story was so whatever that I'd say some of the best stuff in the game was just Travis and Bishop fucking around and talking about Takashi Miike, the game was like kinda trying to make Fu a bit interesting I guess? Or like giving us SOMETHING with him but then at the end he just kinda turns into a Kid Buu and like that's it nothing else is done with him, the bosses are also super uninteresting as characters with some just not saying a single word or being just non-existent, there's some stuff that was interesting or at least nice, I liked the returning character from NMH2, I find what they did with Henry kinda interesting and Sonic Juice was pretty aight everything else doesn't do anything for me.

One of my biggest issues with the game is just the mind boggling decisions it takes, they removed LEVELS except in 2 cases the 1st level we get is in RANK 5, it's a really short first person level that's really slow where you fight like maybe 10 NORMAL enemies and just reach the boss then the 2nd one is THE FINAL LEVEL which is literally just a hallway with like 14 enemies you fight in your mech suit that's literally it, needless to say they are pretty bad and the fights you have to do before the bosses aren't really a good substitute since they feel super samey after a while and are so lazy, they just put you in the same places everytime and you fight like 3 or more random enemies which sometimes like i said feel random with how bad some enemies can synergize or tedious with how big the health bars can be on some of them, and then there's the other fights which are the mech fights in space which feel extremely barebones, the first ones insultingly so but some of the later ones are alright since you actually have to dodge and think a little bit also keep in mind these fights also get repeated in some cases so that's great and fun.

Another insane decision this game makes is THE HUB WORLDS, the triumphant return of one of the worst things of NMH1 is back and this time instead of having one kinda dull and mediocre hubworld we have FOUR, the hub worlds in this game are terrible honestly they are SUPER undercooked, lots of invisible walls and lots of big spaces where you can't even use your bike in some cases, i just have to wonder was it really needed making FOUR of these instead of maybe focusing on ONE hub world and making it ATLEAST decent? The fps in these are also just ROUGH and we have all this empty space and no fights to do in them or anything it feels like these aliens are doing a very lousy invasion because Travis always has to go to them for a fight.

Also this game just takes out elements from the original games or just downgrades them too, i've mentioned the levels already but stuff like clothes? super underwhelming specially compared to NMH2 with tons of clothes you could use, the game does give some outfits but they are very limiting compared to what we had before and some of them are locked till you finish the game, the game also has ONE katana, not a big gripe since the combat is pretty solid but some more variety would've been great specially coming from this series that had you get all the katanas in the first game to get the true ending it seems like a weird thing to not have even if they were only aesthetic changes, the minigames or little chores are pretty fun, the game showers you with money from just doing battles so they feel mostly redundant in this game but atleast they are decently fun distractions like in NMH2 but in this game you barely spend money on stuff other than the inscription fee so it feels like the game just makes money a bit meaningless, i much prefer this to the grind in NMH1 but NMH2 gave some purpose to the money you could earn and i think it had a pretty good system.

On to a very much subjective take, the OST does basically nothing for me, there were like maybe 3 standout tracks and that was really it, most of it felt super weak and didn't really pump me up for a fight or anything, in some cases it's basically the same as having nothing, the worst cases of this are mostly the returning fight from the NMH2 character which had just this sad little song that just does nothing for me specially compared to how good their song was in 2, another big letdown was the henry fight musically it did absolutely nothing for me, specially compared to his iconic song in the first game and the amazing remix he had in the second one, basically the soundtrack sounds super uneventful for me and even goes into background noise levels in some cases, this is specially disappointing coming from 1 and specially 2 having amazing osts.

All in all I found this game super underwhelming, as a fan of the series or at least of 1 and 2 this game to me just fails at almost everything it sets out to do with some mind boggling decisions and some effort that just doesn't pay off, I really don't get the praise on this one sadly and lots of stuff about the praise feel just insane to me, after finishing this game all I was left with was just frustration and a feeling that I wasted my time.