Nobody Saves the World was a lot of fun, but it was always in flux while playing, which is very appropriate given the changing nature of the main character. Drinkbox Studios’ latest is a fun but bumpy top-down action RPG. You must combine abilities to overcome challenging dungeons while clumsily switching between 15 unlockable forms. It’s a clever premise enhanced by great playstyle customization options and all the charm and humor I’ve come to expect from the developers at Guacamelee. After a slow start, it’s great fun for a long time, until the campaign loses momentum once the hunt to unlock all forms ends.

The straightforward story of Nobody Saves the World begins with the outbreak of a devastating disaster. Inexplicably everything is covered in nasty fungus, there are monsters everywhere, and the world’s most powerful wizard, Nostramagus, has disappeared. As the title suggests, it’s up to you, a pale, amnesiac Nobody armed with Nostramagus’ magic staff, to save the world. It’s a good excuse to send you out into the world clearing dungeons while collecting shards of magical gems. The only real highlight is Randy the Lad, Nostramagus’ obnoxious disciple, who becomes increasingly insane as his plans to stop you and steal your glory regularly backfire in a variety of amusing ways.

With this magic staff, you can transform into a total of 15 completely different forms, from a simple rat to a muscular bodybuilder and even an undead necromancer. Each one has their own unique characteristics and abilities, such as a horse’s hind leg kick, a ranger’s rechargeable bow and arrow, or a bodybuilder’s dumbbell kick, making them obviously different as you play.

No matter what form you have, combat is too easy at first, but eventually gets interesting thanks to extensive customization options that expand as you unlock and upgrade new forms. Take the basic melee Knight for example. When you first get him, he only has one swing of his sword, so his entire fight basically involves running towards enemies and holding down the A button until they’re all dead. But take him to the next level and you unlock Stomp, giving you area attacks. Level him up again and you’ll be able to block and counterattack.

In itself, it’s not a very impressive list of abilities. And if the Knight is your only character, you’ll get bored of it quickly. But what’s unique about Nobody Saves the World is that you can take these unlockable abilities and combine them with other characters. So you can equip your Knight with the Horse Gallop ability to run at lightning speed and run through enemies. Or you can put up a Knight’s Shield Block on your Ranger to protect yourself from oncoming enemies. Each form has its own stats, movement speed, and signature attack that can’t be changed and give them an identity, but everything else is completely modifiable. `

This way, you can unlock not only one new form, but all of your potential tools as well. Bring the capabilities of this form to your ever-growing collection. There are also some very fun synergies to explore. I don’t want to give too much away, but try the Ranger’s passive ability that adds poison to all attacks and combine it with the Monk’s Holy Rain to attack all enemies on the screen. . If that’s not enough, you can add in the rat’s ability to explode enemies affected by poison. There are some really satisfying and powerful combos you can achieve at some point, and the difficulty curve rises nicely to ensure that you’ll have to use them to get through tougher fights.

The only significant issue with this combo mechanic is that managing the transformations is harder than it needs to be. Quickly switching between so many transformations on the fly is a pain, since going into the radial menu doesn’t slow down time, you can’t register your favorite shapes to single-key shortcuts, there’s no way to easily place transformations in specific slots, and there’s no way to quickly switch back to a previous form in the radial menu, and worst of all, there’s no way to quickly switch back to a previous form. Since much of the challenge and fun of Nobody Saves the World comes from finding the best synergies between forms, it’s a shame that the controls don’t make it easy to quickly switch between them.

Questing on the Side

When I wasn’t dealing with the many dungeons and half-dungeons, I was exploring the rather large overworld, searching for hidden vials of mana juice for permanent upgrades to my mana pool, and completing side quests for its many inhabitants. Nobody Saves the World’s side quests are perfunctory but entertaining, providing a nice break from the constant combat that occurs throughout the overworld and dungeons.

One is simple, in which you talk to a horse in horse form to eventually find love, while another involves working for a thieves’ guild and transforming into four different humanoids to break the discount store’s one-per-customer rule. Some present challenging mini-games that really test your mastery of certain shapes.

My favorite mission required me to destroy a series of dummies that could only be damaged by a certain type of damage within a limited time. This was easy at first, and could be done with just about any form and equipment appropriate for the damage type, but as I got closer to the end, I had to seriously think about whether I had the skill to hit the dummy fast enough, and come up with a plan to let it cover any type of damage it needed.

The Sweet Center

The mid-game of Nobody Saves the World is really fun. After about 3-4 hours, I unlocked enough forms and powers to make meaningful customization decisions. Enemies frequently spawned wards that required me to modify their damage type to hurt them, and dungeons introduced some very clever modifiers that forced me to think about my gear and whether I should equip certain passive skills or abilities that I would never have been able to use otherwise. Like one dungeon where each attack did 9999 damage to both me and the enemy. Or one that scattered mines on the ground, pitting me against bad guys trying to slow me down. Or one that exploded all of the enemy’s corpses.

Of course, having this extensive set of tools and being able to use them in creative ways to solve clever combat puzzles and encounters is…not nearly as fun. The first few hours of Nobody Saves the World make it clear how weak the combat is without this toolkit. It’s clearly lacking in challenge and depth, and while it makes up for both later on, the first couple of hours feel like a grind without much reward.

Meanwhile, the final part of the 15-hour adventure starts to suffer from a sense that the well has run dry. There are no more new forms to chase, it feels like you’ve seen and tried every ability synergy that makes sense, and it feels like you’ve got an easy answer for pretty much everything. It wasn’t until I got to New Game+ that everything felt fresh again. This let you start from scratch, with all enhanced forms instantly unlocked, all enemies scaled to your level, and each dungeon with a unique set of new modifiers that add another level of challenge. It was a great mountain to climb after playing the game, and helped me recapture a lot of the excitement I felt midway through my first playthrough.

Nobodies Save the World

Nobody Saves the World also has two-player online co-op, which works well mechanically but has some serious limitations. One player acts as the host, while the other essentially steps in as a clone with the same forms, upgrades, and abilities the host player has access to. This means that the second player doesn’t have access to his save file, and therefore has no way to progress in his game unless he creates his own co-op game as the host.

Another frustrating thing about co-op is that when one player pauses, it also pauses the other player’s game. If you’re playing online and you’re the only one looking at your screen, it’s very frustrating to suddenly have a menu pop up while your partner is navigating the transformation tree to insert a new transformation.

Despite these issues, Nobody Saves the World benefits from the presence of a second player: the host can level up two forms simultaneously (or one form twice as fast), there are even more synergies to experiment with, and there’s nicely balanced difficulty scaling to account for the fact that enemies always take double damage. Plus, it all works better with a friend.

Verdict

When Nobody Saves the World is at its best, which is the case for most of the 15-hour campaign, it’s a joy to play. Admittedly, the transformation menus still need a lot of work to make them more readily available, but there’s a wide range of fun and humorous side quests, great customization options that encourage experimentation with different forms and the abilities that come with them, and clever dungeons – designed to demand thorough exploration of this customization. Unfortunately, this tasty middle ground is marred by a slow beginning and a protracted end, but it’s worth continuing to press on and experience this truly unique and engaging action-RPG.