It wasn’t until I got to New Game+ that things started to feel fresh again, as it allows you to start over with all of your buffed-up forms unlocked right away, all the enemies are balanced exactly to your level, and every dungeon has a unique set of new modifiers designed to add on another layer of challenge. I ran out of new forms to chase, I felt like I had seen and experimented with all of the ability synergies that made sense, and I felt like I had easy answers for just about everything. On the other end of that, the last stretch of the 15-hour adventure starts to suffer from a feeling that the well has run dry. ![]() There’s a distinct lack of challenge and depth, both of which are filled in later on – but in those first two or three hours it just feels like a bunch of grinding without much reward. The early hours of Nobody Saves the World expose how weak the combat is when you are without that toolkit. Of course, getting to the point where you have that expansive set of tools and get to use them in creative ways to solve clever combat puzzles and encounters is… much less fun. Like, for example, a dungeon that made it so that every hit dealt 9999 damage, both to me and to my enemies or one that littered the floor with landmines and put me against baddies that could slow me down or one that made all enemy corpses explode. Once I was about three or four hours in I had enough forms and powers unlocked to make meaningful customization choices, enemies frequently spawned with wards that would require me to switch up my damage type in order to hurt them, and the dungeons introduced really clever modifiers that forced me to think about my loadout and consider equipping certain passive and abilities that I might never have used otherwise. The middle of Nobody Saves the World is great fun. This started off easy and could be done with pretty much any form with any loadout that matched the damage type, but toward the end I really needed to think about what abilities I had that could hit the dummies fast enough, and come up with a plan that could allow me to cover all the required damage types. My favorite of these had me destroying a series of dummies that could only be damaged by specific damage types in a limited amount of time. Others present challenging minigames that really put your mastery of certain forms to the test. One is as simple as talking to a horse while in horse form so you can finally find love, while another has you working for the thieves guild and breaking the “one-per-customer” rule at a discount bargain store by transforming into four different humanoids. The sidequests of Nobody Saves the World are shallow but amusing nonetheless, and offer some nice breaks from the constant fighting that happens throughout the overworld and within dungeons. ![]() When I wasn’t tackling the many dungeons and demi-dungeons I was exploring the respectably large overworld, searching for hidden flasks of mana juice for permanent mana pool upgrades and side-questing for its many inhabitants. So much of the challenge and fun of Nobody Saves the World comes from finding the best synergies between your forms, so it’s a shame that the controls don’t make it easier to quickly switch between them. Quick-swapping between so many transformations on the fly is a pain because time doesn’t slow down when you bring up the radial menu, you can’t register any favorite forms on to single button shortcuts, there’s no way to easily place transformations into specific slots on the radial menu and, worst of all, there’s no way to quickly revert to a previous form. My only substantial issue with this mix-and-match mechanic is that managing your transformations is way more difficult than it should be. Level him up again and you’ll get the ability to block and counter attack. But level him up to the next rank and you’ll unlock his stomp, which gives an area-of-effect attack. When you first get him all he has is a single sword slash, so all combat for him is basically just running up to enemies and holding the A button until everything dies. ![]() Take, for example, the basic melee-class Knight. No matter which form you’re in, combat starts out simple to a fault, but eventually becomes interesting thanks to the expansive customization options that grow with every new form you unlock and upgrade. Each of them has their own traits and abilities, such as the horse’s hind leg kick, the Ranger’s chargeable bow and arrow, and the Bodybuilder’s barbell push, which makes them feel markedly different from one another to play. It’s that magic wand that allows you to transform into a total of 15 wildly different forms, from a lowly rat to a muscle-bound bodybuilder, or even an undead necromancer.
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