Nobody Saves the World Review

Developed and Published by Drinkbox Studios, Nobody Saves the World is a clever action RPG with a fresh new twist on how to develop your character. From the same people that made Guacamelee, you can see their artistic mark on this game with graphics partially cute, very colourful and also marginally haunting. I think that screenshots may do this game an injustice as it may come across as hack’n’slash clone but it is much more than that.

The game’s intro is very short but impactful. You see something terrible but you are not sure what it is. Then your character wakes up to what you believe is a nightmare but you have amnesia so you don’t know who you are. You are an empty white husk and somewhat naked which is pointed out. A nearby person advises you to seek out the powerful wizard Nostramagus but he has disappeared. You soon discover a magic wand that belongs to Nostradamus and his assistant sends you to a prison in his basement. But all is not lost.

 You soon discover that you are playing the tutorial section of the game which brings you in nicely with how the game has taken a different approach to progression. Instead of hitting things until you level up you now need to achieve mini objectives. The first ones are simple in just walking around your prison cell and inspecting things. As you complete the objectives you gain experience and magic stars. The experience is needed to unlock other forms you can transform into and improve the grade of your current form. The first form you unlock is the rat which is used to help you escape the prison cell. You then get a new set of objectives for your new rat form which is used to upgrade the form and eventually unlock other forms which there are many. But other than form experience there are also objectives to gain normal experience which is used to level up and improve your base stats for all of your forms.

I quite like this format as it encourages you to try out different forms so you can’t just cheese your way through the game with the strongest form as the game finds a way to prevent you from doing it. For example, as you progress you will come across enemies and dungeons that explode when they die so a strong melee character will get wiped out quickly as they get caught out in the explosion. But on the flip side being purely ranged won’t always help you either as certain enemies will only be vulnerable to a certain type of damage which cant be done by ranged characters. A lot of the different objectives you get with the different forms are mostly to encourage you to try out all the different forms. You cannot unlock other forms until you achieve a certain grade in the other form so to progress in the game you have to equally improve all the forms at the same time to progress. But for me, that didn’t feel like a chore as it was fun to play as so many different forms. The objectives set do get trickier further on into the game but not so much that you will pull your hair out. Some might be to hit 8 enemies at once with a move which is more of a struggle to get the opportunity to fight 8 at once than it is to pull off the move.

The game has other mechanisms to develop as well with the money you gain as you kill enemies and break the various breakables everywhere. This money can be spent at a trader who is frequently found around the large map. He offers you base upgrades, passive abilities, magic stars, unveils locations to dungeons and sometimes extra objectives that you can complete for more experience. As you level up your character and improve the grade of all your various forms you can start to mix and match abilities between your forms. Not to spoil it too much but you can be a slug, a horse, a ranger, a guard an egg and so many more. So you can be a slug and have the ability to fire arrows like a ranger or gallop like a horse. Some of the objectives encourage you mixed certain abilities which I think is a clever way to max out the potential of the game.

The pacing feels just about right in this game and semi linear style means you cannot rush through it. The game’s map looks like a nice sized open-world environment but it places a lot of barriers so you can only progress where it wants you to. The main dungeons have a star price before you can enter them. As before you can only get stars by completing the quest/objectives or by buying them which I felt is unnecessary. The dungeons also have a recommended level that you should attempt them at and they feel accurate enough. If you attempt it at the right level they are still pretty challenging and you have to get 2/3 levels above for it to become much easier. But trying a dungeon below the level is very tough and not advisable. Other parts of the map are also inaccessible until you have either unlocked a specific form or completed some of the main quests.             

My only gripe about the game is that although it offers online Co-op it is only with friends. So you cannot play with strangers and you cannot play it locally either which is a shame as sometimes finding a friend who is free at the same time who also enjoys these kinds of games can be hard to come by.

Conclusion

So I am actually impressed with Nobody Saves the World. Drinkbox Studios have a very fun and interesting graphical design about their games although on first impression they can seem a bit childish when you see the haunting eyes of some of your forms you realise it is for a slightly more mature audience. The way they have handled progression in this game is a breath of fresh air and I look forward to playing this game through to completion.

This game was tested and reviewed on Xbox Series X/S. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.