As a big fan of Drinkbox’s previous games in the Guacamelee franchise I was pretty eager to try out Nobody Saves the World. It was initially revealed as an Xbox console exclusive which definitely disappointed me, but I was okay with it, I had a feeling it would become a multiplatform game. This period apparently took literally 3 months lmao but I simply did not notice because it turns out, I had better games to play (MLB The Show addiction).
I guess I forgot about the game until I saw it appear on this month’s Playstation Plus games. I let out a “lets fucking go never punished” or something to that extent. I wouldn’t even have to pay for the game.I had heard rumors of it being a roguelike or something like that and I think that was what offput me from fully committing to playing the game.
Going into the game itself I had almost no idea of what the gameplay of it would be. I didn’t watch any reviews or pay attention to trailers. However what came across to me eventually while playing was that thank god, this was just a normal dungeon crawling action RPG. I felt it was quite evocative of 2D Zelda in the gameplay. You play as a formless character quite literally called “Nobody” a wizard who can transform into different creatures The game also feels a bit like Binding of Isaac without the twin stick stuff in the ways the dungeons exist. However, the true draw I felt playing the game was through the upgrade system. Each form is given a bunch of tasks to complete in order to upgrade its level to the max where more skills can be unlocked. These are all done in the form of a checklist making these upgrades feel like a collectathon in the best way.
Another very interesting part of the game’s combat system is the skills your characters can use. Forms have 1 signature attack they must have followed by up to 3 other slots to use for skills and attacks. Additionally you could have multiple passive slots (level ups bring them up to 4 but you start with 2) to gain passive abilities to benefit whichever situation you are in. Well initially customization with these characters is limited but with enough upgrading, these characters can have custom built builds for tasks a dungeon will present. Sometimes a dungeon will have “wards” who have shields requiring a certain type of attack to break, by customizing your build to account for obstacles like these it provides an element of strategy that makes customizing your build rewarded by the game. What is genius in ways about the tasks you are given to upgrade the characters, is that they actually give good ideas for the player to use in future builds with “Custom quests” needing you to use many different builds to fully upgrade a character.
New Game+ goes even further with this customization with dungeon modifiers as they are called being affected. One particularly dastardly modification I had to deal with was that every attack you dealt would cause mini homing rockets to be shot at you. So I had to do the equivalent of deck building to figure out the best combo involving the equivalent of a damage shielding passive and some abilities from the ghost character on the slug character who sort of functions like a rapid fire moving turret.
The artstyle of the game is quite charming, feeling like an average children’s cartoon with thick linework. The animation work in the games cutscenes, while limited, is completely serviceable for the game this is present in. It is a drastic departure from both the Guacamelee games and Severed (A game I have played about an hour of. It was a neat hour of gameplay) but it ends up working pretty well.
The story of the game itself feels pretty weak with it probably not being the focus. Guacamelee’s story in general was sort of weak but nothing in it felt truly cringe besides maybe the dated memes. The dialogue in particular to me feels a bit groan worthy with what I would consider out of place mild swearing. Damn is a commonly used word and I truly don’t give a shit about cursing but it just felt out of place in the dialogue.
The difficulty curve of the game is a bit weird with the final boss feeling like an easy breeze compared to the dungeon I had previously played. The New Game+ as a whole also experienced a similarly odd difficulty curve because of the randomization of the dungeon modifications. There were early game “demi dungeons” that felt much harder than the big dungeons in that version of the campaign.
As a whole I thought the game beat my relatively muted expectations and kept me gripped enough to commit to this gameplay loop all the way through and beat it in a little under a week. My game rating scale might be fucked up because I am giving this game the same score as Spider-Man 2 despite that game being a lot better. Don’t care
8/10
I guess I forgot about the game until I saw it appear on this month’s Playstation Plus games. I let out a “lets fucking go never punished” or something to that extent. I wouldn’t even have to pay for the game.I had heard rumors of it being a roguelike or something like that and I think that was what offput me from fully committing to playing the game.
Going into the game itself I had almost no idea of what the gameplay of it would be. I didn’t watch any reviews or pay attention to trailers. However what came across to me eventually while playing was that thank god, this was just a normal dungeon crawling action RPG. I felt it was quite evocative of 2D Zelda in the gameplay. You play as a formless character quite literally called “Nobody” a wizard who can transform into different creatures The game also feels a bit like Binding of Isaac without the twin stick stuff in the ways the dungeons exist. However, the true draw I felt playing the game was through the upgrade system. Each form is given a bunch of tasks to complete in order to upgrade its level to the max where more skills can be unlocked. These are all done in the form of a checklist making these upgrades feel like a collectathon in the best way.
Another very interesting part of the game’s combat system is the skills your characters can use. Forms have 1 signature attack they must have followed by up to 3 other slots to use for skills and attacks. Additionally you could have multiple passive slots (level ups bring them up to 4 but you start with 2) to gain passive abilities to benefit whichever situation you are in. Well initially customization with these characters is limited but with enough upgrading, these characters can have custom built builds for tasks a dungeon will present. Sometimes a dungeon will have “wards” who have shields requiring a certain type of attack to break, by customizing your build to account for obstacles like these it provides an element of strategy that makes customizing your build rewarded by the game. What is genius in ways about the tasks you are given to upgrade the characters, is that they actually give good ideas for the player to use in future builds with “Custom quests” needing you to use many different builds to fully upgrade a character.
New Game+ goes even further with this customization with dungeon modifiers as they are called being affected. One particularly dastardly modification I had to deal with was that every attack you dealt would cause mini homing rockets to be shot at you. So I had to do the equivalent of deck building to figure out the best combo involving the equivalent of a damage shielding passive and some abilities from the ghost character on the slug character who sort of functions like a rapid fire moving turret.
The artstyle of the game is quite charming, feeling like an average children’s cartoon with thick linework. The animation work in the games cutscenes, while limited, is completely serviceable for the game this is present in. It is a drastic departure from both the Guacamelee games and Severed (A game I have played about an hour of. It was a neat hour of gameplay) but it ends up working pretty well.
The story of the game itself feels pretty weak with it probably not being the focus. Guacamelee’s story in general was sort of weak but nothing in it felt truly cringe besides maybe the dated memes. The dialogue in particular to me feels a bit groan worthy with what I would consider out of place mild swearing. Damn is a commonly used word and I truly don’t give a shit about cursing but it just felt out of place in the dialogue.
The difficulty curve of the game is a bit weird with the final boss feeling like an easy breeze compared to the dungeon I had previously played. The New Game+ as a whole also experienced a similarly odd difficulty curve because of the randomization of the dungeon modifications. There were early game “demi dungeons” that felt much harder than the big dungeons in that version of the campaign.
As a whole I thought the game beat my relatively muted expectations and kept me gripped enough to commit to this gameplay loop all the way through and beat it in a little under a week. My game rating scale might be fucked up because I am giving this game the same score as Spider-Man 2 despite that game being a lot better. Don’t care
8/10