Nobody Saves The World review – change yourself, change the world

metro.co.uk:

The makers of Guacamelee return with a new action RPG where you get to play as over a dozen different characters, from a slug to a necromancer.

Attempting to deconstruct the role-playing genre has become a popular pastime for many indie developers. Games like Loop Hero are obsessed with creating a more concentrated, often more abstract, experience, that gets to the heart of why the genre is so enjoyable and why its design elements have changed so little over the years. Nobody Saves The World’s key conceit is to focus the constant need to level up and complete side quests on just one goal: unlocking a new form for your hero and then using that to look forward to unlocking the next one after that.

Few recent games dangle a carrot with quite so much verve as Nobody Saves The World, with developer Drinkbox Studios clearly aware of how the desire to unlock something new is always far more rewarding than actually getting it. And so it is that the game’s main gimmick is that you can transform into one of over 15 different forms, from a rat or tortoise to a mermaid or a magician. Each form has their own unique abilities and are far more than just a visual change, such that you’re rarely disappointed about obtaining a new one.

An action role-player vaguely in the style of Diablo, the central appeal of Nobody Saves The World is to unlock all the different forms and so long as there’s always another one to look forwards to it remains compelling. The further you get though, the more you start to realise that the underlying gameplay and structure is just a means to an end and there’s far too much anticipation and not enough payoff.

The story set-up for Nobody Saves The World is very brief, as you awake in a small Zelda style village as a