Under the brash exterior lies a wonderfully technical game that offers the freedom to let you discover the quality of its craft in your own time.PFAS are a class of about 12,000 compounds used to make products resistant to water, stains and heat. Guacamelee was a showcase for ingenious level design, but here DrinkBox demonstrates a different knack for layering up complex systems, which combine and play off each other in deviously logical ways. If it's a bit flabby and messy, though, Nobody Saves the World is far more often a delight. Death can be alarmingly sudden when you're surrounded by mobs protected by wards you can't instantly shatter, or if you simply lose yourself amid the chaos. It comfortably manages to accommodate dozens of monsters and familiars smashing into each other at once, but there's no real sense of impact between the paper cut-out characters, and hits don't visibly register other than the little numbers that pop up, so when it turns into something of a mosh pit, it's difficult to gauge who's winning. The enclosed conditions within dungeons also tend make the generally slick and consistent combat feel more haphazard. At the very least it would have been good if there were some strategic boss encounters to top them off, rather than enlarged versions of regular enemies surrounded by minions. I would have been happy with fewer of them if each had more distinctive diversions and offered more contrast to the pace of outdoor exploration. While their themes and décor are certainly imaginative, from the horse mines, littered with horseshoes and giant carrots, to an alien spaceship and the inside of a dead dragon, in practice they're quite similar-a series of procedurally generated monster mazes, with the occasional trap to dodge, lasting a steady 15-20 minutes. Few are major challenges, but they force you to consider your form and tactics, not least because you're booted back to the start if you die before the boss door.ĭespite all this variety, however, I do think Nobody Saves the World is spread a little thin over its 20-hour run-time, and that's mainly down to the dungeons. The latter create awkward wrinkles such as increased enemy damage or healing items that heal monsters as well as yourself. The former carry over from Guacamelee, whereby you can't damage an enemy until you break its shield with a certain kind of attack (blunt, sharp, light, dark). There are also plenty of dungeons to crawl through, and these add extra bite to combat by introducing wards and location-specific rule changes. These are great because, again, they ask you to think up a combination of powers to get the job done. I met a slug who wanted me to bring his wife back from the dead, for example, while a speedy wizard loiters near a makeshift racetrack waiting for challengers. Still, the overworld is well worth exploring, tightly plotted with connecting passageways, open fields, lakes and underground tunnels, and stuffed with monsters, treasure, settlements and amusing distractions. With that, I found I rarely focused on where I was going, and was content wandering the map, mucking about with the range of skills at my disposal, side-tracked by tasks such as slaughtering another dozen enemies using the rat's health-regenerating bite attack while playing as a zombie. And since you can't enter critical path dungeons until you've completed plenty of smaller quests, you have to keep trying different techniques as you tour the land smiting critters. The most basic of these involve hitting a certain number of enemies with a form's regular attacks, but they quickly evolve to demand you master the nuances of your powers or stack them in specific ways. All levelling up in Nobody Saves the World is tied to quests, which include completing dungeons or errands provided by NPCs, but also a series of objectives linked to each form's abilities. Crucially, all these possibilities are used to ensure that the grind of chewing through monsters is never merely about watching XP bars fill.
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