Nobody Saves the World
You can tell this is by the Guacamelee team from the art style - and it has just as much character and attention to detail as those games. NSTW is an action RPG, but has a huge focus on unlocking abilities and characters throughout the game. You play as someone who finds a wand with the power to transform you into one of 17 different forms. Each form comes with a passive ability, and 2-3 unlockable active abilities that you can then use on ANY of the other forms. It allows you to create very diverse character builds. These forms level up by completing form-specific quests, which also teach you how to use the abilities well together and give you ideas.
Notes
Aside from the form-shifting gameplay, it's basically a dungeon crawler with lots of quests and an overworld. The world is littered with dungeons that you need to beat to find stars to unlock the few Legendary dungeons, which lock progress in your form quests and make you assemble a build that works well. The world map is colourful and has several different biomes. Quests from the NPCs you meet are varied and interesting, and aren't simply just "go kill these". For example, one of them was a slug who's wife had died - and he'd heard of a slug necromancer who may be able to bring her back. Thanks to the form shifting abilities, you can combine the slug form with the necromancer's Summon Demon ability to bring her back to life.
Pros
- The mechanics of the game feel unique - mixing different abilities from different characters to create unique builds
- Some enemies gain 'wards' which is immunity to damage until they receive damage of a certain type. This forces you to change forms or use different abilities to break them
- Dungeons have modifiers which make you think about how to build a character
- Huge number of playable characters
- Throughout the whole game you're constantly unlocking new toys to play with
- Dungeons have fun modifiers
- Incredibly polished, both in the UI, animations and gameplay
- Huge number of abilities that you can mix and match across multiple characters
Cons
- The game is a strange mix of too easy, and "keep bashing you head against the wall until it works". It's great that there's always something to work towards, but sometimes that means just getting killed over and over again until you level up a bit more
- The music gets repetitive quickly. It feels like 10 seconds on a loop for the whole game
- In between dungeons, it's pretty slow paced - it's mostly walking, or small easy groups of enemies
- The dungeons aren't hand crafted; they're just procedurally generated rooms full of baddies to kill