Absolum may have its issues, but combat is definitely not one of them. This Rogue ‘em up by Dotemu, Guard Crush Games and Supamonks offers the best 2D side-scrolling fisticuffs I’ve ever experienced. Slick, responsive, kinetic, and satisfying, the combat in Absolum is utterly beguiling. If I could just have the walking and punching, and not all the roguelite stuff wrapped around it, then Absolum would be my perfect game. As it is, there is a whole lot of roguelite shenanigans, and they’re not always that successful.
The world of Absolum is generic fantasy hokum. Arrogant wizards caused an apocalypse, and the resulting chaos and instability helps create the opportunity for a populist figure to take power and rule with absolute control. I’d like to say the plot was far-fetched, but recent world events would suggest otherwise – other than the wizard bit, obviously. Whilst the text-based storytelling and character dialogue manages to be both boring and oddly difficult to follow – thankfully, you can speed it up or skip it outright – the visual storytelling is an absolute masterclass. The world of Talamh and its inhabitants are a joy to behold. Rich detail fills every 2D environment, autumnal forests painted in rich shades of red, creepy undead realms oozing in atmosphere, forgotten mines which somehow manage to make dark caves visually interesting, this is one good-looking game.
The character design is phenomenal, offering an innovative take on a who’s who of fantasy classics. You’ll battle goblins, sentient mushrooms, skeletons, and surprisingly futuristic evil soldiers. Each enemy type is a delight to take on, offering a steep challenge as they seek to surround you, dishing out damage with their varied attacks. The player characters are wonderfully distinctive too, offering a Geralt-inspired Dark Elf, a burly boxing dwarf, butt-kicking marionette and a wizardy anthropomorphic toad. Each character is e, some preferring ranged attacks, others speed and agility, or tanking it up in close combat. As such, there’s someone for everyone.
And good grief, that combat! It’s like Devil May Cry and Streets of Rage had a particularly angry baby. It’s all about breaking through an opponent’s defences, using varied attacks to do so, then you can follow up by juggling the enemy in the air, often batting them between your co-op partner (whether local or online), sending your foe bouncing from the screen borders to hammer them again. By the time you’re knocking ten foes around, the screen filled with rebounding destruction, you know you’re playing something special.
Too often, side-scrolling beat ‘em ups feel too basic, a few simple inputs and little else. Not so with Absolum, which has combat with so much depth, so much nuance, that it is frankly astonishing how accessible it remains. Bosses are superb, offering a genuine challenge, each one being a memorable experience. Particularly The Underking, who my partner and I both grew to hate, until we figured out how to beat him that is. The cheer that went up as he finally fell was one of my most memorable experiences from an entire year of gaming. Lob in all the side-scrolling extras, such as mounts to ride and throwables to pick up, and this is one of the best side-scrolling beat ‘em up experiences available.
But, and it’s a big but, the roguelite elements drag the overall experience down for me. Things start off promisingly enough. The game offers multiple routes at the end of each stage, the choice of which results in a genuinely different game experience. Go one way and the human village you encounter has fought off a goblin assault, go another and the same village is filled with burning buildings as the inhabitants flee in terror. These visual and mechanical differences certainly keep each run fresh in the early going. The addition of secret routes is most welcome too, offering a new exciting path to explore, usually with a previously unseen boss to take on, once you’ve grown bored of traipsing through the same routes. New enemies to vanquish or characters to help also liven up the proceedings of repeated runs, and, over the first few hours of play, I really felt the developers had nailed the roguelite experience.
Of course, you could have had all the above with a more traditional side scrolling beat ‘em up structure. It’s towards the latter stages of the game, once you’ve made it to the big bad boss only to be easily dispatched, that Absolum seems to run out of ideas. Each run lasts around an hour now, and there’s nothing new to encounter. You’ve unlocked all the abilities, levelled up your character, explored all the side-routes, but you’re still going through all the same encounters, again and again, just to have another crack at the final boss. It’s here, ten hours in or so, that Absolum becomes something of a repetitive chore. You stop exploring, as there’s nothing new to find, and instead just grind the optimum route to reach the end boss in the best possible shape.
Matters aren’t helped by the abilities you collect on each run often being totally useless. A handful are fantastic, summoning skeleton allies or a floating sword to do your fighting for you, but far too many are complete pants, providing inconsequential buffs, access to throwable weapons which aren’t nearly as good as the weapons you can readily find in the environment, or are so fiddly to activate that you never use them. The balance of the drip-feeding of these collectibles seems off too, many runs are rendered pointless as you just don’t get any decent drops to reach the final boss with enough health remaining to have a chance.
More problematic are the plentiful glitches. Some issues have been patched out, but others remain for us at the time of writing. There’s routes that can malfunction and prevent you from progressing further, forcing a restart, and there’s certain abilities and buffs that don’t seem to work at all, the game assuring you that you’ve been boosted despite the fact you most certainly haven’t. The AI of allies you can gather on each run leaves something to be desired too. A super powerful barbarian you can hire for a vast sum of gold is mostly useless and spends a lot of her time frozen, furiously not attacking but still looking badass whilst doing so. Meanwhile, other allies will steal your mount, only to not do anything whilst sat upon the creature and, like a toddler on a swing, refusing to get off and let anyone else have a go. Also, the health of your allies inexplicably goes up and down from screen to screen, as if the game can’t remember how many health points they have remaining. That’s problematic in the latter stages when allies are crucial to your success, but suddenly die despite having a full health bar. Most irksome indeed.
It’s a shame that there are such issues. The game is still an absolute joy to play, but the roguelite structure limits longterm enjoyment, and a patch is wanted to polish out unintended issues.
