Absolute Review: Finally a fighting game with depth

Absolum’s elementary combat has a surprising rhythm. When I’m setting the rhythm for a band of goblins, I feel like I’m playing a five-piece drum set. Strike, strike, then elbow into an overhead sword slash that knocks the gnoll off its feet. My teammate then leaps into the air, twirling his bow staff to juggle the hyena for another two seconds, readying my magic sword for the finisher. Annihilated.

I just hit X and Y over and over again, adding a bit of B to dodge. But I feel like D&D Bruce Lee. Really, this is a game made by people who know how to make killing a skeleton really fun.

The development groups Dotemu, Guard Crush and Supamonks are single-handedly keeping the fighting game genre alive. With 16,000 games released on Steam last year, you can count the newest fighting games on one hand: Battletoads from 2020, the lesser-known River City Girls the year before, Shredder’s Revenge in ’22 and Streets of Rage 4, the return of a Sega classic brought to life by gorgeous contemporary comic book graphics from Guard Crush and Dotemu.

Absolum is a two-player fighting game, boldly set in an original fantasy universe, which immediately distinguishes itself from its predecessors, set mainly in cities. In the land of Talamh, magic is forbidden, and the four warring wizards you play as are hunted by a ruthless king who waits atop a glowing tower for the final battle.

This elementary story fits well with Absolum’s retro cartoons, which are most reminiscent of Dragon’s Den and other animated fantasy from the ’70s and ’80s: flat characters against more complicated, shaded backgrounds, neon pinks and acid greens appearing in almost every frame. It’s an extremely attractive look and one of my favorite things about Absolum. The characters are effortless to decipher in motion, and the glowing comic book graphics aid lighten the mood of an otherwise sedate story.

Making an impact

Half the load of Absolum’s percussive combat is in the sound. The barrage of hits comes in punches, thuds, and thumps, and the controller vibrations vibrate selectively as you break an enemy’s guard. The sound design has a great handshake with lithe flashes and hit indicator effects that trigger when you wave. One detail I like is the way enemies bounce off the edges of the screen, which makes side fights feel like a trampoline rattling against the wall.

In Absolum you don’t fight mindlessly, but your characters’ performance always seems greater than your contribution. The game finds a clever middle ground between the most arcade-like game of the genre (like any of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles side-scrollers) and the slightly more complicated game Streets of Rage 4. Dotemu eschewed the elementary combo commands like forward punch that were a customary feature of the series. Their closest replacement in Absolum are elementary moves you unlock after a boss fight, such as triple-tapping Y to unleash a series of swings with your chained sword, or a diving kick, which the character didn’t previously have. These provide significant rewards for flattening bosses.

Another modest measure of complexity is dodging and “crashing,” or initiating an attack at the same time as the enemy, canceling it in the process. The time windows for these defensive maneuvers are longer than, say, Street Fighter and Tekken, but I found them to be pleasantly complex to master.

Absolum may not be a highly technical game, but it is quite complex. While it’s effortless to pull off large combos, enemies hit difficult and health is constrained. Much like Hades’ runs, which Absolum partially imitates, it’s unpleasant to enter a boss with 40% of your HP. Interestingly, Absolum gives you a lot of control over how punishing the experience is: you can reduce (or escalate, if you’re crazy) the damage you take and deal, which is a shrewd way for players to adjust the difficulty.

But the most crucial thing is that Absolum characters are fun to fight. Cider is a type of wooden ninja cyborg with the attack of Inspector Gadget’s extended arm. Galandra’s broadsword appears sweeping and powerful. Brome, the frog wizard, can eventually unlock an ability that allows him to telekinetically throw throwable objects across the screen. And Karl is a little dwarven cannonball who crashes his head through the levels.

Each of these characters has six unlockable arcana – special magical abilities that draw on mana. What I like about arcana is that they can be used in many ways: I can fire at distant projectile throwers with a burst of Karl’s blunderbuss, I can latch onto one of Galandra’s sword slashes for a long combo against a boss, I can hold off a mob of skeletons with Cinder’s land mines. It’s good that mana regenerates quickly enough to encourage you to operate these skills freely rather than saving them too much.

Many Talamh punching bags

One of Absolum’s best design decisions is its operate of the branching structure seen in Hades and other roguelike games. There are major branches – such as choosing between two islands to visit in the second chapter – either – or choosing between them – and a longer list of smaller ones, such as whether to take the path to the beach or the goblin-infested forest at the beginning of the game.

Small, sweet bits of narrative are spread across multiple series. The fourth time I visited the pirate ship, it triggered a surprise attack by sea creatures.

In this way, the levels themselves undergo some changes from game to game. In the Dwarven Mines, enemies can be thrown into a furnace and their burnt bones power an elevator that can be taken to a secret side area. More generally, the number and type of enemies vary slightly in each segment of the level, which reduces the tedium of making another escape. Overall, this malleable structure provides crucial replay value, turning a game that could have lasted six hours into a 20-hour one.

Even though the variety of levels exceeds anything I’ve seen in the genre, I wanted more. Another full island would make Absolum feel more epic, and the third act feels shorter than the two that precede it, robbing the gameplay of much of its payoff. Similarly, while Absolum is great in two-player gameplay, it feels a bit lonely in single-player, even with momentary AI-controlled mercenaries you can hire at various times.

I was also a little disappointed with the Hades-style ritual gems you pick up mid-range, rudimentary passives that can trigger a random shock of chain lightning when hit with a burst of hits. It’s difficult to understand how they work at first, and some seem downright useless, like the gem that drops petite waves left and right as it jumps.

So Absolum is ultimately a fighting game with a bit more depth and progression than we’ve seen before in a style of game that has been so resistant to change since it was born in the arcades. Absolum lacks much of the variety of a true roguelike, but provides enough intricacy to push the genre into a more intriguing space than it has ever occupied.