Absolum Review — Punch Wizard

Take the beat-’em-up mastery presented in Streets of Rage 4 and give it a roguelike progression system and a fantasy world full of incredible art, lore, and characters. You now have an idea of what to expect in Absolum, the brand-new roguelike from developers Dotemu.

I am always excited to play a new roguelike. Side-scrolling beat-’em-ups? I can take them or leave them. I should have known better than to have any doubts about Dotemu’s mastery of the genre, however, as the developers of the aforementioned Streets of Rage 4 have more than proven their mastery of the genre.

This expertise continues to show itself in Absolum, a roguelike quest to dethrone a magic-hoarding emperor with a small cast of characters, each one sporting their own unique movesets, specials, unlockable abilities, and ultimates. Each run, you battle through a series of levels with procedurally generated enemies and rewards, attempting to make it on the long road to the final boss and growing progressively stronger with each failure.

Something that Absolum does a little differently from other games in the genre is give you score-based progression rewards at the end of each run. While many games rely on you to find your progression currencies during your runs—and Absolum is not so different in this regard either—less emphasis is put on lucking out with your drops and more on just doing the best you can each attempt. When you inevitably die and return to your stronghold, your high score is used as a sort of experience bar that unlocks rewards for you as it “levels up,” which is a much more personal and rewarding progression system than simply hoping you find the currencies you need during your runs.

Another thing Absolum does differently is that you can’t actually choose the rewards you will receive in each room. Instead, pathing is more of a narrative choice, with forks in the road ahead leading you through different areas and encountering different enemies, bosses, and safe rooms as you go. There is a clever sort of narrative progression based on which zones you manage to complete first, with the others changing to reflect your choice in ways you wouldn’t expect. Since the roguelike genre is all about replayability, I am shocked that more games don’t adapt to each new run the way Absolum does, and I love the title all the more for it.

The world itself is surprisingly interesting, really captivating me in a way a lot of roguelike settings don’t manage to. It’s not just that the game is liberal with its storytelling, full of dialogue and interactable areas telling you about the grander story of the setting, but the clever twists on fantasy tropes and the incredible environmental storytelling silently present in each level. Absolum has probably done goblins and dwarves better than any other fantasy setting I can recall, moving past a lot of tired fantasy tropes while not totally erasing their familiar identities.

I gushed a lot about the combat in the opening paragraphs of this review, but to get into it a little more, I first want to clarify that I am not an expert on fighting games or beat-’em-ups. I can’t tell you how good the game’s i-frames are or recite other fight-pro knowledge that’ll convince you to buy it for the accomplishments made on a technical level.

What I can instead tell you is that the fighting feels great. Each hit feels strong and provides excellent visual and audio feedback, switching between regular attacks and specials is satisfying, and the player’s combos have this great feeling of coming out fast but hitting exceptionally hard. Enemies die quickly, but not so quickly as to not pose a challenge, and wall-bouncing and air juggling are key mechanics that feel phenomenal to pull off.

I especially enjoy that you can air-juggle bosses. I feel like if the bosses in the game were immune to crowd control or staggers, as they are in many games, Absolum would lose a lot of its identity. Instead, you are rewarded for comboing bosses with your friends, and it is an incredible feeling watching foes like The Underking bounce around the screen as you wail on him.

The Underking, by the way, has one of my favorite boss fight tracks of all time.

The one caveat I would give this game is that it is certainly built for controllers, not for keyboards—something the game is very open about. While I was able to get through my runs on keyboard, I felt like I was at a distinct disadvantage over my co-op partner, often failing to keep up in boss fights and falling behind in damage charts. I would attribute this to the keyboard bindings making it difficult to move around as smoothly, and struggling with dodging and deflecting compared to the controller mapping. However, for Absolum’s incredibly generous price of $25, I would highly recommend picking up a controller to go with it.

Try Hard Guides was provided a Steam code for this PC review of Absolum. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Absolum is available on Steam, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch.