Absolum, Beat'em Up with Rogue-lite elements

So today Absolum released without much advertisement or the usual early access stuff, and it's quite good so far from my limited playtime.



Absolum is a Beat'em up in the vein of Golden Axe or Streets of Rage, in fact the devs are the ones behind Streets of Rage 4 which was released a few years ago. You move mostly from left to right, with hoards of trash enemies spawning and just well, beat them up. It has all the usual standard mechanics like weapons you can pick up to throw at enemies, mounts you can use to deal big damage for a limited amount of time(very Golden Axe style), breaking barrels to find food to heal up, elite mobs and boss fights every now and then. Difficulty is quite high so far early into the game, with healing being pretty sparse and having 0 continue mechanic, so you die pretty quickly.

Indeed as the title mentionned, this has rogue-lite elements, you die you start again, with somewhat randomized elements each run. Every end of stage you get to pick a new power that will do stuff like making your basic attacks apply burn or making your counters generate chain lightning. Every few maps however you get a more major upgrade like changing one of your skill to something better or adding an entire new skill. The map is static and you can control where you go and which place you visit but the content of each place is made of randomized set pieces and enemies. You'll also run into towns with a merchant selling you items and a rest point, the usual rogue stuff. Ultimately when you die, you'll go back to the starting area in which you can use ressources gathered in your previous run to increase meta progression elements like your starting stats, and unlock new special skills for each character.

There is 4 characters, you start with a male dwarf who punches stuff and fires a blunderbuss and a female dark elf with a two handed sword. You quickly unlock a 3rd character, a female puppet with quick dagger attacks and later a male frog caster. Each feels very different from the other so far, with obvious strengths you can play around and you unlock more of their kit as you go giving you better options.

Combat is surprisingly deep for something in this genre. It reminds me of the much more advanced Beat'em ups like Dragon's Crown rather than the 2 button braindead arcade early ones. You get your basic attack and your heavy attack button, the later of which can be used to clash/parry enemy attacks to open them up if you time them right, then you have 2 arcana skills(only one at first, you pick which one to use at the start of the run) which use a mana bar(refills with normal attacks and some upgrades/drops) to cast and finally an ultimate that does big damage. You can grab enemies by running up to them, you can dash around and dash attack and also dodge. Dodge can be used to also block attacks with the right timing or evade and counter. There's also jump attacks, with both basic and heavy. With the way you can unlock additional skills though you end up with pretty interesting combat where you can create advanced combos, juggle enemies off wall bounces, grab a motherfucker and use them as a weapon to hit another motherfucker and all that, feels very nice overall to play.

Story so far is pretty basic, with a very Hades-like feel, in fact all the art is very Hades-like, the story is told as you die and events advance whenever you come back after dying. Can't say it's a strong point of the game but generally speaking it rarely is for the genre.

Game is also 20bucks, so quite cheap for the quality.

Been clearing the achievements mostly, I'll say the difficulty is pretty well done, early on I struggled quite a bit with well, the early/mid game, then as you get more meta upgrades it gets easier but then you get hit by harder stuff later. The last boss especially is quite challenging, and your run needs to be pretty clean before you get to him if you want to even attempt it which is interesting.

The chars have some interesting depth, they usually have a few different "builds" they can go with and if you go hard into them they build into really unique gameplay.

Like the dwarf for example has on one hand the grab related stuff and you can do some really nasty stuff with that, although sadly most bosses being immune to grab makes it a lot more shaky on these unless you can grab the adds so you want to build some damage stuff too, but trash you can just throw one mob at another and they all kinda explode instantly it's super fun.

Other build is around the Reload upgrade which lets you generate mana bars by reloading(neutral heavy, has a pretty long animation) but that lets you spam your arcanas. I got a run where I had Reload, a passive that generates flying shells whenever you use your gun(like arcanas and reloading), the passive that buffs your arcanas and the time power that generate clones when you use arcana/skill, with +1 copy per cast. I got Grenades on the first boss and with the buff on it, it fires grenades that explode then split into 3 mini grenades, the screen looked like PoE bullshit, couldn't see anything just spamming grenades x2 > reload with the clones also spamming grenades and all the flying shells. Was hilariously strong, cleared the game without seeing the bosses by just stun locking them from all the spam and randomly clashing them with reload clones.

The rogue I ran a throwing build in my last run, she has a passive that generates throwables on crit and since she hits a lot, she crits often so you basically litter the ground with throwables. Then I had the passive that duplicates throwables so when you throw one, 3 come out, a bunch of throwable damage items and a lot of passive dodges and some basic attack buffs since I was using that to generate thrower(burn/chain lightning on basics), was a lot of fun. Sadly didn't get the thorn spells to generate thorn daggers on hits but even just rocks and bones and shit you generate automatically do a ton of damage when you throw them 3x at a time.