I don’t trust the word “rogue” when it comes to video games. Given their name, I probably shouldn’t be trusting rogues at all. With wide-eyed, optimistic smiles, these games pitch endless fun, yet they often use their randomized structure to hide the cold reality. Many of these games don’t have solid game design so much as an abundance of metaprogression treadmills stringing you along until you’re addicted to an empty void. Is every roguelike, lite, or lime like that? Probably not. But I’m certainly going to keep my hand on my wallet when they’re around.
Luckily, I do trust the developers at Guard Crush Games. Their work on Streets of Rage 4 demonstrated that these people know how to make great combat systems…and frankly, a great roguelike. The “Mr. X Nightmare” survival mode carried all the strengths of a randomized system with none of the typical drawbacks. It was fun, it was fair, and it kept me playing until I unlocked everything it had to offer. Absolum noticeably draws from and expands on this mode, turning its ideas into a full-fledged fantasy beat-em-up advantage. Before I even played Absolum myself, I was confident that for this particular rougelike that I could trust the process.
Absolum’s aesthetic immediately drew me in. Its stylized take on fantasy tropes looks good on paper and even better in action. Between games like Capcom’s Dungeons and Dragons games and Dragon’s Crown, I have a big soft spot for beat-em-ups that use this setting. Absolum delivers on all the goblins, monsters, swords, and sorcery you expect while giving them a unique flair that rides the line between dreary and cartoony. I love just seeing how the characters move and attack.
The amount of detail in Absolum’s world surprised me beyond just the visuals, too. My time with the demo practically assaulted me with characters to talk to, special side quests to take on, and random bits of lore to learn. At times, I felt that maybe things were perhaps a little too detailed and convoluted, but that may be a side effect of being thrown into a mid-game save file for my preview build. At the very least, all of this information fleshes out the setting in a way that makes the game feels more grandiose than the typical beat-em-up romp, like I had stepped into an RPG that just happened to play like Streets of Rage.
And make no mistake, Absolum plays a lot like Guard Crush’s work with Streets of Rage 4. Each of the four playable characters in my demo had a distinct and wide arsenal of moves that were easy to chain together for massive combos. As far as I’m concerned, Streets of Rage 4 set the standard for modern beat-em-up gameplay, and Absolum carries on that legacy beautifully. It just feels good to hit guys and even better to juggle them relentlessly.
Where Absolum expands on SoR4’s groundwork is its inclusion of more RPG-like systems. Every character has multiple Arcane super attacks that they can equip. You can pick up subweapons with limited uses, like battle items you might pick up in a Final Fantasy. Status effects can be applied to enemies depending on the bonus items you pick up throughout a run. These ideas blend nicely with the beat-em-up base without distracting from the core fundamentals of crowd control that make this genre great.
New to this particular build is a frog mage called Brome to play as, and I spent most of my time with him. His basic attacks don’t have the best range, but he can make up for that with powerful arcane spells that can quickly turn the tides of battle. During my winning run, I relied on his giant laser blast to do big damage, but I can see his other abilities, like setting circle traps, coming in handy as well. In some ways he struck me more as a support character that would work best for multiplayer sessions, but he can certainly hold his own in single player as well. Going through with a full party of different abilities would capture the exact kind of RPG adventure vibes this game gives me.
Absolum similarly captures the essence of adventuring with its game structure. The core idea of the game is that you go through a “run” of the game essentially like any other beat-em-up, going from area to area. However, Absolum spices the idea up by randomizing enemy and obstacle layouts as you’d expect from a roguelike while also adding in a branching path system not unlike beat-em-ups such as Capcom’s D&Ds. None of my runs felt exactly the same, yet at the same time, I also didn’t feel like I was being thrown any annoying run-ending curveballs or challenges that lacked thought. I really did get the sense that I was playing the mythical “infinite fun” version of a roguelike rather than a hollowed representation of fun. Whether that holds up in the final game is hard to say in my few hours of playtime, but I was impressed.
I got to play up through Absolum’s second major area in my demo, Jabora, which takes you from swamps up to a gladiator arena featuring multiple waves of enemies. The arena section in particular reminded me a lot of Mr. X Nightmare, with the giant swinging balls on chains and everything. The journey culminates in a fight with a giant fish king guy. He’s big and hits hard enough to have killed basically all my runs except one.
What ended up making the biggest difference for me seemed to be starting an entirely fresh run on my own. My demo contained an option to send me straight to Jabora, but this seemed to result in me not having the most useful kinds of upgrades. Being able to build my character up in the initial areas allowed me to create a status effect build where everything I did could inflict an intense burn condition, which sapped virtually all my foes’ health bars within seconds.
That kind of thing does admittedly give me mixed feelings. Obviously you expect to fall into powerful builds in any kind of roguelike; I’d rather feel like I won because I learned the game, rather than because I was arbitrarily handed the right tools at the right time. The Mr. X Nightmare mode also worked like this to an extent, and obviously it’s fun in its own way, but for a full game, I don’t feel right signing off on this. ’At the same time, the RPG tilt of Absolum also makes me a little more forgiving. At the very least, I never got the sense that the boss would be insurmountable without the upgrades, so I suppose I’ll see how I feel in the final build of the game.
All in all, though, Absolum impressed me a lot. I didn’t expect to see Streets of Rage 4 get such an interesting successor mechanically, and everything new Absolum brings to the table feels fleshed out and worthwhile. I don’t see myself ever fully loving the typical rougelike elements, but for Absolum, I’ll happily make an exception.
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