Absolum review: Finally, a beat 'em up with depth

There's surprising rhythm to Absolum's simple combat. When I levy a beat down on a squad of goblins it feels like I'm playing a five-piece drum set. Punch, punch, then elbow into an overhead sword slash, which launches a gnoll off its feet. Then my teammate sprint-leaps into the air, spinning their bow staff to juggle the hyena for another two seconds, setting up my magic sword uppercut finisher. Annihilated.

I'm just hitting X and Y over and over, with a little bit of B thrown in for dodging. But I feel like D&D Bruce Lee. Truly, this is a game made by people who know how to make killing a skeleton feel real good.

Development group Dotemu, Guard Crush, and Supamonks are singlehandedly keeping the beat 'em up genre alive. In an era when 16,000 games released last year on Steam, you can count the number of recent beat 'em ups on one hand: Battletoads back in 2020, the lesser-known River City Girls a year earlier, Shredder's Revenge in '22, and Streets of Rage 4, the return of the Sega classic, revived with gorgeous modern comic art from Guard Crush and Dotemu.

Absolum is a two-player beat 'em up bravely set in an original fantasy universe that immediately distinguishes itself from its mostly urban-set predecessors. In the land of Talamh, magic is forbidden, and the four fighting wizards you play as are hunted by a ruthless king who waits at the top of a glowing tower for a final battle.

The simple story is a good match for Absolum's retro cartoon art, which reminds me most of Dragon's Lair and other '70s/'80s animated fantasy: flat-colored characters against more complex shaded backgrounds, neon pinks or acid greens popping in almost every frame. It's an extraordinarily appealing look and one of my favorite things about Absolum. Characters are easy to decode in motion, and the bright comic art helps to soften the mood of an otherwise serious story.

Making an impact

Half of the payload of Absolum's percussive fighting is in the audio. A barrage of hits is articulated with thwacks, thuds, and slams, the vibration in the controller jolting selectively when you break an enemy's guard. The sound design shakes hands perfectly with the flashes of light and hit-indicator effects that trigger as you mash away. One detail I love is how enemies bounce off the screen edge, which makes fights at the side feel like a rattling ricochet against a trampoline wall.

You're not fighting mindlessly in Absolum, but your characters' output always feels bigger than your input. The game finds a smart midpoint between the arcadiest of the genre (like any of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles side-scrollers) and the slightly more complex Streets of Rage 4. Dotemu has done away with the simple combo commands, like forward-forward-punch, that were a legacy detail of that series. Their closest replacement in Absolum are simple moves that you unlock after boss fights, like triple-tapping Y to unleash a series of chained sword swings, or a dive kick the character didn't previously have. These make meaningful rewards for flattening bosses.

The other modest measure of complexity comes from dodging and "clashing," or initiating an attack at the same time as an enemy, which cancels it in the process. The timing windows for landing these defensive maneuvers are longer than in, say, Street Fighter and Tekken, but I found them pleasantly hard to master.

Absolum may not be a highly technical game, but it is a fairly difficult one. Though it's easy to rack up big combos, enemies hit hard and health is scarce. Like the runs of Hades that Absolum partly imitates, it feels unpleasant to go into a boss with 40% of your HP. Helpfully, Absolum gives you a lot of control over how punishing the experience is: you can dial down (or up, if you're nuts) damage received and damage given, a smart way of letting players fine tune difficulty.

But the main thing is that Absolum's characters are fun to fight with. Cider is some kind of wooden cyborg ninja with an Inspector Gadget extendo-arm attack. Galandra's broadsword feels sweepy and powerful. Brome the frog wizard can eventually unlock an ability that allows him to telekinetically toss throwables around the screen. And Karl is a little dwarven cannonball, headbutting his way through levels.

Each of these characters has six unlockable arcanas—special magic abilities that draw on mana. What I like about the arcanas is that they can be used in all kinds of ways: I can snipe distant projectile-throwers with a burst of Karl's blunderbuss, I can tack on one of Galandra's sword-uppercuts to a long combo against a boss, I can keep a crowd of skeletons at bay with Cinder's land mines. It's good that mana recharges quickly enough to encourage you to use these abilities freely, rather than save them up too much.

The many punching bags of Talamh

One of Absolum's best design decisions is to embrace the branching structure seen in Hades and other roguelikes. There are major branches—like the either-or choice between which of two islands to visit in the second chapter—and a longer list of minor ones, like whether to take the path to the beach or the goblin-occupied forest at the beginning of the game.

Small, charming narrative bits are doled out over multiple runs. The fourth time I visited a pirate ship, it triggered a surprise sea creature attack.

In this way, the levels themselves transform a little in successive playthroughs. In the dwarven mines, enemies can be chucked into a furnace, their burnt bones fueling an elevator that can be taken to a secret side area. More generally, the number and type of enemies is mixed a bit on each level segment, reducing the tedium of making another run. Altogether this malleable structure provides crucial replay value, turning what might've been a six-hour game into a 20-hour one.

Even though the level variety exceeds anything I've seen in the genre, I wanted more. Another full island would've made Absolum feel more epic, and the third act feels shorter than the two that precede it, depriving playthroughs of a big payoff. Likewise, while Absolum excels as a two-player experience, it feels a bit lonely in singleplayer, even with the AI-controlled, temporary mercenaries you can hire on at different points.

I was also a little underwhelmed by the Hades-style ritual gems you select mid-run, elemental passive abilities that might trigger a random jolt of chain lightning after landing a series of hits. How they function is hard to grasp at the outset, and some feel outright useless, like a gem that drops tiny waves to your left and right when you jump.

So Absolum is ultimately a beat 'em up with a bit more depth and progression than we've seen before in this style of game that has been so resistant to change since it was born in the arcades. Absolum lacks the extensive variance of a true roguelike, but delivers enough intricacy to push the genre into a more interesting space than it's ever occupied.