Absolver

Absolver feels like a (difficult, sometimes frustrating) step into a larger world, and if you can hang with it, it'll leave you hungry for more.

Martial artistry.

A competitive fighting game with leveling makes for a strange, compelling concoction.

Absolver is a beautiful martial-arts fighting game that allows for an impressive degree of personalized play with its innovative combat deck system, which lets you learn skills from combat with other players and NPCs. Unfortunately, it only comes with a single PvP arena mode at launch, and its fascinatingly nebulous campaign breaks off early and abruptly. It feels like an early access game with a ...

Absolver’s fighting system and weird blend of ideas make it a genre-defying gut punch of innovation. You’ll be in amazement with how much you can customize the fluid combat, but its complexity and intentional design to be constantly altered might be off-putting for some. The same goes for those looking for more to do besides competitive play in an open world begging to be absolved of limited scope...

Absolver‘s sure to be divisive. There’s a clear vision that shines throughout the game. Its combat system encourages a granular knowledge of the different moves and potential combos that stem from each directional stance. But while the appeal will be apparent to the competitive-minded player, Absolver’s pointed focus is complex enough to turn others away. The journey from lowly Prospect to Absolve...

It often feels unrefined and unbalanced, but the uniquely tactical combat system, and Dark Souls influences, create one of the most enjoyably different fighting games of recent years.

With so many different ideas mixed in with a compelling fighting system, Absolver should be better than it is but comes off as needing a lot more work to become truly great, letalone good.

Adal, the setting for Absolver, is large and untamed, but it fits. Overgrown ruins dot the landscape. There are cracks in the ground, ships washed far ashore. Something happened, but there’s little in the way of exposition or grand story. You play as a prospect who enters Adal to fight their way to the final gatekeeper, earning the right to become an Absolver, a master of martial arts. Absolver wa...

In the world of Absolver, no one wants to be your friend.

Absolver is an amazing game buried underneath a ton of server issues and bugs.

Whatever gets added in the future, though, I hope that Absolver doesn’t lose its sense of focus. If the game had tried too much — if it had thrown me into more complicated duels, or forced me to use weapons more often — I don’t think I would have found it nearly as appealing. Instead, Absolver recognizes its singular goal of building a robust, satisfying martial arts combat system. It leans into t...