#lateview

If you've heard the expression, “Biting off more than you can chew”, then you'll understand how I feel about Absolver. Fans of third-person fighter games like “Dark Souls”, “Devil May Cry” and “God of War” know that these types of games require high levels of love and polish to do well. Despite the starved market, there’s a lot of room for mediocrity. Surprisingly, Absolver doesn't pull any punches and goes toe to toe with the best... until it runs out of steam.

Absolver is a third-person fighter game trying to set itself apart from the crowd using two unique mechanics: stances and the combo builder. The “build your own combo” system has been done before, most notably in “Remember Me” and “God Hand” but the way they combine it with the stances really sets it apart. Each move has a speed and damage rating as well as some of the moves having unique properties like breaking guard and interrupting attacks. There are 4 combat stances, visually corresponding to the direction your torso is facing. Changing stances will result in you turning your torso to face to the left or the right of your opponent while others will leave you with your back facing towards the enemy! Each stance can be assigned an escalating number of light attacks and a heavier “alternate attack”. Most attacks transition you from one stance to another; then, since you’re in another stance, you can immediately use that stances attacks. If you build your combos correctly, you can create loops where one attack will lead into one stance before an attack in that stance returns you to the same stance you started in. The end-result is a custom-built train of attacks that you've personally engineered to confuse opponents as you flow from stance to stance. Since you’re changes stances so often, your alternate attack changes over time. Predicting what move your opponent is currently planning on doing is daunting since there is so much they can do. Oh, and did I tell you that you can pull out a sword or gloves and doing so swaps you over to a brand new page of attacks that you need to customise and memorize?

The game has RPG elements to it as well. Gear will drop from mobs as you down them and you'll also find stashes of gear hidden within piles of rocks. Most interestingly though is how you acquire new attacks. You start the game with a reasonable number of attacks but soon you’ll run into people using 'new' attacks against you and if you block that attack, you'll start learning the move. Use your right thumb-stick ability against it and you'll learn it even faster. Story wise, this is a cool concept. Get punched in a particular way a certain number of times and you should be able to know how your opponent punches like that. Unfortunately, in practice, this just results in you actively not killing your opponents. You end up standing around as they are wailing on you while try to block/dodge/parry all their moves; grinding out all the moves before you move along. There is a risk/reward system at play here wherein all the learning you've done during a fight won't be saved until you kill the opponent and exit combat, but there is a lot of moves to learn from random grunts in the world and these don’t really pose a threat once you’ve got a handle on the game. This system gets even worse when you're trying to discover sword specific moves because swords are rare, and by the time you find someone wielding one, they are normally a very strong opponent and you can't afford to grind out these moves because you won’t survive unless you actively damage them.

That's pretty much the entire game. Fight, learn moves, earn gear, equip said moves and gear, repeat. Thankfully that's not as bad as it sounds because hey, it's a fighting game. You came here to fight. So why am I so disappointed in it? Well before I get to the big one, let me just rattle off a few smaller impressions the game left on me: ●       Falling off ledges is far too easy. Admittedly this is a designed mechanic; forcing someone up to a ledge and just pushing them off with attacks is a legitimate way to win a fight but it still felt like it was far too easy to just slip off. Even with nobody attacking you as you’re navigating the environment, one foot off the path might mean falling and most of the time falling is death, because when it's not instant, the insane fall damage will ensure you lose the fight that you just dropped into.

●       The environment is not easy to find your way around. The “map” you're given is essentially 3 circles, and you don't know where you are unless you sit at a bonfire an energy shard thingy or kill a boss as these are the only 2 markers on the map. Many times, vital paths that you NEED to go down are not highlighted or made evident in any way and are sometimes, out-rightly obscured. As a result of this, I completely missed an entire area of the game for a long period of time simply because I couldn’t find the path AND I thought I had already entered that area of the map… There's a time and a place to do-away with the hand holding evident in modern game design but this is too far the other way.

●       Maybe why the environment is so convoluted is to try to hammer in this sense of mystery that the game is so stubbornly trying to instil. The game makes a point of telling you NOTHING about where you are, who you are, what you're doing or why. Thankfully it does tell you what to do (fight people and open a door). It just comes across as entitled. There IS an interesting world here but by the end of the game, nothing is explained at all. Who am I? Why did I teleport when I put on this mask? Why do I need to kill these people? Did I travel through time? Who is this chick with a sword? Who were the people who were here before? The game makes a point in referring to the tesseract-looking particle effect that happens as you kill others, get killed yourself or even unsheathing your sword as “folding” which seems really cool! To sum up my feelings on the aesthetics and lore of the game, I have two words. Obnoxiously Mysterious

Finally, the big one. The game ends. It just ends. No big finish, no special reveal, no closure. Nothing. If you remember before, I mentioned the map being 3 circles? That's it. That's the whole game. I have FOUR HOURS in Absolver, and it's finished. The entire story-mode. That's a third of the I spent in DMC and less than a 10th of the time I spent in Sekiro. Now sure, those are AAA titles with massive budgets behind them, but I cannot help but feel starved of content, especially since the story does not wrap itself up. The game starts with you and a bunch of other initiates standing in an arctic wind before you are chosen, you don a mask and teleport to another world. You then traverse through 12 named areas (3 of which contain nothing) fighting 11 different bosses. There are probably below 50 enemies to fight in the entire game. And then you're done. After fighting the somehow important Risryn, you're teleported back to the place you started with, you graduate from being a “prospect” to become an “Absolver”, you get a neat cape and you get told, “Idk, wait around and grind a bit I guess?” before it teleports you back to the “hub”. To put this in perspective, if the game had 3 times as much content as it currently does, I would still probably call the game short. I have no idea why (besides development problems) the game ended when it felt like Act 2 should have begun.

The game tries to justify this by placing a big emphasis on PVP. There is a system to look up other players and have a tussle and the game is always online so you might find people in the world and decide to start smacking one another but if the game is dead (like it was when I got to it) then all the PVP is non-existent. That's not even mentioning the players who don't WANT to fight other people. As far as I can tell the “latest” addition to the game included the “downfall” mode. This mode (only available after you have graduated to be an absolver) is randomly generated rooms of goons to fight endlessly. The lore explanation for this area only adds questions to the already tall pile of unanswered ones. The game allows you to fight bosses again at a harder difficulty, but this is locked behind PVP progress…meaning that if you weren’t able to find a game like myself, then you just can’t

I hate having to be so negative. Other indie games cater themselves to a casual market and can have all the depth of a puddle and still receive high ratings but because the devs took on such a loved genre, all the depth they have added only makes people want more. I mean really, if my biggest complaint about the game is that I wanted more, there's got to be something good about it. In shooting for the stars, the devs came up short, but the time, skill and effort they put into trying to get there far exceeds a lot of other developers. I can say that the game was bug free and (until it ended) felt close to a AAA title and the sad thing is that it starts to get judged by those harsh standards. For a AAA title, this would be an insult; But for a fighting game? This is a worthwhile experiment; for an indie game? This is one heck of an accomplishment and for your time? This is worth it.

Doom is a victim of modern game design. From collectible overload to signposted level design, the game is torn between what it wants to be and what it expects players will want. Despite this the game is fun and has perfect length to avoid becoming stale.

How many times in a game do you come to a fork in the road, your objective marker clearly says to go left but you just HAVE to go right because you got to find all those secrets? Even if it's just ammo, there will be something down that other corridor right? Every game today has these nooks and crannies to search through and here it's especially jarring. You're supposed to be a demon slayer, not a puzzle solving, map checking treasure hunter. Unless you purposely go out of your way to ignore the secrets, you will constantly be interrupting yourself to open the map and scour your surroundings to check if there is some collectable nearby. Considering that this is a game about shooting demons, this is a big flow killer. It's like having to do homework in the middle of your video game. I hate to blame the game for what is essentially a sidequest but the game doesn't leave you much choice. Every game made today has an RPG mechanic slapped onto it and by god have they slapped it onto Doom. Finding the secrets awards you with praetor tokens for your suit, weapon tokens to upgrade your guns, weapon mods to change how your guns work and Argent Energy to give you a stat-boost. Choosing to ignore the secrets and focus on the (enjoyable) gun-totting gameplay will end up neutering your effectiveness in combat. You'll never end up stuck if you're too weak for a fight because you can always replay old levels but that doesn't fix the real issue.

Some of the level design suffers from the modern game design ideology too. Anytime the game lays out a platforming section for you, they'll make sure to light your way with blinking green lights. One of the things that players respond to in play-testing WITHOUT FAIL, is that they love lights. You ever want your player to know where to go? Make it brighter than everywhere else. Shine a spotlight on something and they will go investigate. It's so obvious in this game that it insults the player's intelligence. Admittedly there is an argument to be made about how necessary it is because you will end up turned around in combat and may lose your sense of direction but it could have been done better.

The story feels confused in what it's trying to do. Right in the first mission, your character, the Doom Marine, punches the display monitor while Samuel is trying to talk to you. The Doom Marine doesn't care for Samuel, he's just here to kill some demons. There's even a moment where Samuel disables your access to the network because he's struggling to gain the Doom Marine's attention! However, you meet up with the sentient AI of the Mars Base and Samuel gives you a piece of Argent Energy and suddenly you're buddy buddies? I thought the Doom Marine didn't care for Samuel? The Doom Marine is initially portrayed as this force of nature, uncaring of the whims of other characters in the story, so why then does he end up partnering up with Samuel? At least that's what I am assuming the Doom Marine does. Silent protagonist syndrome is particularly painful here because you never know what the Doom Marine is thinking. He's clearly a character who uses logic and makes decisions but none of that is explained so the player is left guessing as to what their motivation is! Making matters worse is if you go the whole game without picking up the text logs scattered around, you won't grasp the full scale of the events happening around you. This minimal storytelling idea would work okay if they doubled down on the idea that the Doom Marine giving 0% care to the story but since they don't it just leaves the game feeling very light.

So, negatives aside, the game is a ton of fun, if you like fast paced shooting. You are given 9 weapons throughout the game and 4 ammo types between them (not counting the chainsaw and the BFG). This is good because the game doesn't shoehorn you into having to use a gun simple because you have ammo for it. If you don't like the plasma rifle, you can still use the gauss cannon to consume your energy ammo. Each gun handles differently and you'll probably end up flipping between every gun at least once to see what your favourite and as long as you become proficient at balancing your ammo then you won't have to use a particular gun you don't like. I say this because you will run out of ammo in every fight and it is far smarter to swap to a gun than to try to hunt down a bundle of ammo. On top of this, each gun has 2 mods you can equip to it. For instance the assault rifle can be equipped with a scope or a side-loader of mini-missiles. All of the mods offer advantages and disadvantages and finding your favourite gun/mod combo is enjoyable. The combat constantly has you making decisions and reacting to new information. One moment you will run out of ammo and need to change guns, the next second a new enemy will spawn in front of you and you will need to find another route to take so that you're not standing next to them. Then while you're shooting an enemy they may become staggered. If you turn around and run back to them, you can instantly kill them with a health replenishing, ammo saving glory-kill. Factor in the rune quests and gun challenges that task you to change up your playstyle and the game never let's you perform the same action twice in succession. Simply put, anytime you're shooting enemies, you're having fun.