Absolver

I really wish I could leave a positive review but after 2k hours and being a very involved and active member of whatever scraps of this game's "community" are left, all I can say at this point in time is don't do it. It's not worth it. The game you're looking for isn't this game, and even if it was it's completely dead and the devs are not coming back. Not now, not in the future. Go play Tekken/Sifu/Dark Souls. One of those is the game you actually want.

This game had so much potential, and the devs abandoned it, what a waste!

There is something special about this game. The developers have moved on to other projects; that while good in their own right, fail to capture precisely what makes this title magical. I hope one day a developer captures it again, and refines it into a meta gaming experience; like dark souls did with the Souls genre. This game is sitting on top of a huge genre defining diamond, covered in dirt. Just waiting for someone to clear the debris.

on all fours begging sloclap to comeback to this game knowing they never will.

Absolver had an unreal amount of potential, whats here is great. Its what the devs DIDNT do that upset me, all they had to do was release more pve content, add new zones, expansions, etc. The devs simply stopped making content, its like they didnt understand why the game was liked to begin with. The game is a Pvepvp setting, and it worked great They just needed to ramp up the narrative, and continue writing, what a shame. It could have been so much more, the pvp was great too, sad.

Not worth buying even during the steam sale, this game is dead and the devs abandoned it years ago. Most the cosmetics, school/training mechanics and content for this game was purely player driven as its primarily a PvP experience after you finish the story which honestly you can do in a day. The pvp in this game is also broken, rewarding you for turtling and playing defensive so most fights between two players that know what they are doing result in a staring contest where you try bait your opp into attacking first using feints. Pretty much no matter who you verse, you and them are gonna use the same strat if you want to win after spending 30 mins searching for a 1v1. On release when no one knew how to play this game was 10/10, now i would give it a solid 2/10 and honestly i feel like if you've purchased this you are entitled to a refund as this game does not perform as advertised.

I don’t have any friends to play this with, but man, Absolver still brings back so much nostalgia. Back on my old PS, it was such a blast; getting beaten up, then revived by random strangers, or even getting totally ganged up on, haha. I really miss those times. This game was so unique and fun, and I wish it could be revived or, even better, that they’d make an Absolver 2.

This is a special game. I don't like it at all, but I do think it's special. It's definitely something that would be worth doing a design analysis for. Absolver is strongly inspired by the fighting game genre and borrows heavily from its mechanics, but ultimately takes those too far for its own good. The main loop comes down to performing cyclic "combo sequences" out of different stances. Individual attacks leave you in new stances, which then again rotate to other stances. At any point during any said stance you can perform one particular "special" attack from the current stance you are in (which is, by all accounts, just a regular attack -- but the point is you use these to slot "slow" attacks that have some special effect, like "guard break" or having especially large range/damage). The exact sequences you will be performing you decide yourself through your "combo deck". It's a very unique take on fighting games and I really don't think I have ever seen anything quite like it. Unfortunately the game over-commits: there are too many moves, to many different attacks with different associated "ranges", damage profiles and frame-data, which are ultimately all reduced to just chaining the most safe attacks every single time. You never want to start a combo with something that has a long startup. You never want to use attacks that strike straight ahead of you. It's like taking a fighting game and then saying: "ok, pick any move from any character" and you always end up with some bland, extremely obvious min-max solution that leaves 95% of the other moves at the wayside. Perhaps there is a good reason this concept was never attempted. Absolver is also VERY pretentious game: it takes itself very seriously and it is obvious that not much reflection was done beyond the original vision (which, as admitted before, is indeed quite special). As a result you have this elaborate "combo deck", many different animations and a near infinite amount of possible mixups. That brings me to my biggest problem: the whole game is entirely attacker-centric. In theory, defending parties have access to dodges in four directions: jump, duck, dodge left, dodge right. In reality, this requires you to read some 10 frame startup animations that, quite frankly, just isn't communicated well enough to demand such extreme execution. So what about doing reads then? Well -- the attacking party has up to 16 different attacks, all which different frame data, all of which can be mixed up entirely for free and all of which can be canceled during the startup frames -- again, for free. So good luck doing anything but holding the block button sprinkled with the occasional gambling sidestep. The degree of accessibility is beyond parody. The game explains practically nothing. It explains stances in a vacuum without tying it into the combat loop. It explains nothing about frame data. It barely explains the combo deck. Without watching an hour long youtube tutorial you will not have the faintest idea what is going on in this game. Visual communication is unacceptably bad too: some attacks are "guard breakers", causing related limbs to glow red. Unfortunately, this effect can be partially obscured by equipment. The whole game demands you learn how to read animations in order to react, but quite frankly they just aren't at the level of refinement this is a reasonable ask of the player. Enemies attack from off-screen all the time. All of these flaws culminate in "skill" being almost entirely equivalent to a knowledge check, and a very, very elaborate one at that. Absolver is not a good game. It's not horrible either. It is a game that takes itself far too seriously and should have reflected more upon the basics. What the game did achieve is convince me that this direction of fighting games could work. Unfortunately this is not the game to achieve it.