Absolver

Immediately I imagine most people are shocked at the 5/5. I have to admit this game is flawed to hell and back (got it on the other, worse platform, not here sadly). However, what the game did right it did very right. The game play is extremely enjoyable. Hunting down mooks and fighting them to learn their moves was a fun way to grow your character. Speaking of, having your character grow in moves learned rather than other metrics was also really satisfying. The combat is deep enough to be interesting and gripping but the system of basic/high/low/side/back works really well. The best part about the game is its character customization. The ability to create and refine your own 'martial art' was excellent. The method of swapping between stances based on your last move allowed for a lot of weird and wonderful combinations. The fact that most moves can turn into anything keeps you guessing in pvp and makes info gathering and reads really fun. Drunken Fist was annoying, though. The bad? It felt like a demo. The PvE while fun is empty and non-existent when it could have been Soulsbourne-esque. If it wasn't going to go for that then it shouldn't have hidden PvP behind campaign completion. You should have just had PvP and the campaign as a separate mini game. Absolver didn't know if it was a Fighting Game or an Action RPG. This KILLED the game because it ended up not being able to call itself either. Amazing potential, great experience but you'll be left wanting when you finish and you won't ever come back.

This game drinks a lot from Dark Souls (I know that, with the "Dark Souls of..." meme this statement has become a controversial one, but I really believe that this game was inspired by it). The problem lies that, while Dark Souls is a single player focus game with multiplayer elements, this game is completely the contrary, with the single player working more like a tutorial than the real meat of the game. Of course, this means that the PvP is the central point, but it's quite shallow and bare bones because the game is using single player mechanics, and the single player world feels quite empty because the resources went into the online. The combat itself is quite good (I will even say that it’s excellent), and the world and artstyle are beautiful, but this doesn't stop the game from feeling like a prove in concept rather than a game prepared to be released. I would say that this at least serves like the groundwork for a sequel that focus on the singleplayer or at least a true multiplayer game.

The game's great but how you will like it is based on your attitude. If you expect a game with a story to finish in between other titles you'll be disappointed - there's not much content and the story is cryptic. Think of it as a competitive game like Tekken or Street Fighter but with more organic creation of different combos and more developed PvE content where you can peacefully train your skills instead of Tekken's Arcade Mode. I have much sincere joy just strolling around and beating up random encounters, but you really can't think of any goal and just enjoy the moment :]

The game is a masterpiece, but many players at the start made a mistake with its genre: this is a fighting game, and the game copes with this with a bang: it has more than ~ 48!-(48-16)! = ~ 10 ^ 61 combinations of setups with which you can go into a fight, where 16 is the total number of techniques in the combat, and 48 is the total number of techniques in the game, and this is not counting the fact that you can take a second setup, for cold weapons, and that there are active abilities that also have different combinations; and all these are not empty numbers here! - in a fighting game, if you don't know the opponent's setup, you don't know the matchup. As a result, there is a crazy replayability in PVP, and the emphasis in the game is precisely on this. But there is a thing: in the game you are not led by the handle, there are no spectacles and what would keep the players playing it thoughtlessly - "fill the picture with action, and the viewer will not understand that it is meaningless" (quote about cinema). The game is not about that. It is about what all other fighting games are about - about easy to learn, hard-to-master gameplay. And that is the reason why players leave it: at the release of the game, it was distributed for free, because the developers included it in the Humble Bundle - all those who paid for a monthly subscription to receive games included in the distribution - received it (and this is a bunch of people, because HB was very popular then) - and then there were a huge number of random players in the game who did not plan to buy this game, which ones not even the fighting players; many considered their departure a "withdrawal" of players and a symptom of a bad game, its dying...

Awesome and fuid combat and multiplayer, but have had a few crashes so far and framerate takes a while to stabilize sometimes after loading. Maybe it's just me, but have to run on surprisingly low settings.