If you're on the fence about absolver and don't know whether it's for you let me start by highlighting its biggest weaknesses and if they don't discourage you then I'll tell you why you should buy it. It's largest weakness is game length / amount of content. The game can be 'finished' quite quickly it took me around 6 hours. Online play is plagued with lag issues. The game has no central story, the narrative is rather open ended like dark souls with few cut scenes and dialogue and environmental story cues. Those are all valid reasons to not buy the game. So if you're on the fence and any of those are going to keep you away then no worries, more power to you thank you for reading. However, if you're like me and don't buy games expecting every single one to be perfect and rather are out there looking for the truely unique and innovative games then you can't go past Absolver. The first hour of Absolver when you're still trying to learn the mechanics of the combat, what the stats mean and what you're purpose is were not particularly noteworthy it was all stuff I had seen before in games like Dark Souls, Bloodborne and even to an extent For Honour. The learning curve of this game is rather complex. Sure you might quickly learn how to attack, block, dodge and all the usual stuff but the real magic of Absolver is in its combat deck system. If you've ever played a fighting game like street fighter, tekken, mortal kombat and the like then you've likely had the experience of pausing the game midfight, looking at the combat list and then going back into the game trying to pull off the combo you've just memorised. Well Absolver answers the question, what would it be like if instead of memorising the comboes in that pause menu I could just create them instead. Throughtout the game you will earn a variety of different attacks like uppercuts, roundhouse kicks, leg sweeps. You can learn these moves a variety of way through actually fighting other players and npc enemies. Once you've learned them, you can go into the matrix like meditation state where you can practice your moves and modify your 'combat deck' which is the blank slate where you fill in different attacks and create your comboes. There's a ridiculous amount of customisation to the point where everyone that plays will form their own unique fighting style. Do you favour heavy hitting slow attacks, would you rather hit faster than your opponent or maybe you like to mix it up. There is so much choice and this system alone makes Absolver an incredibly fun game. It has a lot of layers of complexity, adds replayability to the game and even has some narrative interwined elements which are really cool and worth experiencing for yourself. If that all sounded like a blast but you want to know what else there is to Absolver then keep reading. The multiplayer aspec, while not for everyone, builds on the system experienced in games like dark souls and destiny where players will just drop in and out of the zone you are exploring. It's so seamless I often didn't notice until they were right in front of me. You can fight them, pair up with them or just ignore them and go your separate ways. The environments are beautiful, the artists did an amazing job giving Absolver a unique style and there's lots of story in the environments themselves. The sound never distracts only augments the experience. There's much to love about Absolver and I can't wait to see how this game grows with future updates. The developers have said that they plan to support the game after launch so it will be an interesting journey and the openendedness of the ending sets this game up suitably for such additions.
