Absolum Preview
At this point, roguelikes are like weeds in a spring garden. They keep popping up everywhere. You can try to ignore them, but they’re not going anywhere and you know what? Sometimes they’re kind of appealing in their own right. This tortured metaphor is simply to say that Absolum is a new upcoming roguelike and it just might be worth embracing.
Genre Switch
Developer Dotemu is known for signature titles like TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge and Streets of Rage 4, both addictive brawlers. Kudos to Dotemu for changing things up for Absolum. Sure, at its core you’re still beating up on enemies, but Absolum’s roguelike mechanics, art, and setting are head-spinning jukes away from their prior games.
The most immediately apparent change is the move from a retro-pixel art aesthetic to a hand painted comic book style that has a lot of character. Equally fresh — at least for the developer — is the setting, a classic fantasy with orc-ish monsters, axe-wielding dwarves, and sword-swinging knights. Finally, there’s the roguelike structure, which tosses players back to home base when they die. Considered in isolation, none of these ideas are original, but the combination is where the potential magic happens.
I played a demo of Absolum and got to toy with two of the game’s four playable heroes. The game is set in a archetypal fantasy world called Talamh, and the player is sent — over and over — on a quest to rescue a mysterious, mystical figure. There’s a lot of fantasy dialogue, but the game does give the player the option to speed it up. There’s a bit of humor sprinkled in, both in the dialogue and character designs.
Flying Fists and Swinging Axes
In the demo, I alternatively played as Karl, a small dwarf with a big gun, and Galandra, a dark elf knight. Absolum is a side-scroller but 2.5D, so the action basically glides between background, midground, and foreground spaces. Therein lies my biggest gripe and reddest flag with Absolum: character movement and placement. Enemies can glide and sprint effortlessly between layers, but the player’s movement is much slower and more awkward. It’s often very difficult to read where in the space enemies actually are. This mismatch, paired with the player’s janky movement, results in our heroes taking a lot of frustrating hits.
It’s a shame, because aside from that, combat can be a lot of fun. Heroes have a special ability that costs mana to recharge, so Karl mostly brawls with fisticuffs and Galandra swings a sword. Karl’s gun blast is fairly unimpressive and is only effective at close range. Galandra’s special attack cuts a wider swath. However, there are a lot of special items and buffs along the way, like adding a trail of fire in the wake of dashes. Which reminds me, dashes are pretty short and the heroes can’t roll past or through enemies.
Opponents are a mixture — at least in the demo — of stock fantasy and even cartoon-like humans, flora and fauna. Goblins are omnipresent, goofy, ambulatory mushrooms are deadly and going near the ocean means attacks by sentient seashells. Absolum’s level design often includes optional paths or areas, but the layered 2.5D space sometimes obscures where the player can or needs to move. Oh, and the game’s music is an appealing mix of acoustic tracks with a Celtic vibe.
I Need a Hero
Taken as separate elements, nothing about Absolum is groundbreakingly new. The developer’s particular blend of hand painted art, action, and roguelike structure definitely transcend its familiar components. In other words, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. I had a lot of fun with Absolum despite some bumps in the road, which may be smoothed out prior to launch.
***PC code provided by the publisher***
