Absolum

What a journey. I went from thinking: beat em ups are boring > Absolum is not for me > Absolum is fun > 100% the game > I want to play more beat em ups Thank you developers for gently altering my gamer spirit

It's one of those games that does a few things really well and some really poorly. While the majority of reviews are positive and point the really good parts about the the game, like the visuals, soundtrack and the beat em up gameplay is pretty decent, it has a few glaring issues. To keep it simple, it's poor excuse of a roguelike and the overall balance of the game worsens as you play. Certain items have almost no impact, certain abilities/new moves are a waste and the to other choice regularly overshadows the other and lastly the balance of some enemies is quite whacky especially once you complete the game and it kinda throws you a bunch of buffed variants and visual clutter becomes an issue. Also something that annoyed me a bit, is that rewards don't really feel like rewards, if that makes sense. If you just want a 15-20hr beat-em up experience with a sprinkle of "rogue-like" elements, I mean yeah sure, I recommend the game. If you're looking for a rogue-like beat-em up, this might not be the game. I bought the game with the idea that it was a ROGUE-LIKE + beat em up, not the other way around and I'm kinda disappointed. This is the kind of game I would give "Mixed review".. My score would be 6.8/10.

Great rogue-lite with beat-em-up gameplay. Great art and nice overall structure to progression and runs. Copleted the game entirely in couch co-op. From what I've seen of solo gameplay the game is considerably harder in co-op with more tougher enemies, but overall the challenge was nice. The only issue in co-op is visual clutter, there's at least twice the amount of enemies, you can have summons, copies from abilities and so on, routinely I lost my character on the screen. Co-op also makes it a lot harder to read what enemies are doing, so you can't really react properly - the game has a bunch of moves for specifically countering enemy attacks (and rituals to give them special effects), which become hard to learn and execute in co-op. The main issue come from the fact that the screen space and character sizes don't change between solo and coop. Still I had a great time playing the game with a friend, and can easily recommend it for solo or co-op play (not sure about online with randoms).