Absolver

I'm a little bit disappointed by Absolver. I had heard about the complaints of a short campaign going in, and as someone who was far from an early adopter, I was hoping some of the bugs I heard about on launch had been fixed.

And hey, one of those things got fixed. Thankfully, it was the bugs. I do prefer my games to be playable. The game's aesthetic suits it, what little sound there is sounds good, and that's about all I can do to sing the praises of the surface-level Absolver experience.

The gameplay's quality suffers for the length of the campaign. I truly believe that if the story were longer, the reception toward this game would be a little less lukewarm, including my own. But the way it is, there isn't a whole lot to the game for people who aren't interested in playing with strangers. You fight your way to different bosses, button mashing your way through them until you get to... the end? A great deal more enjoyment could come out of Absolver if the difficulty were cranked up a notch and the campaign lengthened out so there's no significant difficulty spikes. As it is today, there's nothing in Absolver that ever suggests that button-mashing is the wrong idea -- and that's a shame, given the care they took to create a unique melee combat system.

Undoubtedly, somebody has reached this point and thought "You could just master it on your own. Why does the game need to prompt you?" And I understand this idea a little bit, I know there are people who play games this way. I'm not one of them. Mastering combat in a game where the AI can't compete with button-mashing strikes me as a waste of time. I don't mind putting time into a game to learn it, but I want the payoff to be satisfying, and wasting 40 hours so I can wail on a bot that I could have beaten by playing with my elbows fails to provide that satisfaction. So it's a shame that Absolver never gives players a reason to go beyond button mashing aside from multiplayer -- the unique combat system in the game is actually pretty interesting, and I think players would love it if they were compelled to learn it to progress.

I was a little excited going in because I've wanted a game with interesting hand-to-hand combat for ages. Despite my other comments about the game, it's still probably the best game out there for that. As things stand, I've got plenty more playtime in games with combat much worse than Absolver. The core difference with these games is that they kept combat varied but consistently challenging in order to keep me sucked in. Absolver would benefit tremendously from doing the same.

it wears a lot of souls dna in its level design/aesthetics/lore, but they managed to build an innovative and well polished fighting style. The campaign itslef is really short and doesnt really have a satisfying end. It feels that the fighting system is quite deep, but i never bothered to explore it when spamming was enough against most enemies. Obviosly it would be very different if i was fighting human oponents, but im not interested in the game for that