Game:

Absolver (2017)

Category:

Review

Duration: 16:59

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1

There are only two good movies in my mind: 1978 Jackie Chan film Drunken Master, and 1994 Jackie Chan film The Legend of Drunken Master. And so when I met Jinn Mesca, a lonely NPC who guards a meaningless staircase in multiplayer fighting RPG Absolver, I immediately dedicated myself to mastering his drunken, stumbling fighting style. To do that, I let him beat the crap out of me for three hours.Learning Mesca's moves wasn't fun per se, but I was motivated. I was motivated to show every player who'd formerly chased me around and knocked me down that I had been practicing, that I knew some things they didn't. I farmed him for hours, fighting him, then waiting for him to respawn, then fighting him again to slowly acquire his set of zui quan moves—wrist jab, wobble low kick, elbow stumble, all the hits. Each time I learned a new move, I spent 5 minutes (at least) editing my moveset to slot it in, chaining low attacks to leaping kicks and building series of rapid jabs to poke through my enemies' defenses. I cleared the whole deck and rebuilt it from scratch more times than I can remember.Of course, when I went to show off my new skills, I matched with a level 60 player who stomped my body to dust with relentless combos of basic attacks and perfect counter moves. Instead of looking like a drunken boxer I looked like a drunk guy getting beat up, but that's how it goes when action RPG progression slides into a 1v1 fighting game. I rage quit after that, but I was back an hour later. Absolver is too fun for me to stay away from, even when it hurts me.Absolver is an attempt to synthesize contradictions into something new—a third-person RPG with gear and leveling that's also a competitive fighting game, a Journey-like meditation that's constantly violent—and the result is a strangely shaped game. It takes place in a small, maze-like open world littered with AI enemies who are tethered to their posts, always silently waiting for someone to wander by for a fight. It's more gloomy than mysterious, quiet and still. There are dead ends, empty areas with no enemies, and confusing circular routes that had me mashing every key to find a map, though none came up.The AI opponents are decent fighters, not always predictable and pretty tough, though not tougher than any competent player. Most of the time, they win in numbers, as Absolver doesn't handle locking-on to multiple enemies well, or countering attackers from all sides. To push away some of the gloom and even out group fights, up to two other players can spawn in your world through automatic peer-to-peer matchmaking (which can be turned off, or set to invite only). You can't talk to them—there's no voice or text chat—leaving communication up to a small set of emotes in a radial menu.The gamble is that Absolver can drop new players into a confusing and oppressive world and rely on bows, thumbs ups, and shrugs from experienced players to guide them. When it works it can be brilliant.At one point I was struggling t
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Source: http://www.pcgamer.com/absolver-review/

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