Absolum Is A Dark Fantasy Beat ‘Em Up With Best-In-Class Fisticuffs

By Elijah Gonzalez | October 9, 2025 | 9:00am

Video Games Reviews absolum

Absolum Is A Dark Fantasy Beat ‘Em Up With Best-In-Class Fisticuffs

Over the last few years, Dotemu has more than proven itself as a torchbearer of the beat ‘em up scene: they co-developed Streets of Rage 4, published Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge, and are also backing the upcoming Marvel Cosmic Invasion (which seems quite cool). And now, from the same team that worked on Streets of Rage 4, we have Absolum, a big, bold attempt at reinventing the genre through a roguelike lens. While it doesn’t make this leap to a run-based format without quite a few stumbles, the bright side is that its core beat ‘em up loop is just about as good as it gets.

Borrowing even more explicitly from fighting games than many of its peers, here you’re given the tools to carry out extended combos, as you bounce your foes from coast to coast: you’ll be dreaming of airdashing dwarves and a magic frog who literally just has Urien’s Aegis Reflector, as these many tools, some of which you unlock over the course of a run, let you come up with increasingly creative ways to juggle your foes: I cannot oversell how fun it is to punch guys in this video game.

However, if it wasn’t clear from the fact that the game is getting an animated show, hacking and slashing footsoldiers of an authoritarian regime isn’t Absolum’s only ambition. Set in the land of Talamh, you play as some of the last remaining wizards in a world where magic has been outlawed. The Sun King Azra and his oppressive Crimson Order rule this land with an iron fist, preying on fear in the wake of a cataclysm caused by hubristic magic-wielders. Events begin with a cold open as the elf Galandra (who wields a very big sword) and the dwarf Karl (who has a gun) break their “Root Mother” Uchawi out of imprisonment in a heist, allowing the pair to repeatedly return from death thanks to her powerful magic.

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Absolum review

Just like its opening, there’s very much an in media res feel to the plot, with the player dropped into the middle of a complicated war. While the storytelling can be a bit too terse (and I say this as a big FromSoftware fan), leaving far too much unsaid as you glean clues from the environment and one-off lines of dialogue, the visuals and broad framing do a lot of heavy lifting to place us in this world—specifically, this is a game about beating the shit out of authoritarian dirtbags, and it makes it quite enjoyable to do so.

Supamonks’ thick line art, vibrant use of color, and a general hum of digital noise combine to make the game look like a forgotten dark fantasy cartoon that aired on crackling CRTs. This is to say, while I wish there was a bit more direct storytelling going on (maybe they’re saving that for the animated show), the visual style has enough personality to distinguish the game from its high fantasy peers, with heavy shadows and color contrasts that make it look more like a long-lost sibling to Imaishi’s Dead Leaves or Redline than anything this side of Tolkien.

As for how your journey through this space is structured, as previously mentioned, Absolum is a roguelike. Over the course of a run, you pick up various Rituals that add elemental infusions and more to your abilities. Additionally, you’ll find and buy trinkets that carry passive upgrades, and even unlock entirely new moves that can dramatically change how your character plays; as alluded to, Karl the dwarf can go from a ground-based bruiser to an airbound fiend. As you repeatedly fight and die, you’ll unlock a currency that can be spent to get permanent upgrades. The goal of each run is the same: battle your way through Talamh so you can confront the Sun King Azra and stop him for good.

To do that, you’ll need to beat up a whole bunch of guys, which happens to be this game’s specialty. While on the surface, Absolum doesn’t seem too different than other games in this style, it stands out when it comes to the details, with tons of little nuances to master. Perhaps most importantly, your strikes have a real sense of weight: it never got old to swing Galandra’s Guts Berserk Sword down on enemies, this several-ton slab of steel bouncing foes into the air for a follow-up attack.

Even more so than Streets of Rage 4, there’s a focus on combos—elaborate, lengthy, extremely gratifying combos that have more than a dash of fighting game flair. Basically, once you hit an enemy, there are tons of ways to cancel moves into other moves: a simple example is that every character can do the first few hits of their standard attack string, cancel this into a dash, and then perform the same sequence over again. While there’s a system in place to ensure you can’t do infinite combos, much of the time, landing a single hit on a standard bad guy gives you the leeway to pummel them until they’re a goner, letting you continue the sequence on their unconscious body as you keep the juggle going to earn extra mana.

On top of this, there are defensive mechanics that let you get around incoming strikes. You can perform a dodge to sidestep an attack, a “deflect” by dashing into an incoming strike, or a “clash” by timing your heavy attack to intercept an enemy’s blow, each of which lets you score a Punish (again, this is literally a term used in fighting games), which nets you more damage and will eventually even open up armored foes who can’t normally be juggled. While the control scheme is quite simple—you have light and heavy attacks, a grab, a dash strike, a few different aerials, and some special abilities that use meter—your moves are designed to flow into each other, letting you convert almost any stray hit into big damage.

If the many Street Fighter cameos weren’t enough of a hint, the game does a great job capturing fighting game fun, but in a simplified package. And while each of the characters are straightforward enough to allow you to pick up and play, mashing to your heart’s content, they also have their own nuances, like how Cider can use her prosthetic extendo arm to pull herself towards enemies, setting up for air sequences so involved that they’d make Dante blush. As someone who has spent a fair amount of time with this genre, whether it’s tossing punks as Cody or swinging for glory in Ninja Baseball Bat Man, I have a hard time thinking of many beat ‘em ups that eclipse this one in terms of combo-fueled fun (Fight’N Rage is close, though).

As for how this all intersects with the roguelike elements, that part of the experience doesn’t quite reach the level of its peers, but it isn’t enough to drag things down entirely. One issue is that the game isn’t quite as randomized as many games in this style. While the map will change a bit from run to run, it always has the same basic layout. There are many different paths to explore with their own side quests and enemies, but an issue is that if you’re actually attempting to beat Azra, you’re more or less incentivized to go with the same route every time. Much of this comes down to how punishing the experience can be: not understanding an enemy’s patterns and moveset can quickly demolish your health bar, potentially invalidating a run—these take upwards of 50 minutes to an hour if you’re reaching the end.

Additionally, unlike most roguelikes, there isn’t any way to ratchet up the difficulty further once you’ve beaten the true final big bad, and while the side-quests ensure you’ll be playing for 20-30 hours before seeing everything, the lack of this kind of escalating challenge definitely is a missed opportunity. While there is a good amount of room for build variety, especially when it comes to unlocking entirely new moves for your character, you’re not particularly incentivized to experiment.

Another issue is that while it’s a delight to pummel basic bad guys, you’ll frequently run into a specific unit type that are a major buzzkill: armored enemies. They can’t be comboed unless you break their guard, and while the defensive mechanics give you decent means to open them up (attacking an enemy after blocking or dodging will break their guard more quickly), when the screen is full of punch-happy minions in addition to these opponents, it can be a bit much. It also doesn’t help that some of the bosses remained a bit grating even after finding ways to deal with many of their moves, in part because the defensive mechanics can feel awkward against their quick-paced attacks (damn you, lizard gladiator man). While you’re rewarded for aggression in standard scraps, the fights with big bads require a more passive playstyle that doesn’t quite match the game’s tempo.

Still, while these flaws keep Absolum from reaching the Mount Olympus of run-based games alongside greats like Hades, its fisticuffs are so deeply satisfying that they’re liable to make you so punch drunk that you’ll overlook these gaffes. Whether it’s using Karl’s harpoon gun to pin a screenful of goblins to a wall, performing an eight billion hit aerial combo with Cider, unleashing laser blasts with Brome, or hitting people with Galandra’s big, big sword, these scraps are gratifying, intuitive, and free-form. Not many games can claim to be truly best-in-class at something, but Absolum’s beat ‘em up action makes a convincing argument.

Absolum was developed by Dotemu, Guard Crush Games, Supamonks, and published by Dotemu and Gamirror Games. Our review is based on the PC version. It is also available for the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5.

Elijah Gonzalez is an associate editor for Endless Mode. In addition to playing the latest, he also loves anime, movies, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.