Dotemu has had a pretty spectacular run over the past couple years as a publisher between their projects with Tribute Games – TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge, Marvel: Cosmic Invasion, and games I didn’t play like the Power Rangers beat-em-up – and Ninja Gaiden: RAGEBOUND with Game Kitchen. For their first original IP game in quite awhile they teamed up with Guard Crush Games (who they previously worked with on Streets of Rage 4 and Streets of Rage EX) and Supamonks, and the result is Absolum, a rogue-lite side-scrolling beat-em-up, and it is outstanding.

Multi-player side-scrolling beat-em-ups is Dotemu’s jam, so you would expect them to do a good job here, and they absolutely crushed it. Unlike a lot of their games with Tribute the combat is a bit more focused / strategic, less about having four players on screen spamming abilities everywhere and more about timing your combos and building out a powerful synergistic ability kit. The game is totally playable and balanced single player, but you can play co-op with a second player either local or online.

The core combat is in line with previous games they’ve published: you’ve got a basic melee attack, a special/heavy attack, and a special running attack. You’ve got some basic combo strings, throws, pummels, etc. There are four playable characters and each feels distinct, my personal favorite is Cider the puppet-construct, who has a fast rogue-y style, with fast basic attacks, a long-distance grab for a special, and a flurry attack for her run move. Great juggle opportunities, great combo extends, and fast recoveries.

The advanced combat is refreshing and does a great job balancing between being crunchy and technical and being easy to use. There’s no static “block” button, dashing has an “advancing guard” with it, so if you dash into a “normal” attack it blocks. Cool. If you block you can punish and do more damage. You can also counter a basic attack with a special attack if you time it right, which will trigger a “clash” that briefly stuns the enemy and opens them to punish. Finally, the third option is to dodge – some attacks are highlighted with a red wind-up indicating they can’t be blocked or countered, but you can dash up or down to side-step and dodge the attack, and after a successful dodge you can dodge back to punish. It’s a very intuitive system that flows very well with the basic combat systems. It doesn’t feel like it’s required, it just feels like extra stuff you can pepper in to your combat to be more effective.

The rogue-like aspect of the game is that it’s run-based, with a huge map of different biomes to run through, and different powers to select as you go. Each “zone” on the map is made up of 2-3 unique rooms with 1-2 encounters per room. At the end of each “zone” there’s typically a branching path, usually two-way, sometimes three-way, and these branching paths could lead to different mini-bosses, different enemy types to encounter, so unless you pick exactly the same route there’s going to be a decent amount of variability every run.

The other big source of rogue-lite variability is the power / itemization system: at the end of each room after you beat all the enemies you get a reward of a power, cash (temporary), cash (permanent), or a trinket. There are 8 core families of powers, ranging from “basic” elemental stuff like fire / water / lightning / wind, to weirder things like “bramble” that’s all about spawning throwables. When you get a power reward you’ll be presented with three options from the pool you’ve unlocked, and it’ll range from like “your primary adds burn” or “your dash creates waves” or “your special starts building up static charge”. Once you can apply basic effects it’ll start offering secondary effects like “waves push enemies further” and then “pushed enemies take more damage” and then maybe combo-effects like “waves also apply burn”. Over the course of a normal run you’ll rack up a crazy set of abilities that should synergize nicely, like primary attacks stack lightning charges, finishers put enemies in a bouncing water bubble, when bubbles get launched into other enemies they also get bubbled, and when bubbles pop they explode and leave fire-trails on the ground, and fire trails slow enemies that walk through them.

The lite-ness is pretty straight-forward: as you play through each run you’ll pick up crystal shards which can be used to re-roll drop choices, and however much you have left over at the end of the run can be dumped into a pretty simplistic upgrade tree. Based on how well you do you’ll also get incremental rewards to unlock different mana-using skills for each of your characters and to add more magic powers to the pool for future runs. The upgrades are pretty basic, it’s stuff like “5% more damage from pets and summons” and “10% more throwable damage” or “1% chance for abilities to spawn at a higher tier”. It certainly makes you more powerful, but buying everything in the tree isn’t essential to success, it’s just incremental buffs.

Compared to most beat-em-ups – even other beat-em-ups from Dotemu! – Absolum has an incredible amount of depth. Between the character choices, loadout choice, power choices, trinket choices, route choices, and general randomness within individual encounters, you really have to try hard to have two runs play out exactly the same. Combat is challenging, but the powers and combos you can unlock and build towards even it out, leading to a power scaling that feels balanced and fair. And you want the game to feel less fair, there’s a bunch of super complicated secrets to hunt that require multiple runs across multiple characters to complete, and post-game there’s a whole challenge system that unlocks to significantly ratchet up the difficulty.

I love this game. Of all the incredibly high quality beat-em-up games that have come out recently, if I’m going to return to one it’s going to be this one. If anything I’m strongly considering buying it a second time so I can have it on my Switch. Highly Recommended. Play this game. It rules.