Absolum

Beat 'em ups and roguelites are, on paper, an obvious combination -- waves of enemies, a run structure, permanent unlocks between attempts -- and yet almost nobody had actually married the two at scale before Absolum, released on 9 October 2025 by Dotemu and Guard Crush Games, the studio behind 2020's Streets of Rage 4. The result landed about as well as a genre-fusion indie can: Metacritic 87, Very Positive on Steam at 93.6% across 4,568 reviews, 9/10 scores from Game Informer, Inverse and GameSpot, and enough players naming it a personal Game of the Year that it's worth taking seriously as one of 2025's real indie highlights -- alongside a real, specific, well-documented multiplayer stability problem this review isn't going to paper over.

Talamh, and four heroes who actually feel different

Absolum drops you into Talamh, a fantasy world where Sun King Azra has seized magic for himself, and hands you one of four playable outcast heroes to take it back. What separates it immediately from a re-skinned brawler is how distinct those four actually control -- reviewers repeatedly describe them less as palette swaps and more as different fighting-game archetypes stitched into a beat 'em up frame, each with its own combo language and pacing. "Playable characters have very different playstyles, you can do some cool combos," reads one review that is otherwise critical of the game's structure -- a useful signal, because even players unconvinced by Absolum's meta-progression consistently credit the moment-to-moment combat.

That combat draws the most direct comparisons in the review corpus to Streets of Rage 4, the genre's modern high-water mark and, not coincidentally, also a Guard Crush Games credit. "The combat system is instantly satisfying, with combo mechanics that feel similar to Streets of Rage 4," reads one detailed 4,779-minute review. Another calls it "the biggest thing for beat 'em ups since Streets of Rage 4 single-handedly brought them back," a framing echoed across several of the outlet reviews surfaced in research for this piece.

The art carries even the reviewers who bounce off everything else

If there's one element of Absolum that draws close to unanimous praise, it's the presentation. The hand-drawn art, character design and animation come up in nearly every review this piece read, positive or negative -- "beautiful art, good voice acting," concedes one negative review before detailing its other complaints; "its beautiful hand drawn style combined with what will I'm sure be one of, if not the best" soundtracks of the year, reads a glowing one. Several reviewers describe genuinely being won over on a genre they didn't expect to like specifically because of how the game looks and sounds in motion -- "I went from thinking: beat em ups are boring > Absolum is not for me > Absolum is fun > 100% the game," reads one, crediting the game with "gently altering my gamer spirit." That's an unusually strong, consistent signal for presentation specifically, independent of how any individual reviewer felt about the systems underneath it.

Real narrative ambition, unusual for the genre

Beat 'em ups have traditionally treated story as scaffolding between fight scenes. Absolum tries for more, weaving unfolding narrative threads across characters and repeat runs rather than a flat save-the-world plot, and multiple reviewers single this out as a pleasant surprise: "what I got was surprisingly heart felt," reads one, describing a straightforward "evil guy is slowly killing the land" premise that develops more texture than expected as runs accumulate. It's not universal praise -- outside coverage flagged for this review notes the narrative "struggles to match the grandeur of its worldbuilding" for some critics -- but it's a genuine attempt at something the genre rarely bothers with, and it lands for a clear majority of the people who wrote about it.

The real problem: multiplayer stability

Set combat and presentation aside and the negative sample converges hard on one recurring, specific, technical complaint: co-op sessions crashing and dropping players. "The game crashing on multiplayer together almost every single time," reads one review from a couple who otherwise loved the game enough to finish it once already. "Multiplayer doesnt work most of the time," reads another, "and the interloper boss has ruined two runs. The boss stops losing health making the run unwinnable" -- a specific, game-breaking bug on a named late-game encounter, independently corroborated by the shape of a second review describing crashes "on the final boss of the game on two different hour-long playthroughs, and having no way to recover the lost games." For a game whose co-op is one of its most consistently praised features -- multiple reviewers describe warm, memorable sessions with partners and even children -- these are not minor annoyances. They're the single most repeated, most specific complaint in the entire negative sample, and worth checking current patch notes for before committing a co-op weekend to it.

"We have Hades at home"

The second real fault line in Absolum's reception is about its bones rather than its bugs. A meaningful minority of detailed reviews argue the run structure and elemental upgrade system lean too heavily on Hades' template without contributing enough that's genuinely new. "'We have Hades at home'," one review opens, bluntly, before crediting the game's art, voice acting and character variety and still landing on a thumbs-down over the progression loop specifically. Another describes the game as devolving into "'1 punch, 10 different explosions' once you unlock some of the latter elemental upgrade trees," arguing the colour-coded damage system is "as uninspired as in Hades" and rarely pushes a genuinely different playstyle. It's a fair critique of a specific system, not a rejection of the whole game -- most of the reviewers making this argument still praise the combat feel and presentation in the same breath -- but it's a real ceiling on how far Absolum's roguelite half innovates versus how far its beat 'em up half does.

A smaller, related complaint concerns single-player-specific balance: enemies "mob up around you," parrying isn't omnidirectional, and elite encounters lean on RNG in ways a few reviewers say feel unfair rather than hard. This reads as the sharper edge of a design built with co-op very much in mind, where the difficulty math assumes more bodies on screen to spread aggro.

Verdict

8.0 out of 10. Absolum earns its acclaim -- Metacritic 87, 93.6% positive on Steam, and a chorus of players naming it a genuine Game of the Year contender in a year stacked with much bigger releases -- on the strength of combat that stands comfortably next to Streets of Rage 4, hand-drawn presentation that wins over even its critics, and a real, if imperfect, attempt at beat-'em-up storytelling with actual weight. It loses points here specifically for two documented, repeated problems rather than vague reservations: co-op stability that's dropped and corrupted real players' runs, up to and including a specific boss-breaking bug, and a progression system a genuine minority of thoughtful reviewers find too close to Hades' shadow to fully call its own. Neither sinks the game. Both are worth knowing before you buy it -- especially the first, if you're planning to play it the way its biggest fans say it's best played: with someone else in the room.