Right now,
Absolver is on Free Weekend w/ Steam and all. Will end in a few hours - i.e. 4pm EST Time / 1pm PST.
For those who don't know of the game...
Absolver on Steam -
https://store.steampowered.com/app/473690/Absolver/
Absolver on GOG -
https://www.gog.com/game/absolver
Absolver is basically an online/offline open-world sandbox-style fighting-ARPG.
You're gonna learn stances, kicks, punches, moves, and all kinds of styles from playing.
Up to you, if you want to play offline or online. Very cool.
Problem I see, namely from playing offline, is this: if you're gonna play offline...well, you're gonna need to get really good, grind a lot, and/or the areas at times might be sparse w/ not much happening. When online - you have other players you can help or fight against at any moment, which really keeps the gameplay, combat & action going since there's a fair amount of people playing right now...especially since the game feels very bare-bones on the story, lore, and all of that stuff; and doesn't really have NPC's dishing out quests to you.
Games of this style, like Dark Souls, keep the lore in the Inventory descriptions (for equipment - whether weapons, armor, items, keys, etc etc); have a few NPC's that talk but don't waste any words; and/or might even have enemies thrown dead or placed in certain ways in certain areas in which those who are paying attention can really understand there is a plot & story visually (and esoterically) being told there. Unfortunately, feels like Absolver is doing none or not much of that.
I've spent a little bit of time with it. Man, it's tough. This is like Dark Souls type of tough. You will die a lot - whether from other players on the server (if you're playing online) or from the CPU. You are gonna have to either learn the game, the enemies, their patterns, and "get good" (i.e. Dark Souls type of game); grind a bit to get somewhere; or a decent mixture of both "get good" and grind away enough to move forward.
When defeating enemies - you can gain more moves, maybe some gear, and whatnot. You can also find gear and stuff in the game-world, too - in chests, under objects, or somewhere; just look around and keep your eyes open.
Combat's awesome. Plays great with a XBox Controller, if you are into fighting games of that sort & style. If you like fighting games - yeah, you should be using a controller here in the first place anyways; you're going to need to be very precise w/ your movements, motions, directions, and everything here. If not - well, you're gonna be toast. You do have different stances from what school of combat you take on (at the start); skills you learn form beating opponents; and whatnot - which is all pretty cool. You can flesh out your own "deck" (set) of moves, at some point - but, I ain't really done that yet. Still trying to get to grips w/ the combat.
Art-style is not super-technical, but leans more on the artistic side of things here - aiming at looking different, interesting, mysterious, cool, and unique. It looks cool and unique, which is great - but performance can be all over the place, which isn't so great. Had to drop it to 1080p with a mix of most stuff on High & some on Medium w/ V-Sync off, just to keep it stable around 50-60fps and not jumping around all over the place at any second on my desktop PC (i7 950; 16 GB RAM; GTX 970; W7 64-bit).
So, yeah - it's cool, so far. It's good, but still...probably not as awesome as I was hoping for. It has a great foundation here - but if they can add all kinds of content in that planned upcoming
next Downfall free update - yeah, that could really turn the tides into making it great.
