Absolver

Sloclap's martial-arts brawler is one of the few fighting games where the most important decisions happen before the fight, in a menu that is really a character sheet. It is also compact, online and a little rough around the edges, and it is worth knowing which of those you are buying.

What you are actually playing

Absolver is a third-person martial-arts brawler from Sloclap, published by Devolver Digital, and it is a fighting game with a walk in front of it. You wake in the ruins of the Adal Empire wearing a mask, cross open ground, meet other Prospects, and pick fights to earn moves and gear. The fighting is where the game lives: four stances, a deck of attacks you assemble yourself, and a single defensive ability that quietly decides which exchanges you are good at.

The fighting comes in two halves. The campaign is yours to work through against offline opponents, with nobody else needed online, and that is where you can learn new attacks and hunt gear on your own. The open world is also shared, and other players walk into it: you cannot tell from a distance whether they want to spar, duel or simply pass through, which is most of the tension the shared map has. The structured play is the Combat Trials: 1v1 duels, plus a 3v3 Overtake mode that shipped a few months after launch, all fought for rank and rewards.

The deck is the character

There is no class and no fixed moveset. Your deck is a list of attacks you arrange yourself, and each of the four stances holds its own set. You begin with almost nothing, and every move you want has to be earned, either by defending against it in a fight or by learning it from someone who already knows it. Then you decide where it goes.

That is the whole game in one idea: what you can do in a fight is something you built. A deck that flows is one where each attack leaves you in the stance that holds the next one, so a good sequence plays as a route rather than a list. You can change stance on the fly mid-fight, and this is where decks are won and lost. A careless arrangement leaves you standing in the wrong guard with the wrong move loaded, which is not where you want to be while someone swings at you.

The cost is that Absolver is often at its most interesting before the fight starts. If the best weapon in a fighting game being a menu sounds like the appeal, it is. If you want to pick a character and learn their buttons, this is a lot of homework bolted to a fighting game.

You are not guessing at any of it, either. Open an attack in the list and it shows its own numbers: range, stamina cost, impact on a raised guard and the advantage frames it leaves you on a hit. Absolver is a fighting game that hands you the frame data, and decks get sharper the moment you start reading it.

Styles decide what defence means

Every character picks a Combat Style, and the style changes what defending actually does. Kahlt Method absorbs hits without being stunned or pushed back, and returns some of the health you lose when the counter that follows lands. Forsaken parries and briefly stuns. Windfall avoids the strike and slows the attacker for a moment, which opens a counter window rather than a free hit. Stagger, the fourth style, is a drunken-boxing variation that fights to its own rhythm, and Downfall added Faejin, drawn from Bruce Lee's Jeet Kune Do, which changes its defensive ability depending on your input and the stance you are in.

Defence is not only the style ability. Guarding, feinting and manual dodging are all still there, and Downfall added Resilience: when your Resilience is at least as high as an attack's power level, that hit will not interrupt you. Two players in the same arena can hold completely different ideas about which exchange they want to be in.

So the same fight plays out differently depending on which answer you own. A Windfall player is waiting for the strike to slip past. A Kahlt player is looking to eat it and hit back. Two characters in identical gear can approach one exchange in completely different ways, and that is the reason Absolver's fights stay interesting well past the first few hours.

Schools, and the people you learn from

The social side is not a lobby bolted on afterwards. You can join a School, learn from a mentor, and eventually run one yourself with students of your own. A school lends its deck and its powers to its members while they are in it, and using that deck against enemies is how its moves become yours. School Challenges then turn that into a season: reach Disciple rank, take your school's loadout into 1v1 Combat Trials, and the wins your school racks up pay out rewards on a three-week cycle.

That is a better reason to care who is on the other side of the arena than a friends list. It is also the part of the game with the sharpest edges, because learning from people depends on people being there to learn from, and a school's rewards only matter if you keep turning up to defend them.

Downfall, and what came free

Absolver got one expansion, and Sloclap gave it away. Downfall arrived in 2018 as a free update and added a dedicated PvE dungeon mode: a run through the Adalian Mines, alone or in online co-op, against upgraded enemies and three boss fights, with the Gleam you collect feeding upgrades and eventually unlocking the Faejin style. The base game's shared world already had its own PvE fights, so treat the mines as the focused dungeon run rather than the only place to test yourself offline. Downfall also added School Challenges and rewrote how every enemy in the game fights, which changed the original world fights too.

The paid extras stay small. The Adalian Forest Pack is cosmetic gear with the same stats as pieces you can already earn, so it buys a look rather than an advantage. The rest of the money goes on the soundtrack and a Deluxe edition that bundles it with a digital artbook. Nothing essential sits behind a paywall.

Powers, gear and the long game

Beyond the deck, every fighter carries a few Powers. Downfall's set is a good sample of what they do: a burst of cut damage on bare hands, a shield that stops your own attacks being interrupted, a stun that disarms the opponent and drags their weapon towards you, and a short window where you slip every incoming hit. They unlock in the Essence Shop once your Gleam level is high enough, which ties the mines back into the rest of the game.

Gear runs a similar long game. Weapons and armour drop from fights and from Rift Disks, the loot boxes you buy with crystals. Crystals come with prestige levels past level 60, and they also pay for attribute resets and appearance changes. Spare pieces break down into fragments, and those fragments turn an aged piece back into a new one. It is a lot of systems for a game about punching people, and all of them feed the two things that matter: your look and your deck.

What it costs you

The first cost is the connection. The shared world and online Combat Trials need a stable connection; the campaign can also be played offline.

The other cost is scale. Absolver is a compact game: the open world is a route between fights rather than a place to live, and the long tail is duels, schools and the mines rather than new regions to roam.

One practical note: the store page's own system requirements recommend a gamepad. Absolver's defence is built on direction and timing, and the fighting is laid out with a controller in mind.

Should you play it

Yes, if the idea of assembling your own martial art sounds better than picking one off a list. Absolver's fights are still unlike anything else in the genre: the stances, the deck and the style abilities all point at the same question, which is what you actually know how to do when the pressure arrives.

Skip it if you want a large world, a long campaign or a fighting game you can play next to someone on the same couch. Absolver is an online brawler with a small map, a high skill ceiling and no local co-op, and the people who stay with it stay for the deck.