We're residing within the new golden age of 2D beat-'em-ups—however the most effective one launched this yr had one foot in a special style completely
Private Decide
Along with our essential Sport of the Yr Awards 2025, every member of the PC Gamer staff is shining a highlight on a sport they liked this yr. We’ll put up new private picks every day all through the remainder of the month. You could find all of them right here.
Certainly one of my greater disappointments this yr in gaming was reviewing Marvel Cosmic Invasion. In some ways, it is a fantastic sport—a throwback to the arcade beat-’em-up period that proves how enjoyable and satisfying that traditional components can nonetheless be. However on the identical time, it looks like that devotion to nostalgia holds it again, with a brief marketing campaign and few incentives to replay.
In a number of methods, they’re very related. They’re each side-scrolling beat-’em-ups with an emphasis on honing your expertise, they’re each dropped at life with beautiful 2D animation, and so they even each have the identical writer: Dotemu. However the place Marvel Cosmic Invasion is a throwback to the previous, Absolum is an interesting swing at a potential future for the style.
The core conceit is that the sport combines a beat-’em-up with the construction of a roguelike. On the face of it, that is an apparent transfer—in spite of everything, we stay within the period the place something and all the pieces is a roguelike, from poker to Breakout to inventory buying and selling. However these are two flavours that style fantastically good collectively, and Absolum combines them with actual magnificence and, importantly, restraint.
The core downside of the beat-’em-up style in 2025 is content material. They’re video games designed to be beatable in two or three hours. As soon as upon a time, particularly within the arcade period, their longevity got here in being brutally troublesome. You have been anticipated to replay them time and again, mastering their nuances over time.
Within the fashionable period, that may really feel like a half-formed hook. Mastery is enjoyable, however we anticipate extra construction—development and variation.
Roguelike mechanics convey that to the desk in spades. On the floor, a run in Absolum is sort of a traditional arcade mode playthrough—you stroll onto a display filled with dangerous guys, beat all of them up, after which transfer on to the subsequent display, with bosses sprinkled in alongside the best way. However each time there are totally different upgrades to strive, quests to pursue, and secrets and techniques to find—and even failure earns boons again at camp and strikes the story ahead.
The extra you play, the extra Absolum’s world grows and adjustments. Your actions throughout runs can unlock new alternate routes by means of the totally different zones, or change your relationship with sure NPCs and factions, and it is filled with surprising occasions and encounters. There’s greater than just a little Hades to it—protecting a repetitive expertise contemporary by making the world acknowledge and react to your makes an attempt to beat it, quite than merely being a static and emotionless adversary.
However importantly, the weather of development are by no means allowed to take over. Getting additional and bettering is at all times about ability and mastery of the fight system quite than merely grinding for improved stats. Meta-upgrades unlocked at your base are extra about providing you with extra choices than merely making you higher, and loot found out within the area is just ever as highly effective as your capacity to deploy it.
It is nonetheless, at its core, a sport concerning the easy pleasure of getting actually good at punching—and even layers in mechanics impressed by different motion genres, akin to a brilliantly satisfying parry and counter system, to provide you much more to dig into.
As an alternative of eclipsing the sport’s beat-’em-up roots, the roguelike construction solely provides you extra methods and causes to have interaction with them, gently main you into totally different challenges, combating kinds, and discoveries that expose the nuances of what may at first look like a easy button-masher.
That is what makes me say this is likely to be the way forward for the style—as a result of by layering in one thing new, Absolum gives the right platform for displaying off what remains to be so compelling and fascinating a few components that stretches again 4 a long time.
Between video games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge, the River Metropolis Ladies sequence, and the upcoming Scott Pilgrim EX, beat-’em-up followers are already residing in a contemporary golden age for a style that not that way back felt useless for good. However I believe Absolum provides a potential path ahead, opening the style as much as completely new audiences. I can not wait to see what Dotemu and builders Guard Crush Video games and Supamonk do subsequent.