Hey, for folks interested in free games:
There’s a game that’s currently free on PSN called “Absolver”.
It’s actually… really good.
It’s a melee fighter, with an online component.
Most of the game is an open world, which reminds me somewhat of a cell shaded Dark Souls type environment. A big, windy world that is broken into various regions. No load times between any of it. You run around and are attacked by NPCs. Also, there are other players running around, and you can fight them, or help them.
The combat is both simple and deceptively deep.
You have a “Combat deck”, which allows you to assign moves to one of the two buttons. You really only have two buttons for combat, Square and Triangle, plus a dodge button. But your combat deck lets you assign pretty much any move to them.
The depth comes in that there are essentially 4 “stances” that you can be in. Each stance has a certain subset of the moves which can be used from that stance, and when the move is finished, it puts you into another stance. So, pushing square will execute different moves depending on what stance you are in, and your stance changes based on what moves you execute (and you can also manually flip into any stance). So designing your combat deck becomes a matter of setting it up so that you can fluidly move through different stances and attacks as necessary.
Additionally, your character has a “style”, which gives it some additional skill. Like being able to absorb attacks, or slowing down an opponent when you dodge their attacks.
You start out with a fairly limited set of different moves, but you learn new moves by having opponents attack you with them and either blocking or dodging them. If you block or dodge a new attack that you don’t know, and then you end up defeating that opponent, you will learn that move. Or rather, you’ll gain “experience” for that move, and after you dodge or block it enough, you’ll learn it and be able to add it into your combat deck.
You also find armor and weapons and stuff. Weapons have their own moves, used in the same way. Armor is very much like Dark Souls armor, in that different pieces have weight, which slows you down, while offering different amounts of defense against different types of attacks.
Anyway, I highly recommend checking this game out. It’s free for PSN+ members this month.
