Author: Game Infliction

It would be easy to take a quick look at Crimson Desert and assume it’s another fantasy action game where you hack and slash your way through enemies with repeated presses of the attack button. And if you equip your protagonist, Kliff, with a sword, you can certainly do that. But tap two of your controller’s face buttons together and he’ll lunge, thrusting the blade directly forward. If you then press both the light and heavy attack buttons at the same time, he’ll transition into a powerful, magic-infused overhead slam, bringing his sword down in an arc of dizzying particle effects. There’s more than one way to swing a sword, basically – and that applies to everything in your combat arsenal.

Transition from aiming a bow into a dodge roll and you’ll trigger a brief window of medieval Matrix slow motion, perfect for scoring a headshot. Cast a spell at the apex of a jump and you’ll launch yourself into the air, riding the energy of the magic’s blast (do it twice more to climb even higher). And, in perhaps the most entertaining example, hold two face buttons in conjunction with shifting the direction of the left analogue stick to unleash a variety of increasingly amusing wrestling moves, from simple grapples to human hammer throws.

For this month’s IGN First, we spoke to the design team at Crimson Desert developer Pearl Abyss to learn how they crafted this deep, multi-layered combat system. The very first thing they said was both surprising and helped contextualize everything: one of the key inspirations for Crimson Desert’s combat was retro arcade games like Samurai Showdown, Final Fight, and King of Fighters. Suddenly, all those multi-button combos and linked moves make much more sense.

But those fighting game combos are not necessarily the thing that Pearl Abyss intended to replicate. The team cites the strong sense of impact that comes with each blow, both inflicted and received, as a key aspect they wanted to capture. That’s clear not just in the visuals, but in the crunchy audio – the sound design team directly references Capcom as an inspiration. But across the 10 different boss battles I’ve fought so far, plus plenty more skirmishes in the open world, it’s clear that there’s more to it than that. Fighting game characters have access to many, many different moves that can be chained together to create unique approaches and strategies. Open world action games, on the other hand, typically have a much more restrained move set – a dodge, attack, and counter, for instance. But despite being a fantasy open world game itself, Crimson Desert’s long list of combat moves seems to be gunning for the breadth of options that fighting games thrive on.

Kliff’s ever-expanding ability tree means there’s a multitude of ways to approach any fight. It’s not just ranged vs melee, but the more minute choices within those options. Will you weave kicks and suplexes into your swordfight? Channel lightning down your blade? Use whistling arrows to summon artillery strikes? The important takeaway here is that Pearl Abyss refuses to provide any real strict definition for Crimson Desert’s combat system – unlike something like Batman: Arkham, there’s no rhythm or pattern to follow. The combat team told me that they had no interest in creating a game where you have to respond to on-screen prompts by pressing specific buttons, the kind of system we’ve seen in games like Mad Max, Shadow of Mordor, and both Marvel’s Avengers and Spider-Man games. Instead, the studio aims to fulfill a player’s fantasies by allowing them to do whatever they want in any situation.

That arguably makes Crimson Desert’s approach to battle a bit loose, and for some, the distinct lack of rules or rhythm may be frustrating. There are no hard counters for particular enemies, for instance, nor any kind of strict rock, paper, scissors relationships between different attack or defence types. A particular weapon may be stronger against shielded enemies, for instance, but there’s no requirement for you to use it. The same applies to bosses – while they certainly have attack patterns that can be memorised and weaknesses that can be exploited, Pearl Abyss has no interest in demanding you pay attention to that. The team believes any method of attack should be valid (within reason – you can’t swing a 500-pound monster by its ankles, of course.)

This “there if you want it, but no worries if you don’t” approach extends out into the world itself. The BlackSpace engine that powers Crimson Desert is able to simulate elemental reactions, so water can either freeze or conduct electricity when struck by the correct spell, while wood will burn and smoulder when set alight. The combat team cites the modern Legend of Zelda games as inspiration for this, in which there’s constant interaction between you and the environment. But this is very much a system that you can master and exploit if you choose to, rather than a core component of combat. For instance, there won’t be a boss battle where you have to freeze water to hold your foe in place, or coax them into a metal grid you can then electrify with a lightning spell.

Kliff is not a wizard, and so his spells come courtesy of a bracelet that grants him simple mastery over fire, ice, and lightning. But new weapons and gear help expand his ability set further than the unlocks on your skill tree. There’s a spear, for instance, which opens up like a propeller and blasts enemies with bursts of wind like a deadly Airzooka, and a sword that summons an angry genie-like creature. The further you progress, though, the wilder the options become. Kliff is able to ride a number of mounts, which in the early hours are simple horses with no remarkable talents. But head into territory held by The Black Bears and you’ll be able to saddle up on a massive grizzly, which can swipe at foes with sharpened claws, effectively thinning out herds of barbarians.

Fast forward a few hours and things become stranger still. Your simple horse could be traded for a raptor. Yes, you can ride on the back of a literal dinosaur. If you prefer your scaly mounts to fly and breathe fire, then Crimson Desert also has that covered, too – fantasy’s most important creature is present and correct here, and in the game’s later hours you’ll be able to command Tristar the dragon, who’ll swoop in at your beck and call. But that’s not the wildest option. Dispelling any notion that this is a typical high fantasy video game, in Crimson Desert, you can pilot a mech. Yes, really.

The dwarven-engineered battle robot is a late-game treat that asks the question: What if a Bioshock Big Daddy and a Titanfall mech had a baby? Equipped with thrusters, machine guns, multi-target-lock homing rockets, and a wide-radius EMP blast, your sword-and-board-wielding enemies don’t stand a chance.

It’s been seven years since the last Battlefield campaign. A decade since the last one set in the modern day — the intriguing, but ultimately flawed Hardline. In that time, Doom and its sequels took the speed of a single-player first-person shooter to the next level, Titanfall 2 pushed level design forward in inventive ways, and even Call of Duty reinvented itself on several different occasions to varying degrees of success. But Battlefield 6 has little interest in innovation, instead firmly looking back at what made the series so successful two console generations ago. Aside from being an impressive technical showcase at times, its small set of routine missions has little new to offer. There is some variety and a few moments of impressive scale to be found, but it’s all over so quickly you barely have time to savour them. Though it never quite feels like a full-on afterthought, it’s a campaign that comes across as the sidearm of Battlefield 6’s arsenal when placed alongside its more grand multiplayer suite.

Across its nine missions, Battlefield 6 zips around at a furious pace, but I couldn’t help but feel that I’d done it all before, albeit at much lower fidelity. It’s flashy, but lacking when it comes to genuinely interesting level design, with its great feeling gunplay not supported by what you’re asked to achieve with it. On one hand, it makes sense for Battlefield Studios to take this approach and treat the campaign as a training ground for its trademark large-scale online warfare — the pure size and number of enemies that flood the screen in its missions are certainly in conversation with this. But in the other palm, it crushes all hope of crafting a thrilling story that has the chance of stepping out of the shadow cast by those multiplayer modes.

That’s not to say there aren’t splashes of inspiration. A particular highlight was a sequence that takes place on a crumbling New York bridge. It’s at least visually interesting, even if it offers no great variance in what it’s asking you to do gameplay-wise. There’s just no one mission that screams out as an all-timer here, even if there are attempts to ape Modern Warfare’s Clean House — which fails to capture any of the desired tension — or its own version of a Normandy landing as you storm a Gibraltar beach. It’s, oddly, very much a ‘Call of Duty’ campaign in its map and objective design, and struggles to stamp much of the signature Battlefield large-scale action that made me fall in love with the series. I find it frustrating not to see risks being taken creatively, especially when such a vast budget is available to fuel such ambition.

One later chapter set amongst the mountains of Tajikistan does take place in a wide open area and echoes the multiplayer roots of the series, as you’re encouraged to take your own approach when completing the task at hand. In theory, this could be exciting, with all manner of airborne and ground vehicles ready to be controlled at your fingertips and a vast library of weaponry and gadgets to gear up with. In practice, it presents as more of a thin veneer of choice rather than drastically different ways to tackle objectives, with the range of tools at your disposal kept frustratingly limited. You’re given a drone to play with and a choice of ATVs and armored trucks to drive, but little beyond that. I’m just not a fan of this larger map approach when it comes to first-person shooter campaigns, much preferring an authored hand to level design, rather than being handed a box of crayons to make my own fun with. These stretches are worryingly close to Modern Warfare 3’s “open combat missions” at times — a memory I never wanted to relive, yet again so soon after, but at least they do feel philosophically more at home as Battlefield arenas.

Thankfully, these don’t make up the majority of the campaign, but what’s found in its smaller scope staging isn’t any more exciting. You’ll often find yourself hunkering down in tight city streets or behind hulking tanks, waiting for the right opportunity to pop your head out. A run-and-gun mentality simply isn’t welcomed here, with a patient, cover-based approach encouraged — the gunplay is snappy at least, with a satisfying weight to it whenever you do choose to open fire. Assault rifles and LMGs pack a powerful punch and serve as efficient tools when faced with another wave of enemies, and sniper rifles are satisfingly devastating — even if the enemy AI displays little brain to blow out. It gets especially exciting when the impressive destruction tech takes a chunk out of the building you’ve been finding solace in, and you’re forced to scramble to another safe haven. These claustrophobic moments of true jeopardy really are all too rare, though, as for the most part, the campaign is reduced to rinse and repeat objectives that were getting old in FPS campaigns a decade ago.

Having one mission include a sequence where you need to destroy anti-aircraft guns or SAM sites can be forgiven, but doing this on more than three occasions is just downright boring and grinds any gathered momentum to a halt. There are only so many times planting C4 can be considered a fun time, and all too often, you are tasked with standing still amongst the action and pressing a single button in order to continue. On multiple occasions, I was asked to watch some explosions that I didn’t even get to set off take place, or sit in the back of a speeding vehicle and control a mounted turret that only gives you a mild feeling of being responsible for the carnage on screen. It’s on-rails all too often, taking its most exciting moments out of your hands and displaying them in cutscenes, resulting in much of the campaign feeling like the most straight-faced Disney ride ever built. I wanted to be the star of the show, but I just ended up feeling like a passenger.

An early mission that takes you through an abandoned WW2 tunnel network-turned-museum to the decades-old war serves as an unfortunate symbol for the campaign as a whole — a relic of first-person-shooter design dressed up in a new guise. Being funneled through corridors towards the next static shooting gallery to gun down fish in a barrel is hardly exciting in 2025, and it barely was 20 years ago. Outside of a series of tank battles as dry as the desert roads they take place on, it attempts to sprinkle very little of that Battlefield magic into the mix, largely negating environment destruction as part of your toolkit and never once putting you in control of an airborne vehicle. Is it really Battlefield if I’m never zooming along in a fighter jet or unleashing hell from a helicopter gunship?

There’s a slight glimmer of tactical ops magic to be seen, as you can call on your squadmates to activate their personalised skills to help you in a fight. They each come packed with their own multiplayer-class-flavoured abilities, such as Gecko, the recon specialist, being able to tag targets, which, admittedly, does make certain situations ridiculously easy, as every enemy in the area is revealed to you instantly. Ultimately, though, each member ends up playing practically the same and feels like another missed opportunity to add a dash of variety into the mix.

They each fall under the banner of an expert Marine Raider squad called Dagger 1-3 — an unfittingly sharp name for such a dull bunch. On the whole, they’re a fairly cookie-cutter military unit who love nothing more than getting their boots on the ground and shouting “hooah”, with memorable character moments near non-existent. The performances and the shells of humans they inhabit are wholly forgettable, barely coming across as fully formed, and it’s hard to detect any sort of emotion, even when one of their own falls in the line of fire. Nuance is hardly the name of the game when it comes to Battlefield 6’s campaign, though, and its story, centered on taking down a rogue private military force called Pax Armata (ironically, Latin for Armed Peace), proves to be anything but a peaceful one.

It’s a fairly straightforward affair that doesn’t leave too much room for interpretation. For a military shooter about the collapse of NATO, it’s all oddly apolitical in its presentation, and as such, it feels like it has nothing of real substance to say. It’s safe, and as a result, largely uninteresting. At least Call of Duty has attempted to take on subjects such as chemical warfare and terrorism, even if they’ve ultimately been misguided efforts that come across as antithetical to its larger message. It’s not easy to present such important themes delicately, so I can understand why Battlefield Studios may have felt like trying to fire and catch a bullet laced with hot-button issues may have been a risk not worth taking when it could simply choose not to pull the trigger at all. It just means it doesn’t have anything to say on a global or personal level, and all feels a little hollow as a result. It’s a far cry from when the series did tell some engaging tales through the eyes of fun characters in its Bad Company days.

I did also fall victim a few annoying little glitches on the way, such as my character zipping across the screen involuntarily, fuzzy textures popping in, and occasional bullets aimed right at enemy heads leaving zero impact. But on the whole, there’s no denying that it looks and sounds very impressive, with spectacular explosions peppering skylines and gunfire whizzing and cutting through smoke and debris as mayhem ensues around you with regularity. I just wish there was a little more substance hiding behind it all.

Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.

They say “insanity” is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result, but if I believed that, I wouldn’t play video games – and I certainly wouldn’t be playing roguelikes. They are, by definition, doing a lot of the same things over and over again and expecting that this time, this time, Steve, shall be different. This time, I am going to bash my head against that boss until that mother goes down. This time, I’m going to make it to the end of the run, and I’m going to look fabulous doing it. This time will be different. Those are the things I tell myself as I die for the umpteenth time in Absolum, a roguelite beat ‘em up that’s fun enough to convince myself it just might be true every single time.

There is, of course, the undeniable possibility that I’ve gone ‘round the bend, full on cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, lock-me-in-a-padded-room, Looney-Tunes-finger-on-lips bonkers. I’ll leave that up to you. The point, reader, is that if you’d put a gun to my head five hours into Absolum and demanded that I score it on the spot, it’d be a lot lower than the score you see on the bottom of this page. But I’m a professional, and you don’t turn the movie off halfway through. There are large parts of Absolum’s fusion of genres that don’t work, and those growing pains are most obvious early on. But if you push through that weak start and get to the point where you’ve got some permanent rewards, have opened up the map, and runs end with you operating with a full kit and making good progress, it comes together quite nicely, even if it’s still never quite the game I wanted it to be.

“Roguelite beat ‘em up” is a combination of words that I never expected to see, much less put in a sentence, but here we are. Because it’s a roguelite, you need a reason to die, and a reason to come back. The reason to die is simple: the land of Talamh, broken by a magical cataclysm (bro, what is it with mages and magical cataclysms? Why can’t they ever bumble their way into magical utopias?), has been taken over by Sun King Azra. Wizards are enslaved, and the general populace, still a bit miffed by the whole “breaking the world” thing, are understandably not super upset about it. You play as one of the rebels using that forbidden magic in an attempt to bring him down. That’s the “how you’ll die” part.

The “why you’ll come back” part is because you’re working for Uchawi, the last of the Root Sisters, and as you bite it, she swoops in and saves your ass from being condemned to a permanent end. Live, die, get saved by Uchawi, repeat. The Sun King must die. And you gotta kill him.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I love a good ol’ fashioned “somebody done somebody/a lot of somebodies/society/the world at large wrong and now that somebody gotta die” story as much as the next guy, but Absolum’s problem is that the story isn’t that interesting for a good chunk of its runtime, especially early on. Yeah, there are some compelling character moments, the general history of the world is cool, and some conversations enticingly imply more questions than they answer. There’s more going on here than meets the eye, but a lot of it is couched in a fairly generic fantasy setting. Dwarves live underground, they delved too greedily and too deep (figuratively), bad things happened; elves have a mythical, lost land; the strong rule in many places so you can gain entrance by beating up The Current Big Boss, blah blah blah. The story does go to some cool places eventually (and, like Hades, you really gotta play it to completion multiple times to see everything), but man does it take a while to get there.

It’s good, then, that the playing part of Absolum rules. In a lot of ways, it’s a standard beat ‘em up with four different characters to pick from (though you only start with the first two listed here): Karl, the bruiser dwarf with a gun; Galandra, the elven knight with a massive sword; Cider, a nimble thief who is almost more machine than woman; and Brome, the frog-shaped spellcaster. Each character has a standard combo, a throw, a strike unique to that character – Galandra uses her sword, Cider pulls herself to enemies, and so on – a couple of unique special attacks tied to a meter, and an Ultimate Attack.

The real sicko stuff comes when you combine everything to form long combos, bounce enemies off walls or each other, and chain moves together in a symphonic beatdown that would make the deepest action game aficionado blush. Absolum was made by the teams behind Streets of Rage 4, and, as you’d expect, it absolutely has the sauce. I particularly loved the way so many moves paid homage to the greats: Cider’s Gyro Drop is essentially Ryu Hayabusa’s Izuna Drop, many of Galandra’s moves recall Devil May Cry’s Dante, and so on. If you know, you know. If you don’t, they’re just cool moves.

The big thing separating Absolum from its beat ‘em up brethren, aside from the whole “man, can you get lost in this sauce and it tastes good” combo-mad gameplay, is its focus on defense. You can dodge, which is pretty normal for a modern beat ’em up, but if you dodge toward an enemy at the right time, you can deflect their attacks, potentially opening them up. If you’re feeling particularly spicy, though, you can time your strikes with an enemy’s attack to cause a clash and stun them for a hot second, allowing you to lay into them with a sweet, sweet punish combo. This is harder, but the payoff is huge. And it feels great when you land it against a boss who was kicking the crap out of you and then the timing clicks and they can’t hit you no more. On a moment to moment gameplay level, Absolum’s bona fides are unimpeachable.

Its problems instead stem from its structure as a roguelite. Unlocking new rituals that power up your attacks, deflects, clashes, dodges, and so on each run is fine. I particularly like the ones that spawn throwable knives and allow you to extend combos by locking dudes into a bubble or hitting them with chain lighting. Finding a mount to help you out? Awesome. Buying or finding some trinkets to boost your stats or hiring a mercenary (or finding a chicken) to follow you around and help out in combat? That stuff is great.

What sucks is that parts of each character’s kit have clearly been chopped up and segmented into upgrades called Inspirations for you to temporarily acquire during your runs. Galandra’s dive kick? Amazing. Life-changing. The same is true of her three-hit sword combo. She should always have it. She doesn’t only because this is a roguelite and we have to have something to upgrade, a reason to choose that path that you know will end in an Inspiration. When you go from that one hit sword attack to the three-hit combo, it’s like being struck by lightning. The same is true of Cider’s Legally Distinct Izuna Drop or her ability to dash through enemies. “Oh,” I said, after getting them once. “This is how it should always be.” These are core parts of these characters’ identities and kits. They shouldn’t all be locked behind random upgrades. Like, give me something here that I don’t have to unlock besides my strikes and special attacks, y’all. Just a little bit of fun, as a treat. Admittedly, once you learn what paths lead to upgrades (Absolum is a roguelike, but its map does not change), you’ll quickly learn what the optimal path is, and likely never deviate from it.

The other problem is the persistent progression. Absolum isn’t a game you’re meant to beat on the first run. You’re supposed to die – a lot – while you build up the currency needed to acquire permanent upgrades (and find new paths full of rewards) to get you through future runs. Yeah, sure, if you’re really good at Absolum, you might be able to progress faster, but the margin of error early on is very, very small. In both solo and co-op, I often felt like I was dying because my numbers just weren’t high enough. It doesn’t help that Absolum is pretty stingy on health pickups. This structure might work in a game like Hades, but there’s very little narrative meat to chew on between runs, and in a beat ‘em up – a genre where you’re traditionally able to get by on sheer skill – it feels bad to be a slave to the Evil God of Numbers. I genuinely hate it when RPG elements get in the way of my action game, and that happens a lot in Absolum’s early hours.

At the beginning, runs feel like you’re going through the motions. You always start at the same place, and you have very limited paths to choose from. That means seeing the same enemies, environments, and bosses over and over and over again with very little room for change. Yes, there are quests, and exciting new things do pop up from time to time – I’ll never forget the first time I went to [redacted] (trust me, you’ll know when it happens) – but there is a lot of repetition here, and Absolum doesn’t handle it the way the best roguelikes, like FTL, for example, do. In the early hours, I often felt like a broken record, testing that definition of insanity. Even the joy of finding a secret chest is dulled by the fact that it’s always there, in the same place, every time. While the stuff you’ll get changes and new things do get added, the map itself never fundamentally changes. There’s not enough Rogue to this roguelite. It can’t just be a progression system. It has to be everything around that, too, and implementing that clashes with the way beat ‘em ups work.

It does eventually click; around 8 hours in, my mastery and Having Enough Numbers dovetailed, and I started to make more and more progress on each run. The jump was pretty substantial, and once that happened, I began to enjoy myself a lot more. On the one hand, yay, less repetition! On the other hand, I think there’s something to be said for games using mechanics and structure to reinforce their narrative. Dying over and over again while you work to take down a tyrant would suck! It would wear on you! I think that decision helps Absolum’s story, but I don’t think that story is strong enough, especially initially, to earn that. It doesn’t feel intentional; instead, it feels like padding out a runtime that could (and should) be much shorter.

And it sucks to feel that way, because so much of Absolum is so good. When it hits, it hits, kids. It’s beautiful, the soundtrack is wonderful, the combat has the sauce, there are cool build opportunities, and on and on it goes. But man could I have gone without the repetition. There’s a better version of this game somewhere that’s about half of the 20 or so hours it took me to see the conclusion of the main story. Unfortunately, it’s not the one we got, and if I wasn’t reviewing Absolum, I probably would have bowed out before it ever clicked. My co-op partner did, and I can’t blame him for it.