Hey you, I heard your breath smells like a fart. What are you gonna do about it? Fight me!? Excellent. I was hoping you’d say that, because I’ve put together a list of the 10 best fighting games on PC, and it would be fantastic if you came and had a look, gave your thoughts, and maybe elbowed me in the teeth while you’re at it. Finally, a decent reader willing to dropkick me. Matchmaking is hard.
All right, let’s take this outside, where the top 10 fighting games are waiting. How exciting.
]]>Another impressive month of deals in the Humble Monthly - I'm impressed at how consistently good Humble's subscribe-o-bundle has been this past year, and the next set headlines with a trio of gems. Northgard, Mutant Year Zero: Road To Eden and Absolver cover a wide spread of genres, but all three games are united by one common thread; they all got free expansions recently. You can snag all three together for a mere $12 (roughly £9), and you'll get an extra sack-full of mystery games at the end of the month. See some trailers and thoughts on the three games below.
]]>Hey, what are y-- get out of my house. No, I meant the mine, where the miners work. Not my house. Get off my armchair, stop eating my -- oh, okay, one fight, but then you’ve really got to go. This free update in Absolver won’t news itself. The skinny fighting game has just added new kicks and Bruce Lee punches and armour and powers, you see, but most importantly players can now dive into an abandoned mining complex where a random assortment of rooms and enemies will let them harvest a shiny new type of moneystuff to spend on fashionable new waistcoats. I’m going down there right after I knock you out. Here, this is your controller. Yes, the broken one. Hiiiiiiiiii-YAH!
]]>Oh my, are you really wearing THAT to your big fight? You need a new scarf, mate. And those scruffy elbow pads will simply not do. Lucky for you, fashionable fighting game (f)Absolver is getting its free expansion in a couple of weeks, now with a proper release date. It’s coming out September 25, say developers Sloclap in a post on the PlayStation blog. This is the ‘Downfall’ expansion, which brings a new Bruce Lee inspired fighting style, and a randomly generated dungeon into which to delve and re-delve, in search of the perfect sleeveless murderblouse.
]]>Hiiii-YAH. That was me kicking you in the nose. If you want revenge on behalf of your face, come and fight me in Absolver, the martial arts slap ‘em up. It’s got a free weekend on Steam now and its crumbling world is worth wandering through if you like the following things: Halloween masks, fashionable scarves, statues, crystals, stones arranged in a nice cairn, pretending to be drunk but actually being a dangerously powerful martial artist.
]]>Dust off your fashionable frog mask, fabsolvers. Martial arts biff-em-up Absolver is getting a new dungeon-diving mode and a fifth fighting style modeled after Bruce Lee's twitchy fists and kicky feet. We knew this free expansion was on the way but now we know it's due out some day in September. And there are other details about what you'll be punching in the new ‘Downfall' mode, which sees players descending into two new areas – the mines and temples of the fighting game's crumbling world.
]]>Listen up, you’re drumming on my time now. What’s the tune? It’s the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show of course. This week we are talking about music in games, and what makes a good game soundtrack. The bleeps and bloops of Pac Man? Or the orchestral panache of Oblivion? A lot of people requested this topic, so we’ve also done something special – a music quiz! Can you guess the game based on a few seconds of music? Even if you can, I doubt you’ll score higher than Katharine, who it turns out is, uh, quite interested in videogame music.
]]>Absolver, much like its cast of masked pugilists, is a fighter. Sloclap's stylish online brawler-RPG was plagued with server and balance issues through its first few months of life, but the studio believed in it, and haven't given up. For a while, the studio have been working on a major new update centred around a PvE mode featuring new environments and enemies, buffed up with fresh AI. Today, they teased that the reward for besting these new foes would be a fifth fighting style, inspired by one the greatest martial artists of the past century.
]]>We asked a handful of our contributors to put together a list of their three favourite games from 2017. Their picks are running across the week while the rest of RPS slumbers.
I've been thinking about time a lot recently - how we create and manipulate histories and the present in video games and in general - so you'll forgive me if my end-of-year choices are a bit Back to the Futurey.
]]>Let us podcast, lest we forget. The squad of the Electronic Wireless Show chat about some of the most overlooked and underappreciated games of this year. Katharine thinks head-in-a-sack trip to the underworld Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice might qualify, while Adam praises the unsettling tales of Stories Untold. Brendan just wants more people to slap in skinny-person biffing game Absolver. But we've also been playing some other good 'uns, including the magical realist family chronicle What Remains of Edith Finch and naval tactical battler Mare Nostrvm.
]]>My career in Street Fighter was a painfully short-lived experience. For a long time, I’d been trying to find a fighting game to really get into and to help me understand a genre I’d always been quietly interested in but entirely apart from. After being gifted Ultra Street Fighter 4 back in 2014, I was quickly hooked on the technical mastery and quick action - a few runs of Arcade, and I was even starting to feel competent. But getting good at Street Fighter, or any traditional fighting game, requires a strong level of commitment: lonely hours spent mastering frame data, grinding against opponents and the local competition. After a disastrous showing at a Dundee tournament, I was out.
Fighting games, I figured, just weren’t for me - until Absolver came around.
]]>Absolver, the martial arts fighting game that you're not very good at, now has a ‘prestige’ system that lets high-level players redistribute their skill points. Its latest update also brings Halloween masks, new cloaks, a means of obtaining more loot for post-level 60 players, and a way to turn duplicate pieces of gear into salvage, letting you sew up the holes in your natty old trousers. As someone who's been bashing and jabbing since the game's release, usually at fighters far superior to himself, I can confirm this is Absolver’s biggest update so far, and it offers some of the most sensible and in-demand features for the game’s audience of skinny biffers.
]]>Skinny weirdos in masks have been beating me up all month in martial arts biff-em-up Absolver [official site]. They’re called Absolvers because they grant absolution to my face with an endless barrage of kicks and slaps. Perhaps, with this latest update, I can finally treat an opponent to a sin-cleansing uppercut of my own. Patch 1.06 is mainly a bug-fixing effort, but it also disempowers the fastest attacks and tweaks absorbing guards. There’s also a handout of six masks based on other games by publisher Devolver, like a Hotline Miami chicken mask.
]]>Pow! Whack! Absolve! The martial arts biffing game Absolver [official site] is my hot cup of videogames at the moment. But like its slap-happy characters, it’s a bit on the skinny side. Once you’ve completed the story, there’s little remaining for the PvP-averse. And even online fighters might find themselves at a loss after mastering all the moves. So I asked creators Sloclap what’s in their fightpipes. The sad part is that new attacks, bosses and PvE areas are all at the back of the queue. The good news is there are a lot of small improvements coming, including a way to redistribute your character's skill points, and pigments for changing the colour of your raggedy trousers.
]]>The martial arts brawler Absolver [official site] is a beautiful arena for skinny people who are both very polite and incredulously angry. It’s a great bruiser but isn’t without serious flaws. The sometimes-insufferable lag, for one thing, is killing the 1v1 dueling mode for many. A small patch has recently been added, bringing cross-region support and some “improvements to server connection”, say developers Sloclap, with more fixes and improvements incoming. But a lot of players, myself included, are still encountering teleporty punches, stuttering kicks, disconnections and unstable matchmaking. That means toothless frowns all round.
]]>Martial arts fighting game Absolver [official site] is keeping me and many others happy with its fluid recreation of both fisticuffs and feeticuffs. But the move that has the brawling community most excited isn’t a whip-fast spinning kick or a sharp elbow to the top of the head – it’s a simple, shame-inducing slap to the face. Now, the most disrespectful thing you could do to another fighter is to get them down to their last sliver of health, then finish them with a single slap.
]]>Who owns those odd voices? It's the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show and guess what - we're all in the same room, with our actual bodies. Unprecedented. And there's a special guest this week too. Chris Bratt of Eurogamer joins us to talk about the alien-murdering of XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. It's a Brattcast! While Pip has been playing teen angst drama-llama Life Is Strange: Before the Storm and I'm still trying to discover an impossibly powerful attack in Absolver. Come listen.
]]>Our review has now been updated with post-release impressions. Read them below!
I stumbled into Raslan like a newborn foal, aimless and on wobbly legs. Absolver [official site] and its labyrinthine city are not gentle with Prospects, the masked warriors who make up the game's players and AI-controlled enemies, but I assume that ritualistic combat trials aren’t typically easy-going affairs. Regardless, for the last week I have persevered, fighting my way from lowly Prospect to the coveted position of Absolver. I remain absolutely lost.
]]>The Steam Charts aren't, as you may have been led to expect, large sprawling maps depicting the locations of all the world's known steam. They were, but due to government pressure we've altered them to list the top ten selling games on Steam, in reverse order, like a rocket taking off.
]]>Hark, it's the sweet vocal vibrations of the humble RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. The lads (lads lads) are back from the bright lights of Gamescom and ready to chat hard about the games they saw. But Pip is only giving us a maximum of three words about each one. Madness. Never mind, we can talk more verbosely about the alien-shooting of the Destiny 2 beta, or the otherworldly kickboxing of Absolver, or the other-alien-shooting of XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. It's been quite a good week.
]]>I was already 'jazzed', 'stoked', and 'ziffed' for the launch of open-world fighting game Absolver [official site] later this month, and now the weeks beyond that are sounding good too. New fighting styles and moves will arrive in free content updates after launch, developers Sloclap and publishers Devolver Digital announced yesterday, as well as features like a 3v3 mode and spectating. In a game where every player builds their own fighting style from different stances and attacks, I'd certainly like to safely watch other people's technique.
]]>The beautiful art of drunken boxing is the fourth fighting style confirmed for Absolver [official site], the fine-looking online combat game from Sloclap and Devolver Digital. Drunken boxing is one of my favourite styles to see in kung fu movies, punchmen rolling and staggering as their momentum swings into unexpected hits, and I'm certainly excited to build my own drunken boxing combos within Absolver's custom fighting styles. Look at this cool fighting:
]]>If you too want to grow up to be, be an Absolver and punch faces in online multiplayer melee action, make a note: Sloclap's Absolver [official site] will launch on August 29th. That's the news from publishers Devolver Digital, who have also whipped together a trailer explaining how Absolver's biffing and learned custom fighting styles work. It looks smashing. Adam called it one of his favourite games at E3 last June and yup, I want a go too. Check this out:
]]>When our Adam played Absolver [official site] last year, he declared the online melee murderfest "one of E3's best games." Oh we're all very happy that you had such a good time, but what about us? We won't get to play until later this year. No scampering around an open world duffing up enemies and other players, not for us yet. If it's any comfort, we can watch a 15-minute new video with one of the devs explaining the ins and outs of PvP face-mashing. Hey, this does look fun.
]]>As Old Father Time grabs his sickle and prepares to take ailing 2016 around the back of the barn for a big sleep, we're looking to the future. The mewling pup that goes by the name 2017 will come into the world soon and we must prepare ourselves for its arrival. Here at RPS, our preparations come in the form of this enormous preview feature, which contains details on more than a hundred of the exciting games that are coming our way over the next twelve months. 2016 was a good one - in the world of games at least - but, ever the optimists, we're hoping next year will be even better.
]]>E3 2016 has been finished for a couple of weeks, giving us time to wash the taste of LA smog from our mouths and reflect upon the games we saw there. This seems like a good time to talk about what we want to see from those games next, when they no doubt appear at Gamescom 2016 in August. What games are we most hoping to play, to see new trailers of, or hoping will reveal a different side of themselves in Cologne?
]]>I saw good games at E3 and I saw great games, but no other game surprised and delighted me as much as Absolver [official site]. It’s a game about punching and kicking opponents in an open world, but describing it as a beat ‘em up seems unfair. It’s a martial arts simulator, with elements of both Dark Souls and Zeno Clash but a combat system all its own.
]]>Sloclap, a recently-formed indie studio made up of ex-Ubisoft fellows, have today announced their debut project: Absolver [official site]. Devolver Digital are publishing this uber-stylish martial arts-inspired "online combat RPG" affair and, although a distinct step away from their usual pixellated roster, this one looks equally cool. Let's have a look, shall we?
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