Warriors: Abyss Review – Numbers Must Go Up

While the Warriors franchise is incredibly old, publisher Koei Tecmo hasn’t taken too many opportunities to experiment with different genres. Sure, we had titles like the Dynasty Tactics series back in the day, but that felt like the extent of it. At most, we saw the franchise branch out into including other settings into its gameplay, with games like Hyrule Warriors and Samurai Warriors. As a whole, however, Dynasty Warriors hasn’t changed too much from back when it first came out.

In this environment, a title like Warriors: Abyss feels like a sucker punch in the best possible ways. To put it quite simply, the title melds all of the core gameplay aspects you expect from a Dynasty Warriors game, and mixes them up with a roguelite gameplay loop. The end result is what feels like a surprisingly natural evolution for the franchise.

"The end result is what feels like a surprisingly natural evolution for the franchise."

The premise of Warriors: Abyss is quite simple; you take on the role of one of many available characters from throughout the Warriors franchise and try to fight your way through what is essentially hell. In your travels through various levels – referred to in-game as tiers – you will face hundreds of enemies, with most objectives revolving around killing anywhere between 30 and 150 enemies to proceed. On finishing a tier, you get rewards, which range from items that improve your character in some way, to the ability to recruit more warriors to your cause. Completing a certain number of tiers allows you to get into a boss fight, where your current build will be put to the test.

While an incredibly simple gameplay premise, Warriors: Abyss manages to have plenty of depth to it thanks to the absurd roster of playable characters. It features more than 100 playable characters, each equipped with their own weapons and abilities, which also means that each one of them has their own unique movesets. These same characters can also be recruited to join you in a run, summoned by pulling off a simple combo. Doing so has the character show up to the battlefield, do a massive attack, and leave.

Players with experience in the Warriors franchise will find the main hack-and-slash gameplay quite familiar. You get variations: a light attack, a charge attack, and a musou attack. A combination of light and charge attacks will be your bread and butter as you take down hordes of enemies and slowly fill up your musou gauge. When this gauge is full, you can pull off a devastating musou attack that deals an enormous amount of damage in a large area around you. When it comes to defensive options, the game limits players to a simple dash which can be used to quickly move out of the way of heavily-telegraphed attacks.

While the core gameplay is incredibly simple, and even promotes button mashing to quite an extent, most of the depth comes from the decisions you take with regards to your build. A character’s build is simply a combination of their core abilities, attribute boosts they pick up align the way, and most importantly, other heroes they can recruit and what formations these heroes are then arranged along. Warriors: Abyss does a great job of letting you know just how powerful you’re getting with a simple numerical value that goes up by varying degrees depending on your choices. If you’ve been focusing primarily on the Speed and Bolt attributes, for instance, recruiting a hero that buffs the Fire attribute won’t really give you much of a boost.

Thankfully, just about every character has multiple attributes they benefit from, and players will often end up picking their preferred heroes through a combination of their skills, and the type of weapons they use. The choice of weapons isn’t a light decision either, since every weapon has a different moveset. While some deal excellent single-target damage, others are better for killing bigger hordes over a larger area, and others still might be more comfortable at range, focusing on stunning their enemies and letting recruited heroes finish the job.

"Thankfully, just about every playable character has multiple attributes they benefit from"

The most important thing to keep in mind with Warriors: Abyss is that the entire game runs on the philosophy of higher numbers being good. None of the choices you make will ever make you weaker, and even just the simple act of making use of the meta-progression currency to unlock new characters will give you a slight boost in power with a permanent bonus to some attribute or another.

While the gameplay is rather excellent, it does falter quite a bit when it comes to its story and overall presentation. Presented as a fictional tale where a legendary warrior was summoned to the afterlife by King Enma in order to do battle with hordes of tormented souls, Warriors: Abyss takes its sweet time before letting you actually start enjoying yourself. The first hour of gameplay is an exercise in frustration thanks to constant interruptions to give you either some overbearing tutorial that uses way too many words to explain simple things, or King Enma and their annoying voice yelling at you about why you should continue to kill things and why they can’t handle these problems themselves.

The story in Warriors: Abyss is just an excuse, and even the game seems to be well aware of this aspect since it doesn’t really bring the story up again until you start hitting some milestones, like killing the boss. Thankfully, there’s always the skip dialogue button, and I’d recommend making heavy use of it since there really isn’t anything of value in the story. The main gameplay and how it lets you mix-and-match heroes and weapon types to take down hordes of enemies is, on its own, more than enough reason for you to keep playing.

"The entire game runs on the philosophy of higher numbers being good"

Visuals are also a weak spot for Warriors: Abyss, but this does seem to be an intentional choice. The game prides itself on giving you massive hordes of enemies to take on, and readability was obviously a major concern for the developers. While the game’s graphics might not be the best, the visuals at least do a great job in letting you fully understand what kind of attacks are coming your way, as well as other things like a boss’s weak points.

Warriors: Abyss is an incredibly fun title, with the genre-bending experimentation having paid off quite well for Koei Tecmo. The core gameplay is a solid base for the new roguelite gameplay loop, and the simple meta progression of unlocking new characters to get stronger goes a long way in keeping things simple, while also providing an immense amount of depth. The game is an easy recommendation, and it doesn’t even need the caveat of players needing to be already invested in the Dynasty Warriors franchise. While being a fan might obviously come in handy when it comes to recognising characters, the game does a good enough job of letting you know the gameplay benefits of picking one character over another anyway.

If there was one change I could make to Warriors: Abyss, I would simply scrap the entirety of the story, and re-write some of the tutorials. Aside from that, it’s an excellent hack-and-slash roguelite with the perfect amount of Dynasty Warriors flavour.

This game was reviewed on PC.