Throughout Sony’s February 2025 State of Play presentation, the massive shadow drop was Koei Tecmo’s Warriors: Abyss, which presents a low-budget, roguelite tackle the favored Warriors hack ‘n’ slash system. The excellent news is that this style hybrid seems like each halves match completely collectively—the mindlessness of the fight combined with the temporary run-focused nature of roguelite motion is so good that it virtually feels laborious to imagine that the crew by no means thought to provide one thing like this earlier. The dangerous information is that its struggles with repetition maintain it from being anyplace close to as addictive as roguelikes comparable to Useless Cells or Slay the Spire. Fortunately, Warriors: Abyss nonetheless proves itself to be a worthwhile new entry within the sequence, however solely simply.
Warriors: Abyss begins with you being summoned by an impish little god named Enma, the king of Hell, who was not too long ago deposed when an historical evil being named Gouma was launched and took over the land of the lifeless. Desirous to reclaim his throne, Enma enlists the celebs of the Warriors franchise to combat off Gouma’s forces and in the end ship the creature again the place it got here from. Now and again, Enma will pop up with a bit extra of lore or some snarky quip, however there’s not rather more to the storyline past this primary setup.
Gameplay in Warriors: Abyss seems like a typical Dynasty Warriors entry with a splash of Diablo and Hades thrown in for good measure. A complete run shouldn’t take you any longer than a few hours and consists of speeding by way of 4 distinct biomes with eight ranges every, with the ultimate levels at all times reserved for that biome’s resident boss monster.
Every flooring usually duties you with killing a set variety of enemies, who you’ll fell by the handfuls as you tear by way of hordes with reckless abandon. After every flooring, you declare treasure or summon one other hero (extra on this in a bit) and choose the room rewards you need to chase for the subsequent flooring.
For those who’re remotely versed in roguelites, you’ll be conversant in the construction right here, however that’s a very good factor. Warriors: Abyss could not add numerous attention-grabbing new concepts to the standard roguelite type, nevertheless it executes on all the pieces fairly nicely. The ability ramp is pretty satisfying as you quickly snag buffs and power-ups that remodel your character into a military of 1, whereas the brutality of the ‘powerful however truthful’ problem might be softened by way of sheer persistence and taking part in the meta-progression parts proper.
Warriors: Abyss is the form of sport the place you’ll end up shedding runs left and proper at first, however the thrill of fight and development is powerful sufficient that (a minimum of initially) you may hardly resist making an attempt only one extra run.
A part of what makes every run attention-grabbing is the sheer variety of potential playable characters: 100. Everybody follows the identical combo assault construction of mixing both heavy or mild assaults to drag off flashy strikes, however the attention-grabbing bits include the character-specific skills and buffs.
One character will likely be granted a free immediate revive as soon as per run once they lastly get overwhelmed by the enemy hordes, one other may get a hard and fast proportion buff to their energy for every member of a selected clan they handle to gather. It will probably take some time to discover a ‘most important’ or two that basically gels along with your playstyle, however there’s no scarcity of choices to experiment with right here.
The majority of the extent rewards come within the type of a crack on the Crystal Sapling, a tree that permits you to commune with the spirits of different warriors you’ve unlocked and add them to your crew. Not solely will the primary six of those change into summonable for bombastic cooldown assaults as an extension of your base combos, however every one may even grant you a wealth of stat buffs and new skills to make your character that rather more formidable.
Choosing the right hero on the tree can typically really feel a bit of overwhelming given what number of stats and variables there are to contemplate, however the sport helpfully summarises issues by providing you with a hard and fast energy quantity as a tough estimate of how a lot that character will buff your fight skills. This quantity turns into rather less helpful should you’re going for a really specialised construct, nevertheless it nonetheless acts as a very good metric to gauge general effectiveness.
Whenever you inevitably fall in battle, you’ll be despatched again to the Nice Corridor to start out over from sq. one with a brand new character, although there are some methods you may fudge the percentages in your favour. Within the Corridor of Bonded Souls, you may spend forex obtained out of your run in a large ability tree that grants you issues like new characters and buffs to the expertise that you simply achieve in a run.
Each unlocked character results in some type of everlasting stat increase that applies to all characters, which creates a noticeable impact when you’ve constructed up these buffs throughout just a few dozen character unlocks. And although everybody begins a run at stage one, all accrued ranges from throughout their many makes an attempt feed right into a ‘cumulative stage’ that grants that character additional everlasting stat boosts. These metaprogression parts are a welcome a part of the cycle, making certain that sustained effort will lead to you finally managing a profitable run.
Naturally, it wouldn’t be a Warriors sport with out a ridiculous quantity of grind and that’s the place Warriors: Abyss is each at its finest and its worst. On one hand, there’s one thing brilliantly pleasing a few modestly tough, however comparatively senseless sport the place you may decide to do little else however maintain down both ‘Y’ or ‘X’ and watch the fireworks as your character rips and tears their means by way of most of their foes.
Alternatively, run makes an attempt quickly begin to really feel indistinguishable from one another no matter which character you select, which makes additional makes an attempt really feel step by step much less interesting. Warriors: Abyss is the proper ‘second monitor’ form of sport, one thing that’s at its finest once you’re listening to a podcast or have a rerun of a favorite present on within the background.
Visually, it is moderately disappointing, which contributes in a roundabout strategy to the grindiness of the gameplay loop turning into extra obvious over time. The biomes all have a moderately low-poly and unimaginative design, whereas the enemies are principally generic troopers and monsters. Provided that there are typically actually tons of of transferring characters on the display screen without delay, the simplistic visuals really feel like a suitable compromise for conserving all the pieces transferring at a clean body charge, besides, it doesn’t make for a really visually attention-grabbing or inventive expertise.
Conclusion
Warriors: Abyss is a good low-budget spinoff within the long-running hack ‘n’ slash sequence, however is not significantly inspiring. There’s tons of replayability, a great deal of unlockables, and an exciting fight system that assist to maintain this one attention-grabbing for some time, however its paper-thin plot, repetitive gameplay, and poor visuals very a lot maintain it again from being something distinctive. We’d give this one a modest suggestion to followers of both roguelites, Musou video games, or each, however with the caveat that you could be need to wait to select this one up on a deep sale someday in a while.
