Warriors Abyss was quite the surprise announcement, and it’s nice to see Koei Tecmo exploring different gameplay styles within the Musou genre. I went into Warriors Abyss blind, expecting to play a Diablo-style isometric action RPG with a Warriors twist. So, I was quite shocked and pleasantly surprised when I realised the game was instead a roguelike, sharing more in common with Hades or even Vampire Survivors than Diablo.
The game’s story is rather straightforward, You have been summoned to Hell to fight on behalf of Enma, the King of hell. The king has lost his powers and the forces of hell have become unruly so tasks you with bringing things back under control. It’s a simple premise but it works well enough.
Warriors Abyss plays out exactly like a Warriors game, you have your light and heavy attacks that can be combo’d together for a wide range of attacks and even a Musou attack which is constantly filling up allowing you to deal massive amounts of damage to numerous enemies at once. It’s really nice just how well the Warriors core gameplay has translated over to this new isometric perspective.
Each level will have you fighting a set number of enemies starting with a mere 30 for the earlier sections and culminating in the 1000s near the end game. Once defeated, you’ll be able to recruit the aid of another randomised warrior, each with their own skills and abilities.
Each recruited warrior comes with an emblem or two which power up certain aspects of a particular run. For example, collecting multiple speed emblems will allow your character to dash and collecting, even more, will allow for consecutive dashes. It’s a fun system which makes no two runs identical.
After around 8 levels you’ll fight a massive boss enemy which you must beat to proceed further into Hell. Personally, I found the bosses a little annoying. they felt overly tanky. It wasn’t so much their health and more their shield bar which I took offence with. You have to break the boss’s shield bar before you can do any damage and it takes ages depending on your load out. This will stun the boss leaving them open for damage but only lasts so long ending up with them summoning a ton of annoying enemies and completely refilling their shield bar. Very annoying, especially when they only have a few hits left to go down and you have to do another dance around all the summoned enemies and take that shield back out
To help you on your adventures through hell you have access to the Hall of Bonded Souls. This can be accessed after each run and from here you can spend accumulated Embers to unlock additional characters from the various Warriors series and there are well over 100 characters to unlock. Each character has their own distinctive move-sets, abilities and weapons that can be unlocked and it can feel a little overwhelming at first with just the sheer number of playable characters.
Every unlockable character comes with a small residual buff to all characters even if it is just a small 1 or 2% extra HP or defence, these soon add up and snowball into making you a lot more robust and powerful so it’s well worth unlocking as much as possible.
One area the game stumbles on slightly is the sheer amount of stats to keep track of. Often I found all the different systems (Emblems, Embers, Tears of Blood, Battle Power etc) in the game a little overwhelming. There are just so many different stats to keep track of. Even King Enma mentions early on just to focus on the total Battle Power number which goes to show even the Devs found it a little convoluted.
In terms of length, the main story took me around 15 hours to complete but I had only unlocked around 65% of the characters at that point so there’s plenty left to do if you intend to unlock all available characters and weapons etc.
There are only 33 levels in total, known as phases which is a little short. It would have been nice if there were another 2 sets of levels and bosses as the main campaign feels short and I want more. Thankfully, there’s a comprehensive NG+ cycle to attempt after completing the main story, although it just seems to add more difficulty and offers little to no additional content except a few different outfits.
In terms of performance, I am happy to report that I got a solid 60fps on the Steam Deck and a stable 120fps on my PC, even when there were hundreds, if not thousands of enemies on my screen at once. I especially enjoyed playing on the Steam Deck as I could quickly get in a run or two when I had some downtime or just before bed.
Sadly, one last thing I feel I should touch on is The inclusion of expensive cosmetic DLC packs is always something that annoys me somewhat in any game, but in Warriors Abyss it’s ridiculous. Not only does each DLC more than the game itself, but the costumes are hardly noticeable due to its zoomed-out, isometric camera. In my opinion, these DLC packs are a complete waste of money.
Conclusion
Warriors Abyss is a great spinoff title for the Warriors series and I really enjoyed my time with it. The gameplay loop is addictive and I had a ton of fun unlocking different characters and trying out different build combinations. The game really nails that ‘just one more run’ feeling that the roguelike genre is known for. It’s a little rough around the edges and I do wish there was a little more content but I can highly recommend picking Warriors Abyss up, especially with its lower price point. Hopefully, we will be seeing a sequel of sorts as I would love to dive back in!
8.5
Steam PC review code kindly provided by Koei Tecmo