Whilst it may feel shallow at times, Warriors: Abyss is addictive, fun, and easy to pick up and play.
I’ve not played a huge number of the Dynasty Warriors games. I think I played the fourth one, Samurai Warriors 2, and Warriors: Orochi 3. Oh, and Hyrule Warriors if that counts. Every time I’ve played one though, I’ve found it a very enjoyable, if lightweight, power fantasy of a game in which you can cut down hordes of foes and feel like a badass doing it. The recent series reboot, Dynasty Warriors: Origins has fared well in bringing the series back to the table after a poorly received ninth main entry. Warriors: Abyss doesn’t have nearly the scale of the main games, but it does have a really enjoyable rogue-lite experience that hack & slash fans will probably get a kick out of. I certainly did at any rate.
There’s a story here that progresses as you succeed and fail on your path through hell akin to Hades. Yes, you’re in hell this time, as the ruler King Enma has been deposed by the evil Gouma. Enma has summoned powerful souls from the world of the living to fight for him to reclaim his throne, and you’ll be taking on these roles as you smash, bash, and crash your well through the underworld.
The story here is pretty throwaway really, although there are a couple of twists and turns that I shan’t spoil. Warriors : Abyss is very gameplay driven, with you taking on absolutely enormous numbers of enemies at once, normally with a goal of defeating a certain number of them before moving onto the next area and doing it again. Make it through seven encounters and you’ll take on that region’s boss before moving onto the next of the four main areas. Succeed, and glory shall be yours! Fail and it’s back to the start with a handful of resources in the form of Karma to unlock some new features along with perhaps a little more plot development.
Those unlocks are mostly new characters, and because Omega Force has the whole history of Dynasty and Samurai Warriors games to call on, there are a lot of characters to unlock, most of whom play quite differently to each other. Before starting to make notes for this review, I spent about eight hours playing the game and I wasn’t even half way through all the unlocks and had played with barely a fraction of those I had acquired. There’s a lot to play with here, and those who want to mess around with lots of different approaches will find plenty to enjoy. With that said, some characters are vastly stronger than others, so you’ll probably pick out a few powerful options that you’ll use more frequently than others.
If that’s the case, then why even bother unlocking weaker heroes? Well, aside from the somewhat contrived way in which heroes need to be unlocked to give you access to further unlocks, each time you add a hero to your cadre, every other hero also gains a small boost to their health, attack power or other stat. That in itself is nice, but there are additional benefits too. Should you unlock a major player within a certain faction, everyone else in that faction becomes significantly stronger which may encourage you to push for certain heroes over others. Beyond that though is you also gain access to these heroes as allies you can make when playing through the main game, and it’s here that things get quite interesting.
When you complete a combat encounter, you’ll get to choose which path to take next, much like in Hades. Many of these will lead you to a tree which will allow you to form an alliance with one of your unlocked heroes. Each hero has a different set of emblems that will power up your chosen character for the remainder of the run. For example, Hanzo Hatori will improve your speed and evasion, whilst Zhang He can improve your ice attacks. In simple terms, these are your level up points that you earn, but they actually do more than that. You can set six of your allies to be summon attacks during combat, accessed by inputting a simple combo for each one (X-Y for your first choice, X-X-Y for your second and so on). These will provide extra damage and area of effect damage to really thin the enemy numbers, but with each one on a cooldown you’ll need to consider when to use them.
But wait! There’s more! Certain hero combinations will unlock more effective attacks, so you may want to forgo a more useful stat boost to access a powerful pairing. Then there’s your Assemble attack that summons all your heroes at once to cause untold carnage for a limited time. This can be further modified by picking out a formation that determines which direction your summoned heroes will attack in, as well as giving you a bonus during that summon.
There’s a lot at play here, so why did I describe this game as shallow? In real terms, you actually do a lot of the same thing, with combinations of X and Y being used to carve through enemies so you can move onto the next area and do it again. Don’t get me wrong, it’s really fun to do this, but it’s mostly all you do. There aren’t that many different areas or bosses, and most enemies you face are all identical, so it’s possible that you’ll get tired of seeing that same opening biome over and over. Then again, if you want to switch your brain off and destroy legions of foes, you’ll still have a great time.
Now, the visuals are worth a mention here. They’re solid enough and the engine manages to shift a lot of enemies around the screen at once. Warriors: Abyss can get a little choppy in frame rate terms at times though, normally to do with the sheer volume of effects on screen at once. Playing on an Xbox Series X, this is pretty disappointing, as I’d rather fewer on screen elements and a stable framerate. I dread to think how it runs on Nintendo Switch in handheld mode. More irritating though is just how hard to read the screen can become. Enemies show a purple area in which they will attack so you can dodge out of the way. This is fine but when there are a lot of these on screen at once, things become just too crowded to read. This is more frustrating with certain boss attacks that almost entirely obscure your vision. The music and sound are great though, with most of the characters being voiced in Japanese, and some of that iconic Dynasty Warriors music to enjoy.
Warriors: Abyss isn’t perfect, and may be a little repetitive for some, but I had a really fun time fighting my way through hell over and over again. The power fantasy is on full display here, and fans of the franchise may well enjoy the bite-sized chunks of combat that this spin-off provides. You won’t get the grand scale battles of the main releases the series is known for, but these rapid fire skirmishes are hard to complain about.
Warriors: Abyss is available now on PC, Xbox, Playstation, and Nintendo Switch.
