REVIEW: ‘Warriors Abyss’ Stretches Itself Too Thin

On paper, everything about Warriors Abyss seems like it should click into place. Take the massive rosters of Koei Tecmo and Omega Force’s Warriors series — Dynasty, Samurai, and beyond — and send them into roguelike fray. On many levels, it does work. But Warriors Abyss ends up feeling more like a framework or blueprint than a filled-out experience.

Warriors Abyss is fairly straightforward in premise: the ambiguous “you,” the summoned spirit of various heroes of yore, have been brought to actual Hell by Enma. The rightful ruler of the underworld, Enma, has been dethroned by the malevolent Gouma and needs your help to rid the afterlife of his presence. Aside from a few interstitial dialogues where Enma encourages you or provides comic relief, that’s about it for the story. The narrative is just acting as framing for the action at hand, with the lack of any resolution, but at least Warriors Abyss lets the fighting take center stage.

In the actual run, Warriors Abyss has some great ideas. Unlike your typical musou, it’s an isometric game, with a camera pulled overhead, similar to Diablo or Hades. You still hit X and Y (or Square and Triangle) in certain sequences to activate specific charge attacks and combos and use those strikes to mow through hordes of bad guys like a lawnmower through grass.

It’s impressive how well each Warriors character has translated over to this style of play. Each one has specific mechanics and playstyles, and combo systems from their specific series are put into practice here. I mostly stuck to the Dynasty Warriors crew, but my time with the Samurai Warriors crew reminded me how subtle differences could change up my flow while blasting my way through legions.

Warriors Abyss has some great ideas, with some panning out while others crash.

The core mechanic, though, is summoning. For each run, you pick your main character, but as you dive down further into Hell, each floor can offer rewards, often in the form of adding characters to your summoning roster. You can seemingly accrue as many as you want, though in battle, you can only have six at a time. Each one offers emblems, which enhance specific aspects of your main fighter and can also be called into battle to unleash a special attack. Think tag attacks in Marvel vs. Capcom, and you’ve got the general idea.

What really works here is how traits, characteristics, and modifiers all interact. My favorite go-to was getting the Shu faction together and unleashing chaos. Guan Yu, the focal point of my build, has the ability to call in all Five Tigers of Shu if you have them in your lineup. This eats up a lot of space on the bench, but it meant every time I called in Guan Yu, I was calling in a whole crew with him.

Add someone like Liu Bei or Xiahou Dun, stack up Charm (which lowers summoning cooldown), and I was regularly clearing off the screen. Musou attacks are here, but so is the Assemble bar, which instantly calls in all the warriors in your formation, activating a special buff based on what formation you’ve chosen and letting you cap it off with a special Musou attack.

It’s here where Warriors Abyss feels most inventive, even when its unintuitive tutorials and UI get in the way. Different icons, like Vigor, Speed, or Fire, can build up meters on your character, eventually unlocking special effects. Some, I wish, hadn’t been gated behind this mechanic—like needing to put a point in Speed to make your Dash invulnerable. But most of them feel like meaningful, effective upgrades. The lower-end bonuses help round out your kit, and investing heavily into specific areas can start to shape a build.

The massive lineup allows for some fun playstyle experimentation.

Each individual character feels fairly unique, even if the inputs are mostly similar. I found that, much like the Warriors series, playstyle preference was placed over balance; while a seasoned fighter like Zhang Wei is going to work naturally, you can dig into the legion of named characters here and find some fun playstyles, like Pang Tong. For musou fans, this is probably the biggest draw.

There’s a simply massive lineup, a promise of more characters to come, and it’s fun to gradually work your way up the unlock tree and repeatedly say, “Oh yeah, I remember that guy.” Costumes can be picked up or, if you’d rather, bought in the store through pricey cosmetics bundles. Some can be earned; others can only be bought.

Warriors Abyss‘s combat concepts don’t feel like they get enough opportunity to shine, though. Enemies are massive blobs of non-descript hell soldiers, with the occasional demonic foe tossed in. While they can start to team up and unleash big rally moves, like infantry charges or a hail of arrows, they only act as danger zones to dodge or run around. The difficulty seems metered by having more on the screen and layering it on thick. It becomes a real problem in later stages, as the screen gets absolutely littered with purple danger zones that blend a bit too much, especially when the Assemble effect is active.

Bosses are also a downside. They get repetitive pretty fast, and only a few of the later ones have interesting attack patterns or challenges. Ramping up the difficulty can help with this, but by the 20th time you’ve fought the Ogre, it starts to get old. Stages don’t help with this feeling of repetition either, as aside from a pit or the occasional hazard, most of the levels don’t really add anything to the combat other than boundaries for the arena.

Warriors Abyss is a fascinating proof of concept that doesn’t measure up.

Even the user interface and menus feel unhelpful at times. It was a little tough at times to find and locate characters with specific traits to aim for in the Hall of Bonded Souls, for example. Often, rewards on the ground feel too small, with tiny text pop-ups, to make any of it out in the chaos. Menus also feel a bit barebones in their tooltips, descriptions, and visuals.

It’s a difficult proposition because, despite a lot of the frustrations, Warriors Abyss does elicit those good musou feelings. The “1 vs. 1,000” concept pumps blood through the heart of the franchise, and when your build ramps up and a floor literally tasks you with slaying 1,000 foes, it feels great to slice and dice through an entire army with the force you’ve built up. The roguelike structure plays into this well, too, encouraging the player to bounce around the cast without the commitment of a full campaign, though runs still tended to be on the long side for a roguelike.

Yet I saw my first clear in under 10 hours and didn’t want to venture much further. There are additional challenges to add on successive runs, permanent upgrades to unlock, and maybe some formations I’d like to pick up to round out my shop options, but honestly? Warriors Abyss has all the right trappings of a potential time-killer, but can’t keep me locked in. Live updates promise more to come, with characters and further updates, and a few have even arrived between getting my code and writing this. But even then, there’s not a lot at the center that’s keeping me here over just booting up a different roguelike or musou.

To weigh it against its inspirations and foundations only shows how barebones Warriors Abyss feels. There’s no story to drive you forward or character interactions, there’s not a “base” to manage outside of unlocking more characters and formations in the Hall of Bonded Souls, and the variety doesn’t ever change up enough to put the player on their back foot.

If you’re someone who’s been playing every musou game for ages and craves a good roguelike that digs deep into those rosters and familiar faces, this might be a good way to burn some time at the airport or on a commute. But with notably better modern options in each of the respective genres it’s pulling from, it’s hard to see this occupying more than a few afternoons, a fascinating proof-of-concept that ultimately can’t fight the giants.

Warriors Abyss is now available on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and Windows PC via Steam.