Warriors: Abyss review: this Hades-inspired Musou is stuck in purgatory

If I had to design the perfect fate for Koei Tecmo’s cast of Musou heroes, it would probably look like Warriors: Abyss. I mean let’s face it: These folks aren’t going to the good place. No matter how well-intentioned their crusades have been, the stars of Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors have killed millions of people apiece at this point. It only seems fitting that they’d wind up in Hell, forced to fight an endless, tedious war on demonkind.

While I’d like to imagine that this was the creative intention behind Warriors: Abyss, its origin is likely more clinical than that. The new game takes the action of Dynasty Warriors and shrinks it down into a roguelike that not-so-subtly riffs on Hades. It’s a cheeky copycat that goes through hoops to fit historical heroes into a sparse underworld adventure full of arena battles. It’s completely absurd

Warriors: Abyss brings some unique twists to a formula that has been imitated to death, creating a deceptively complex action game with lots of combat nuances to dig into. Those promising ideas ultimately go to waste in a shallow, repetitive roguelike that never quite understands what makes Hades so devilishly fun.

Poor presentation

Warriors: Abyss wastes no time establishing its absurd premise. A bubbly take on Enma, the ruler of Hell, has lost control of the underworld to a monster, Gouma. He needs an army to beat it, so who better than the stars of both Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors? After all, what’s one little demon compared to the more threatening Lu Bu? There are bits and pieces of lore along the way, with a whole collection of unlockable records that chronicle the conflict, but it’s more just a thin excuse to bring 100 beloved characters to Hell (where they belong).

That low effort story is indicative of the rest of the project’s presentation. Priced at $25, Abyss is a true budget game. Its low-quality UI looks like it was hastily scaled up from a mobile game. There are grammatical mistakes in its ability descriptions. All of the character models appear to be reused from older Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors games. It feels a little rickety in places, but they aren’t deal breakers. In fact, I welcome the idea of developers creating more small, sustainable games that get mileage out of clever asset recycling.

Where that modest approach disappoints is in world design. Abyss’ version of Hell largely boils down to nondescript biomes covered in muddy textures. There are four stages of hell to fight through and most boil down to rocky terrain, sparse ruins, and a vaguely frigid area. It’s not like the visuals matter too much here considering that all of the action takes place in open arenas, but it’s a drab vision of the underworld — especially placed next to Enma, presented as a bright anime illustration that feels like it was pulled from an entirely different game.

The limited artistic scope can be felt in drab enemy designs, too. I’m mostly just fighting back waves of humanoid soldiers with a Halloween makeover. A few other similarly tame demons are thrown in, like projectile spitting flesh mounds, but there’s not much variety or character. There’s a little more life to be found in its handful of bosses, though those too are little more than run-of-the-mill dragons and reapers.

There aren’t many of those either, as the scope of the core roguelike run is a bit anemic too. There are four biomes that players explore in the same order each time, featuring eight phases that are split between arena fights, upgrade pit stops, and the boss room. Each always ends in the same boss fight, which plays out the same way every time. It’s there where Abyss commits its first sin as a Hades heretic. Supergiant Games’ genre-defining hit is built on variables. No two runs ever feel the same, even when retreading familiar biomes. The rooms shuffle, bosses switch up their patterns, and new story snippets make each run feel like a discovery. With its comparatively static design, Abyss is stuck in purgatory.

Let’s get in formation

The lacking presentation is a bit deceptive, because the combat systems that propel the roguelike are surprisingly deep. On its surface, Abyss checks a lot of obligatory genre boxes. A run has players fighting through arena battles, choosing their next room from three options with different rewards, raising their health through peach trees, and occasionally picking up passive perks through treasures and occasional gifts from the dead, which give players a choice of buffs to choose from.

The twist is that it’s also a Musou like Dynasty Warriors, which means that combat arenas are dense with enemies. Each room tasks me with clearing a certain number, scaling from 30 to 600 (and even higher in extra-hard danger rooms). That unique twist brings Koei Tecmo’s signature power fantasy to a new genre in convincing fashion, as chopping down hundreds of demons in one fell swoop with a giant Musou attack is about as satisfying as you’d expect. That’s combined with a little bullet hell inspiration, as players need to do that while dodging telegraphed purple attacks that ramp in density the longer a run goes. It’s faster and more furious than your typical roguelike.

Abyss is at its best when it’s building on the Warriors part of its title rather than Hades. It features a whopping 100 playable heroes from both Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors. Each one controls the same, requiring me to create basic combos from standard slashes and charged attacks, but there’s a massive range of perks and weapons to toy with. Zhuge Liang uses his fans to add a bit of range to his attacks, while Kiyomasa Kato’s playstyle is all about interrupting telegraphed attacks to boost his own power. If Dynasty Warriors: Origins’ one-character approach left you bored, Abyss fills the gap it left with its diversity.

Like any good roguelike, those characters are clay that can be shaped during a run with upgrades — and that’s where Abyss gets really interesting. As the run progresses, players collect allies who both boost their power level and act as summons. The idea is to build a squad of six heroes, with each activated by different combos. To summon the hero in my first slot, I need to attack once and then hold my charged attack. For my second, I’ll need to hit two attacks, and so on up to six. It’s a unique riff on your standard “special ability on cooldowns” idea that makes great use of Abyss’ massive cast.

There’s a tremendous amount of strategy involved when drafting new heroes. Each one awards players medals, which grant me character new perks. If I focus on collecting heroes with ice emblems, I’ll add freeze powers to my attacks. If I go for speed, I’ll eventually get a second evasive dash in between movement boosts. That creates a lot of mix and match potential, as a strong build has me maxing out a few trees rather than spreading myself thin.

Building the best party requires a lot of engrossing decision making. Some heroes synergize well with others, granting them new powers. Each person comes with a list of emblems (like Oda or Brave General), and some characters will give me boosts based on how many heroes I collect with a specific label. I also need to assemble them into a formation, maximizing their power by putting them into specific positions. I can unlock and equip new formations too, which synergize with my build. If I have a lot of heroes with shock medals, a formation that boosts my attack depending on how many shock heroes I have will boost my damage significantly. It’s all topped off by my ultimate power, an Assemble Attack that sends all six of my heroes loose at once in an on-screen explosion of attacks. It’s the kind of sensory overload that makes Koei Tecmo’s Musou games such dumb fun.

With all of that, Abyss hides a surprisingly deep action game with lots of little buildcrafting nuances to learn and master. And if you want to keep believing that, stop reading the review here, because I’m about to unravel it all.

The number illusion

The dirty secret to Abyss is that none of the strategic squad building I’ve mentioned means squat. The truth is that every decision makes a power score go up. The higher the number, the more powerful your hero will be. You can scroll through heroes and try to craft big brain strategies, but you basically always want to choose the one that’ll give you the biggest power boost. That’s baked into the long, complicated tutorial, which ends with Enma suggesting that players simply pick the big number if they aren’t sure what she just explained.

You won’t simply win your first run even if you go in with that knowledge, though. Abyss features a meta progression system that has players collecting crystals during runs and then using them to unlock new characters and perks. Each new hero permanently increases their base health, defense, and offense. Completing a set of specific heroes also increases the max level cap players can reach during their run when collecting experience points. Players simply won’t have the power to win until enough of the tree is unlocked (I beat my first run with about 75 nodes unlocked, and I bet you will too).

You can try to smash your head against the wall and win with patience and perfect dodging, but you’ll Abyss is an absolute drag when you’re underpowered. Boss fights require players to first burn down a long shield bar and then use a small vulnerability opening to inflict as much damage as possible in a short window. Sometimes I’d reach a boss with no problems along the way, only to discover that my power score simply wasn’t high enough and I was barely putting a dent in their health bar. Eventually, I reduced those fights to math. If I was under 15,000 power by the time I reached the first boss, I might as well throw the fight and save some time. I’d want to be at 80,000 at least for the second. If I surpassed those numbers, I could win with ease. But I’d only be able to pull that off once I had high base stats and more powerful allies I could choose from. It’s a resource grind disguised as a roguelike.

Once I caught on to that, all of the sticky character building lost its luster. Choice is an illusion here masking a “numbers go up” gameplay loop that leaves me wondering if Abyss was originally going to be a mobile gacha game, but later converted into a budget console game. I only cleared my first run by ignoring my instincts and simply choosing the highest value upgrades every single time. That resulted in a wild exponential growth that let me wipe out the final boss in one phase, whereas I could barely damage it just one run prior.

None of the inscrutable character perks ultimately matter either. Sure, they say that I’ll get some complicated bonus from collecting five heroes with Wu emblems, but doing so never actually changes how I play. I’m always mashing the same two buttons the same way from start to finish. Sometimes I inflict a status effect for doing it, but all of those feel fairly interchangeable. There’s no meaningful difference between freezing an enemy and paralyzing them briefly with lightning. Damage output is the sole concern.

Like so many other roguelikes before it, Abyss misunderstands the appeal of Hades. In that game, every boon I collect makes a difference. An upgrade can fundamentally change the way I play, forcing me to adapt to new strategies on the fly. It makes me feel like an inventor; I’m fusing different boons together to create what feels like an undiscovered breakthrough. Last year’s hit Balatro carries the same feeling, letting me feel like a genius for mixing and matching cards in inventive ways that I can tell my friends about later. A successful run in Abyss doesn’t feel like my own; it’s a mechanical victory entirely set up for me by restrictive progression that always points me in one direction. The greatest trick Abyss ever pulled is convincing players that they have agency.

I wish I could put the genie back in the bottle, because Warriors: Abyss has a lot going for it until the magic wears off. When I finally got the hang of every system, I felt like a tactical genius as I carefully assembled my team of heroes. Any time those choices would pay off with me clearing a room of 300 demons in seconds, I was intoxicated by that power just as I am in any traditional Musou game. Perhaps there’s a lesson there: Power is a lie that turns men into false prophets. Maybe that’s why Cao Cao is in Hell.

Warriors: Abyss was tested on PC and Steam Deck OLED.