Release Details
Developer: Koei Tecmo Games
Publisher: Koei Tecmo Games
Release date: February 12th, 2025
Available on: Nintendo Switch, PS4/PS5, Windows, Xbox Series X/S
Reviewed on: PS5 Pro
Fans tuning into console live-streams and directs, such as Sony's State of Play, have essentially come to expect a title to drop the same day as a stream. No longer a novelty, and regardless of what that implies about the game's market potential considering it was chosen to be thrown upon the sacrificial altar with no lead-up time for marketing, demos, or any other kind of build-up, it seems that you can always expect something to release the day of a big stream. And with the launch of WARRIORS: Abyss (W:A) on the various digital storefronts, this past State of Play was no exception.
The abyss stares back
On paper, the year in gaming for 2025 should be a good one for fans of the Dynasty Warriors series. Dynasty Warrior: Origins launched just last month and now W:A is available not even a month later, which technically makes Dynasty Warriors a monthly series for the year so far. W:A's premise is interesting as well - what if rather than mowing down enemies across large-scale war maps, that same musou combat was re-conceptualized within the roguelite genre as smaller scale combat encounters across multiple connecting levels.
The premise is simple and straight-forward: You are a brave soul who has been summoned to the gates of Hell by the now deposed King Enma. King Enma needs you to work through the hordes of enemies across four layers of Hell to ultimately face Gouma and help them reclaim their position. And that's it. Small narrative details are provided from conversation style cut scenes with the 2D anime-esque stills of King Enma showing a range of emotions and reactions. Often this takes the form of a dialog box with a couple of choices that allow you to move the conversation forward, but without any real impact to the high-level narrative.
How the various heroes from across the Dynasty Warriors series fits into this is thanks to the magical hand-wave of the "Hall of Bonded Souls" allowing you to bond with the souls of heroes, which also avoids having to work through why or how they would have all ended up in Hell. It has a "just go with it" vibe that actually fits the premise just fine.
Choose your character
W:A's marketing boasts that there are over one hundred playable characters, and that seems to be the case after glancing at the roster of heroes waiting to be unlocked. (Although the max seems to be exactly one hundred, so I don't know if "over" is truly accurate).
You start with a decent pool of heroes and can unlock more using karmic embers, a blue flame currency earned across runs that can be carried over and saved up for use in the Hall of Bonded Souls. Character unlocks start cheap at 100 or 500 embers and steadily progress in price as you carve an interconnecting path of unlocks up the tree.
More than any other element, the large character roster of heroes would be the best argument for long time fans of the series to try W:A. Even as more of a Dynasty-dilettante myself, I still recognized classic characters like Zhang He and Liu Bei immediately as they sported both their iconic designs and weapons. It was a pleasant surprise to see so many characters utilizing such a variety of weapons. While I expected to see the standard swords, spears, and bows, it was also nice to see the more esoteric options, such as chakrams, umbrellas, canons, and magic staves. It was clear that the development team paid attention to what weapons each character should wield, such as Naotora li having her weaponized boots or Fa Zheng and his cloth.
While there was some repetition between character play styles, which is fair considering the size of the roster, characters wielding different weapons did play differently from one another. For example, a heavy hitter like Xu Zhu felt completely disparate in movement, combos, and specials compared to the more graceful fan-wielder Xiaoqiao.
The roster of characters also doubles as your out-of-run progression system. Since W:A is a rougelite instead of a roguelike, there is a slow but steady progression system in place that allows for greater opportunities for success across each run. Each character you unlock grants a small stat boost to either your health, strength, or defense. Additionally, unlocking a full set of characters raises your max level cap.
However, the unlock system can feel like a grind after a while. While it was always exciting to unlock a new character, it became clear a number of runs would be needed to complete the roster. Additionally, each character has a unique legendary weapon available to unlock as well, but each weapon is set to the hefty price of fifty thousand embers, which is anywhere from ten to one hundred times the price of unlocking that character (granted, there is a small chance you might recover legendary weapons during a run).
Mow them down
Each layer of Hell is made up of a series of shorter skirmishes that challenge you to defeat a specified number of enemies before you can claim your reward and select another path forward. For example, you might be asked to take out thirty enemies, and after defeating the thirtieth enemy unit, the rest of the onscreen mobs melt away into exp gems that get pulled toward your hero. Between each skirmish you are given a brief respite where you can claim your prize, most often an opportunity to bond with, as in recruit for the run, an ally hero you have unlocked. You are then presented with three paths forward, each showing that path's reward, such as another tree sapling for another opportunity to bond with a hero, a max health upgrade, or one of two currency types. Occasionally a path may note that it's more dangerous than usual or that it has challenge mission for potentially greater rewards if you can meet the bonus requirements.
Enemies start out as simple ineffectual melee and ranged undead warriors who are easily dealt with. As you progress however, enemies become more varied and start using more powerful and wide sweeping attacks denoted by a purple area of effect outline on the field. While this feels manageable at first, and is easily evaded with a simple dodge move, this can quickly become overwhelming on later levels. The real issue is that the number of AOE attacks quickly becomes unmanageable and visually confusing. The majority of my time seemed to be spent just working around numerous AOEs that stacked up to cover huge swaths of the field, and during later higher level runs it seemed like a requirement to stack emblems that gave me multiple consecutive dodges or else I stood no chance of completing the run.
Apart from dodging, combat is kept to a simple rhythm of stringing together light attacks with a heavy attack that ends the combo. The number of light attacks you perform determines which heavy attack you execute, for example hitting the light attack button once vs. three times before pressing the heavy attack button will end the combo with different heavy attacks. While this seems simplistic, there is a clever secondary use to combo chaining in being able to summon bonded heroes.
Each allied hero is assigned a place in your formation, a layout that can take on various shapes but provides six slots for your actively bonded heroes. Each slot in the formation corresponds to a light attack in the chain from 1-6, and exiting the chain on the corresponding slot of an allied hero with a heavy attack and then pressing the heavy attack button once again will summon that hero to the field to perform a special attack which you can repeat after a short cool down. I enjoyed this mechanic as it kept me cycling through the possible combinations and it gave me a wider range of attack options as my bonded hero roster continued to grow.
Apart from dodging and attacking, each hero has access to two special attacks tracked by separate bars. The first is their individual musou special attack, an often screen sweeping move that can be used to clear out a cluster of enemy units or lay the hurt on more durable enemies. The other is your rally attack that calls in your allied heroes in a multicolored explosion of specials meant for doing serious damage and clearing out whole swaths of space on the field.
Here comes the big boss
After playing through a series of levels, the overall layer culminates in a boss encounter. These encounters completely interrupt any sense of flow the previous enemy horde wave levels had and feel like a total slog. I almost never lost a run on anything other than a boss and it was often thanks to boss fights being drawn out wars of attrition.
Bosses have a shield bar that must be depleted before you can begin doing any damage in earnest. The only issue is that the shield bar is massive and once it's gone, you only have a brief window of time to do any damage before the shield regenerates and the whole tedious process begins again. Ideally, you will have saved up your big rally attack for the moments when the shield is down, otherwise you might have to repeat this process several times.
During the whole process of trying to remove the boss' shield, the boss itself moves through a series of purple area of effect attacks similar to those encountered during enemy hordes, just on a larger scale. Timing your ally hero summons never seems to fit the rhythm of the boss' attacks, and it doesn't feel challenging so much as irritating, as the boss' pattern interrupts the opportunity for any kind of interesting combos. Worse yet, these phases include a wave of enemy mobs after the first time you deplete a boss' shield, which only lengthens the already arduous experience.
I would have gladly taken more interesting enemy wave patterns or tougher versions of the stage challenges as the final checkpoint of a layer over these truly boring boss fights.
Looping you in
Like most roguelites, W:A establishes a clear game play loop:
Select a hero > Work through enemy hordes across several levels while collecting health upgrades, ally heroes, and currencies as rewards > Challenge the boss > Repeat hordes and bosses on subsequent layers > Eventually lose all your hit points, ending your run > Spend karma embers to unlock additional heroes and formations > Select a hero.
On the one hand, the simplicity of the overall flow allows W:A to feel immediately approachable. Jumping in to another run doesn't involve much of any downtime, simply spend your currency and then start a new run. While other roguelites, such as Hades (2018), have sought to expand on the space between runs, seeing these interludes as a potential space for characterization, exploring the narrative, or offering branching build paths, W:A keeps it extremely straightforward.
How the roguelite genre fits into the equation, apart from partially starting from square one each run, are the slight variations in a given run based the rewards you choose to pursue and the heroes you choose to bond with. The straight up rewards are fairly simple, currency for buying items in one of the shop portals during a run, currency to keep after the run to unlock more heroes, health upgrades and so on, all of which are chosen at the loss of opportunity to bond with another hero. Hero bonding is sort of the bang-for-your-buck upgrade, as they not only fill in formation slots for special attacks, but typically grant emblems which form the skill tree, and the opportunity for synergy with other heroes, which is how you evolve an allied hero during a run.
One of the biggest issues holding back W:A is that both the interface and overall hero and skill growth systems could do with more streamlining. After a handful of runs, it started to click as I began to recognize how emblems stacked and when to look for certain heroes before jumping into a portal to help increase my odds that they would upgrade an already bonded ally, but I felt it all could have been presented more clearly.
Granted, there is an indicator for every choice that tells you how much it will improve your combat score numerically and you could just opt for the biggest increase each time. Likewise, when trying to figure out the best formation for allied heroes, King Enma can be consulted and the most numerically advantageous layout can be selected. All of this is nice, but I did find that the runs where I purposefully focused on a few emblem skill trees seemed to be the ones where I made the most progress. Although, it seemed like I needed at least one of each emblem to cover the basics no matter what plans I had in mind.
One other issue is that runs tend to feel almost identical from one to another. Unlike other roguelites where the randomness of various elements blend together to create tension and unexpected synergies, just about every run in W:A felt the same with the exception of the hero I selected. There were minor shifts in the types of allies, emblems, or buffs I unlocked, but nothing felt deeply impactful. There was certainly that sense that every emblem or hero made my chosen hero stronger, thanks in no small part to an overall combat score keeping track in the bottom right corner, but it wasn't to the degree I was expecting. I kept thinking of other roguelites, where a weapon or power showing up would make or break a run, but nothing like that ever seemed to happen. If anything, unlocking more heroes (and thus more stat boosts and levels) seemed to have the greatest impact on how much progress I made on subsequent runs.
It's just cosmetic though
It would be very remiss of me not to comment on the absurd DLC launching alongside W:A. At launch, W:A retails for $24.99 for the Standard Edition on the U.S. PlayStation Store, along with a "Hack'n'Dash" Edition for $39.99 that includes one of the paid DLC costume sets and some in-game currency, and finally the Ultimate Edition for $79.99 which includes the previous editions' content and the remaining currently available costume packs alongside even more in-game currency.
This pricing already feels egregious for different editions that merely include character costumes as the sole noteworthy differentiator, but where it really takes the cake is the individual pricing for each costume set as standalone DLC. Let's say you bought just the base game to start and now you're interested in buying the costume packs. Each costume pack literally costs more than the base game.
There exists a great DLC divide in the video game playing community, with some noting that content that used to be freely given in older games which is now being surgically extracted and sold separately at premium pricing is a ridiculous practice, especially for something that barely constitutes content. While an opposing force argues that it's purely cosmetic and that you don't need to buy it to complete or enjoy the game. Regardless of what side you fall on, it doesn't feel ludicrous to say that $36.99 for a single costume pack (twelve dollars more than the base game) feels like something out of an unrealistic parody, and yet it's all too real (I am really struggling to think of more outrageous pricing in the history of DLC).
To Hell and back
It feels wrong to call WARRIORS: Abyss a cash grab, but when comparing it to the genuinely thoughtful efforts put forth by Omega Force and Koei Tecmo Games less than a month earlier with Dynasty Warrior: Origins, it's hard to feel like this wasn't a hasty attempt to continue riding a wave of interest in the series. Worse yet, the musou genre paired with the roguelite genre could easily be a match made in heaven. Instead, it's a repetitive experience that feels like one big grind after a while, altogether made worse by overpriced costume DLC that stunningly overshadows the price of the base game.
Unfortunately for WARRIORS: Abyss, it's dabbling in a popular genre filled to the brim with excellent titles, many of which have raised the bar to a height W:A falls short of clearing.
6.5/10
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