In the name of a deity usurped by a malevolent entity, a warrior is called to battle hordes of enemies on another planet. Stop me if you’ve heard this pitch before. Yes, but even though its plot and boss battles may be phony, Warriors: Abyss successfully applies the “1v1000” twist of its Dynasty Warriors origins to the tried-and-true room-to-room roguelite model of games like Hades, which is something I haven’t seen very often. A straightforward yet effective upgrading system, screen-filling special attacks, and one of the largest character rosters I’ve seen in this genre allowed this new roguelike to captivate me with at least a few of those classic “just one more run” hooks before the plot dragged on.
The strongest aspect of Abyss is unquestionably the 100-character roster, which serves as both playable characters and summonable enhancements that accompany your hero along the way. Characters like Nobunaga Oda and Goemon Ishikawa have been selected from Samurai Warriors and Warriors Orochi to team up with renowned Dynasty Warriors like Zhao Yun, Cao Cao, Sun Jian, and numerous others. I tend to favor characters with particular skills or those I have liked in previous games, such as Guan Yu, Liu Bei, and Lu Bu, who cause defeated opponents to explode and inflict damage on enemies in the vicinity after trying out a third of them. Even when I ventured outside of my favorites, I still loved the sense of my build coming together to deliver a ton of damage or overwhelm my adversaries with several status effects, even though each run never seemed all that different from the prior.
Finding more fascinating employers than this one doesn’t need much searching.
Following the minimal setup, you are given four levels to complete, each with eight chambers and a more difficult but uninspiring boss confrontation at the finish. Even while the ogre, skeletal griffin, and other otherworldly creatures are more imaginative than is usually seen in a Warriors game, they never really impressed me. The primary problem, however, is that every boss encounter would still proceed in the same manner—telegraphed strikes and recharging barriers that must be broken before you can harm their health bar—even if they had amazing visual designs. It’s not difficult to find isometric action games with bosses that are more unconventional than this one.
But the great evil still exists, and you must keep fighting until it is eliminated. Given that roguelites are designed to clear several runs before receiving a more comprehensive resolution, this is to be expected. I’ve played for more than 40 hours and finished more than 30 runs with 20 different characters, each lasting 45 to an hour, but I haven’t seen any signs of progress or an end in sight.
Fortunately, even without the story, the extensive cast of characters and engaging fighting made the multiple runs enjoyable. You can recruit someone into one of your six spots each time you beat a room. They function similarly to boons in Hades, but once they’re in your inventory, you can move them between rooms. Additionally, you can select from 30 distinct unlocked formations that expand your possibilities. For example, you can place empowering characters in odd-numbered slots or increase the stats of your main hero by collecting more of a particular elemental emblem throughout that run.
Things were kept interesting by switching up who I recruited and played as.
There is enough variation to maintain interest by switching up my persona and the warriors I was enlisting to help me on each mission. They all have a set of traits that match their backgrounds, a special attack they use when summoned as an ally, combinations of emblems for stats or elements like Strength, Speed, Fire, or Ice, and a passive buff that can be used to summon additional characters, increase the attack power of their special move, or buff your main warrior’s emblems or traits. However, each character uses variations of basic combos that are similar enough that learning to play new ones is easy. They also have special weapons that may be unlocked, which provide their owner permanent advantages and serve as a goal outside of the story.
To fit the more fantasy-based theme, Abyss also does a fantastic job of transforming the classic Dynasty Warriors fighting into something more ostentatious. The Assemble bar, which powers the new assemble attack at a rapid and satisfying speed, is fed by the several normal and charge attack combos that each character has, as well as new summoning attacks. Additionally, it releases a room-clearing explosion when you perform a Musou technique while it’s active, which has always helped me escape difficult situations and finish a combat with a bow.
In actual combat, however, there aren’t many differences among the 100 warriors. Outside of a few characters with unique special attacks, most deal one of five elemental damage types by creating zones of AoE damage, summoning tornadoes that pull enemies in, or conjuring elemental blades from the ground. A select few grant buffs or inflict debuffs, and that’s just a few of the options available. But even though summoning attacks and certain passives are repeated across the roster with only slight differences, there’s enough variety there that I found I could easily create some level of synergy regardless of the warriors I had available on a run.
You can create some imaginative combos. Additionally, you can unleash the Assemble Attack, which is both strong and stylish, after you’ve enlisted six heroes.
Nevertheless, Abyss’s level varies from fairly challenging to too simple based on how far you advance through the meta-progression in between runs. Any rogue-lite is designed to be practically unbeatable in your first few runs: you suffer a lot of damage from bosses and deal little damage until you increase your attack and defense numbers. When you look at the character unlock progression tree, you can quickly and easily unlock your favorite characters or characters with the desired permanent stat enhancements by choosing a path. I rapidly turned the tide of battle in my favor as a Lu Bu supporter, rushing for him while also unlocking other adjacent characters that offered good bonuses.
Verdict
Warriors: Abyss’s cut-and-paste boss fights and open-ended, cookie-cutter plot may be its weak points, but the combat’s replay value and the ability to customize its wide range of characters and builds kept me hacking through thousands of enemies for dozens of hours of rogue-lite play. Overall, Abyss does a good job of adopting the concepts of a large cast of characters and extravagant Mousu action, and it’s always interesting to see a long-running series like Dynasty Warriors try out new genres because it frequently leads to innovation. But this action rogue-lite lacks enough of the other components of a truly great one to be the kind I’ll be playing again for months.
