WARRIORS: Abyss
Released: February 12th, 2024
Developer: Omega Force
Publisher: Tecmo Koei
Systems: PC, PS5 (reviewed), Switch, Xbox X/S
If you think Hades didn’t have enough AoEs to dodge, you’ll love WARRIORS: Abyss. If you think Final Fantasy XIV had too much content getting in the way of AoE-related activities, you’ll love WARRIORS: Abyss. Most importantly of all, if you think more games should look like a bomb made out of blackberries went off, you’ll adore WARRIORS: Abyss.
Tecmo Koei ambushed fans with a surprise Warriors game out of nowhere, and it’s a spinoff with a promising concept - “what if Hades went Musou?” A fine idea, but one that could prove shameful if a large publisher with a flagship series wasn't even 25% as ambitious as the indie studio it's emulating. I'm not expecting the kind of stuffyou get after years of Early Access development, but if Tecmo Koei couldn't sell a game with a mere fraction of the vision - and yet again cheaped out on localized voice acting - it'd be pretty embarrassing.
Not quite as embarrassing as a $24.99 spinoff game with a $79.99 special edition full of DLC the publisher already sold in other games. Oh right... this is Tecmo Koei we're talking about.
At least Zhang He has his claws again, and we didn't have to buy a season pass for them this time. That's something, right?
While Dynasty Warriors: Origins delighted those who wanted the series to be more serious, those of us who liked a diverse roster with unique weapons were left out in the cold. Abyss brings that flavor back by reusing material from Dynasty Warriors 8 for the umpteenth time alongside assets lifted from the last time Samurai Warriors wasn’t complete shit.
So yeah, Abyss is fundamentally a stripped down Hades made of stripped down parts from a stripped down franchise, and it quite honestly shows. This is evident with the very first combat screen you see - a barren, charmless arena with a large swarm of enemies spawning right beside the player. The next one is the same, then the next, just arena after arena of empty flat terrain, the Mississippi of level design.
See, while nominally this game could be called a roguelite, it meets only the barest minimal standards. It has run-based progress, it has stuff you lose when you die, it has incremental persistent upgrades, and it has all of this in the most basic format it can get away with. There's just not very much of anything, and what's there starts to get old after a very short while.
Combat itself would be fun if not for the aggressive tendency to get in its own way.
Characters behave pretty much the same way they do in their respective games, using the familiar strings of normal and charged attacks. You can fight with the series' trusty button mashing commands or you can hold buttons down instead, which I presume has something to do with how this game feels like it was originally intended for mobile phones.
Unique to Abyss is a Summoning system that I'd love if it were in a different game. Throughout a run you collect multiple characters that you can summon into battle by attaching them to your charge attacks. Summons essentially extend attack strings by tacking a powerful move of their own onto the end of your combos. Just keep pressing or holding the charge button after an attack sequence, and the attached officer will initiate a huge colorful ability before entering a cooldown state.
Party building offers an extra ultimate move alongside the series’ traditional Musou attacks. When the Assemble meter is full, you can launch all summons at once as the surroundings turn monochrome and the special effects look like the 1990s exploded in a paint factory. It’s very pretty, and very important for getting through later battles.
Summoning is a lovely little idea and the associated visuals are rather pleasing. Sadly, it and many other elements of battle are hamstrung by contradictory nonsense during combat and an overall messiness that lands entirely on the wrong side of frantic.
Rather than be a straightforward hack n’ slash game, Abyss goes overboard with its aping of Hades by throwing so many area-of-effect attacks at the player the arena floor becomes carpeted in purple indicators. It starts off aggressive, gets absurd, and becomes downright comical past the halfway point of any given run.
Welcome to Ribena Hell!
Combat revolves entirely around dodging AoE spam, and it gets really bloody tiresome. Forget blocking anything, forget strategy outside of just throwing offense in every direction as much as possible. Avoiding purple templates on the ground that telegraph attacks is literally all this game cares about to the detriment and contradiction of anything else it might be doing.
It’s to such an extreme they had to add the unintuitive ability to pick up your attack string where you left off immediately after a dodge. No other Warriors game does it, but without such a feature crowbarred in, most attacks would be literally impossible to pull off. I’ve been conditioned by most games - including the Warriors ones - to expect my offense to reset after evading, but in order to consistently summon officers as they cool down, I’ve got to fight my own muscle memory. Amidst the sheer density of onscreen nonsense, it can be downright disorienting to keep track of this shit.
Abyss’ obsessive use of AoEs directly butts heads with the Summoning system since it inherently shafts characters whose charge attacks require multiple inputs or lengthy animations. It already takes such warriors way longer to summon than others do, and constant interruptions thrown into the mix only hurts them more. The Samurai Warriors roster is practically defined by multi-stage charge attacks and can “reverse” their normal and charge attack behavior, so not only are they shafted by the dodge-a-thon, they further complicate keeping track of attack sequences.
Characters with moves that see them zipping around the screen are further impacted by the risk of landing right into a huge purple pond of incoming death. Of course, that’s to be expected in a game where dodging one AoE frequently puts you in the path of another AoE because most of the screen is the path of an AoE. For Christ’s sake, even basic mooks get to do them!
All my complaints are exacerbated by the fact that this is still, at least optically, a Musou game, and that means the damage indicators are underneath an ocean of enemies and effects. So, you’re trying to get your lengthy attacks off while keeping track of which summons are on cooldown while bombarded by area-of-effect attacks whose telegraphs are continually obscured by both the enemies spamming them and other AoE telegraphs. Between the control nightmares and this shit, the whole thing is overwhelming.
For added fun, try playing a character like Sima Yi or Nobunaga, whose attacks affect an area and are fucking purple. To be quite honest, I find that legitimately funny. When in Ribena Hell, Ribena as the Hellbound Ribenas!
That’s not the funniest part though, as Abyss pulls a truly majestic prank with its combat: did I mention that dodging has a cooldown time after use?
Comedy. Pure comedy.
Your build’s effectiveness is gauged by a Battle Rating. Officers have all these attributes and elements and relationships that synergize to add evermore effective bonuses, but most of the complexity gives way to a simple case of picking whatever options add the most numbers to the number. So it goes with all games inspired by Destiny’s mentally numbing power rating system.
Upgrades are not completely brainless, as some officers and attributes give you abilities you’ll want regardless of your current status. It’s essential to have at least one Strength upgrade so your charge attacks can interrupt AoEs, and the Skill attribute is needed to expand your moveset with more space for summons. It pays to focus on a handful of attributes otherwise, since picking up officers and items with the same ones quickly stack Battle Rating multipliers.
Formations offer another choice, and they look complicated at first until you realize they’re just glorified multipliers. You start with a basic one, purchase more in a shop that randomly appears during play, and each one multiplies the strength of various attributes. Late in a run, the type of Formation and which officers you’ve attached to specific attacks can impact Battle Ratings by millions, but not to worry - the game itself can automatically arrange what you have to maximize power. I appreciate that, but it does emphasize how much things boil down to Number Go Up(™).
Permanent upgrades cost a Karma Ember currency acquired during runs, the only thing retained upon failure. A sprawling unlock tree contains the playable roster alongside new Formations and passive bonuses, and each officer adds a universal stat boost for everybody. This is a genuinely cool little system, as it makes individual character unlocks rewarding in both a specific and general sense at once.
Other than that, there’s not a lot to do between runs. Omega Force clearly wasn’t interested in copying the stuff that really made Hades stand out, so aside from some readable lore and unlockable music that you can’t even play outside of the selection menu, Abyss’ entire loop consists of running and unlocking and running again. It wouldn’t be an issue if I felt excited to start a new run, but after only a few I found the prospect wholly unenticing.
It’s not like the story is going to reel anyone in. The Gang Goes to Hell is pretty much the entire plot. They’re all in Hell, there’s a bad demon, they need to kill it. That’s the whole deal.
Speaking of bad demons…
Boss battles are designed in such a way as to be fucking stupid. In order to deal even one point of damage to a boss, you must fully deplete a barrier that staggers it, giving you a brief window of time in which to hurt it as much as possible. The barrier - which is the size of the health bar itself - fully replenishes after a few seconds and must be emptied again in order to make any progress toward victory.
While this is structurally similar to boss fights in many other games, most barriers at least let you deal minimal HP damage or have some other system in place to mitigate the frustrating scenario of having a boss on death’s door but totally invincible for ages. At best, it’s tedious. At worst, it’s disheartening.
When I lose a run, it’s basically always within this scenario, and it’s not encouraging. It doesn’t make me want to jump right back in and have another go because I feel more like I was cheated in a bullshit war of attrition. I lost a run on the end boss’ final phase after depleting so much of its HP the health bar looked empty, only for it to get its shield back and grind me down before I could get the one point of damage I needed to win.
Am I really supposed to want to play it again after that?
Also, because you’ll increase your barrier damage as you progress, the first boss is the hardest in the game until the very final one. Guaranteed. With just a little luck in your options, the rest of the bosses are a joke in comparison.
That’s the thing with Abyss - it’s not really difficult, it’s just had its balancing completely fucked. It constantly irritates with so many contradictory mechanics and inefficient design choices. It’s like nobody asked if the various systems actually played well together, if perhaps some of the ideas needed rebalancing or required some compromise. This is a big problem Omega Force has in general - even when they have a good concept, they just smash it into a preexisting formula with no consideration or care.
To the casual observer, Abyss may look like a dopamine factory, something similar to Vampire Survivors with all its bright colors and flashing lights. It’s more like a dopamine teaser, because any joy you could get from building yourself into a dazzling death dealer is forever mitigated by how much you need to evade and how harder it gets to see what needs evading. In Vampire Survivors, you can reach a point where it doesn’t matter that you can’t see because you’re so overpowered. It always matters in a dopamine teaser, no matter how strong you are.
When your Battle Power is in the millions, fights become firework displays, and cooldowns have been nothinged by upgrades, there’s genuine entertainment to be had, but whenever I’d reach that point l’d already feel spent. A run through Hell starts at fever pitch, quickly spikes a couple of times, then maintains a spiked fever pitch until the end. It’s hard to appreciate how bombastic your build’s become when it’s just adding to a cloud of indecipherable noise.
WARRIORS: Abyss wants to be a Warriors game and a Hades game at once. The best way of doing that is not to duct tape the disparate elements together and hope it all works in the end. That’s what this thing does though, and the result is a visually stressful, mechanically conflicted mess.
It can be enjoyable at times, but only in two cases - when a run starts and it feels like a Musou game, or when the thing’s nearly over and you have a power rating in the millions so the chaos becomes hilarious. Even then, however, the sheer tedium and frustration that characterizes the majority of the experience makes those fun bits simply not worth the effort.
That’s the biggest problem with WARRIORS: Abyss. It’s not the worst thing in the world, but with so many better Musou games and far superior roguelites, why hassle yourself with the kind of game that builds its combat obsessively around dodging and then puts your dodge ability on a bloody cooldown?
5/10
