Warriors: Abyss review: Hell of a grind

Koei Tecmo has come screaming into 2025 with all kinds of wins, from bringing the hype back to Ninja Gaiden to successfully shifting gears in Dynasty Warriors. Even Atelier is growing in leaps and bounds. Somehow there’s room for more, as we saw during the February 2025 State of Play. A whole new Warriors game shadow-dropped, and it’s another intriguing experiment: a roguelike! Not just any roguelike, but one that goes out of its way to invoke Hades, one of the most tremendous of its kind in contemporary history. Generally I buy what Omega Force sells, but I wasn’t feeling Warriors: Abyss when I first saw it during the showcase. After playing it… well, I’m still not really feeling it. But I kind of am? Buckle up folks, it’s a weird one.

Drag several people to Hell

Abyss’ premise rules. King Enma, lord of the underworld, who is an extremely fashionable, androgynous child for some reason, has lost control of Hell after a big monster invaded. The solution? Pluck legendary Chinese general Zhao Yun from wherever he’s standing, drag his ass down to Hell, and make him fight evil goop demons and giant monsters until things are back to normal. Zhao Yun can’t quite hang but while he tries he generates enough cosmic magic to summon more heroes from throughout history, forming a chain reaction that makes everyone involved stronger. Thus, Enma comes to realize the key to restabilizing Hell is to throw dozens of mighty warriors from China and Japan at the problem like they’re War Crimes Pikmin. Makes perfect sense to me.

That’s pretty much the whole loop. Get as far as you can with your chosen Warrior, then spend the magic currency on unlocking more Warriors and watch all the numbers go up. You’ll get further and further as the numbers get bigger, until you eventually have the whole squad and enough video game synergy to trivialize the whole ordeal. You do this by playing, more or less, a traditional Warriors game but from a more isometric perspective. If this sounds fun, that’s because it is! If this sounds like it might be a little too simple for its own good, even in the beat ‘em up-like realm of Dynasty and Samurai Warriors, that’s because it is! There are major pros and cons to this formula, and frankly for me the impact of either side shifted dramatically over the past few days depending on my mood. It’s that kind of game.

These numbers do kind of fib, actually

The biggest problem is the whole progression system. It feels fake, in the exact kind of way a mobile game that just wants to drain money from your wallet would feel. There are lots of numbers, modifiers, status effects, formations, elemental properties, labels, and just about any other gimmick you could think of on display. There’s also one big number, that’s the King Number, the one Enma themself tells you is the one that really matters. Turns out they weren’t lying, and you can ignore anything else when it comes time to make a choice. Everything else that seems like it should matter… really doesn’t. If you aren’t trying to grind, if you want to craft some badass builds, you are in the wrong place, homie. Go play the TMNT one of these if you’re looking for a Hades supplement. Hit some mouser robots with a poison stick; it’s a good time.

They nailed the important part

If you want the Musou sauce, though, there is still Musou sauce. These games often get flak for being repetitive, but despite Abyss’ low-budget feel it goes out of its way to feel like a robust action game. For starters, each character has a distinct moveset. Warriors games sometimes fumble in this respect, but Abyss chooses its roster with a sense of specificity, making sure each character stands out despite simple controls. Even if the differences aren’t functionally massive, you can see the difference in animations, hit properties, so on and so forth. It’s genuinely impressive, especially for a game that costs 25 smackers with a bunch of characters presumably ripped from other games.

The other really impressive part is the split between characters from Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors. Casual onlookers may not realize it, but these two series have fundamental gameplay differences despite their similar control schemes and structures. Those differences are in place in Abyss, making choosing between characters from each series a bigger deal than you might think at first, until you’re up against the hordes of goop demons in Hell trying to figure out the most efficient ways to clear objectives. It’s fun to, while you’re working on your preferred characters, their unique attacks, and the (admittedly limited) build-crafting, also factor in that half the roster plays by a somewhat different set of rules from the other.

There's a mechanic unique to Abyss that also helps it stand out, and makes actually building the roster feel better beyond simply making numbers go up. Each time you add to your team after a stage a character gets added to a sort of cooldown stable that attaches to your standard Warriors combo-enders. This adds chaos to your own moveset, summoning extra fighters for big, screen-clearing damage and other extra properties your chosen general won't have on their own. It adds a layer of timing and strategy to the core combat, something that really ramps up in importance as the enemy hordes get stronger and the game's body count demands grow. I loved this part especially, as it had me thinking about which moves to use and when way more often than I expected. 

Boss bummers

Unfortunately this mechanic also exposed another big problem with Abyss, that being the boss fights. These are super annoying wars of attrition, mostly because you have to break each boss' shields before you can actually hurt them. And the time it takes to break said shield versus how long you have before it comes back is absurdly off-balance. I wanted to scream every time I got a boss down to a sliver of health, only to run out of damage time and be forced to start from scratch on a third or fourth shield. It sucks! Especially because summoning your homies from your own combo variants can take time you won't have when a boss is spamming AoEs at you every three seconds. While I enjoyed the crowd-clearing levels, I came to see boss fights as chores to work through in order to get back to the good stuff. And that's no bueno in a game like this, especially because the bosses don't change at all like they might in other roguelikes.

My conundrum with this game is on one hand, feeling intellectually insulted by its systems or lack thereof, and on the other getting a great deal of joy out of its surprisingly nuanced combat. I can pick Abyss up and easily lose an hour to it without noticing, but I don’t walk away feeling like I necessarily value the time I spent beyond the lizard-brained dopamine it brought me. It’s an experience I could probably replicate playing a different Musou, and perhaps have a better, more gratifying time, but this happens to be the one I’m in front of. But at the same time, it’s still a markedly different experience of its own.

Where does that leave us, readers? A strange land, full of conflicting emotions and shifting moods. It’s the perfect space for a strange, budget-friendly title to occupy, which is exactly what Warriors: Abyss happens to be. This is not a game with ambitions to stand up and box with Hades, and it obviously isn’t “the next Warriors” by any means either. It’s a fascinating experiment that misses as many targets as it hits. I’ve seen some people hypothesize that Abyss could literally be a repurposed mobile game, and while I don’t agree I can understand where that feeling comes from. I’ve had a good time with it despite its issues, but I can just as easily pass it over in favor of other, similar games without blinking. Warriors hypebeasts probably have plenty of reasons to pick this up, but I don’t see Abyss escaping its own niche anytime soon.

Warriors: Abyss is available now for the PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and 5, and Xbox Series X|S. A PC code was provided by the publisher for this review.

Lucas White

Contributing Editor

Lucas plays a lot of videogames. Sometimes he enjoys one. His favorites include Dragon Quest, SaGa, and Mystery Dungeon. He's far too rattled with ADHD to care about world-building lore but will get lost for days in essays about themes and characters. Holds a journalism degree, which makes conversations about Oxford Commas awkward to say the least. Not a trophy hunter but platinumed Sifu out of sheer spite and got 100 percent in Rondo of Blood because it rules. You can find him on Twitter @HokutoNoLucas being curmudgeonly about Square Enix discourse and occasionally saying positive things about Konami.