3.5/5 ★ – bokonon764's review of WARRIORS: Abyss.

Warriors Abyss is essentially Dynasty Warriors, but as a roguelite. It’s an unholy union of mindless fun. The game has a simple loop; descend four areas, fight a boss, rinse and repeat, all the while, slaying hordes of undead. If you’ve never played a Warriors game, you essentially just push the two attack buttons perform combos over and over, dash when you need to avoid an attack, and fill meters for special attacks. Abyss doesn’t have you running all over a battlefield to protect allies or capture command posts like most musou games. Instead, it’s a series of stages with an isometric camera angle, which works for what’s essentially the exact same control scheme as other Warriors games. Just mindless fun. Listen to music, podcast, while you play, this game is perfect for that. There’s this character called Enma who’s pretty annoying, some fuckin thousand year old androgynous anime person who’s actually a god or whatever. I learned from looking that name up that Enma is a the Japanese god of the underworld, so that’s neat, I learned something. Enma has you going through the underworld to kill this monster thing, I don’t really know. So pretty cool, a roguelite set in an underworld *cough* Hades. My only experience with roguelite games is with Hades, so I don’t have much to go off, but Abyss functions in a very similar way. Collect buffs as you move through the stages, all buffs are lost upon death, although there is a currency that can be used to purchase permanent stat boosts. The sheer variety of buffs that Hades offered puts this game to shame, but it’s a still a fun system that I got really into experimenting with. Each buff comes from choosing another character to join your team; this will add strength points, elemental damage to attacks, extra dash chances…and then on top of that, picking certain characters in the same group (“Brave Generals” “Oda clan” etc.) will give additional buffs. From the team, which can easily swell to well over 30 characters, six can be used as summonable allies. It’s just a pop in and attack thing, but it adds one more layer to complement the very simple combat. So I don’t know, while it lacks a variety of gameplay style between buffs, it’s still has a depth to be explored, I’m a fan. There are an overwhelming number of characters to play as, but that’s also a standard of the series. Each has their own unique weapon and move set, but because of the sheer number of characters, it’s hard to keep them all straight. Just play as Lu Bu if you’re not sure what to do. Lu Bu is the shit. There are some DLC characters to that we’re free, just had to be unlocked. I don’t know any of the games the characters are from with the exception of the four Ninja Gaiden characters. Honestly, there are so many cool Warriors characters, I didn’t really fuck with the guest characters at all. There’s not a whole lot to say here, this games fun as fuck but nothing special. If you like Dynasty Warriors, this is a great variation of the style.