WARRIORS: Abyss Review (Switch eShop)

During Sony’s February 2025 State of Play presentation, the big shadow drop was Koei Tecmo’s Warriors: Abyss, which offers a low-budget, roguelite take on the popular Warriors hack ‘n’ slash formula. The good news is that this genre hybrid feels like both halves fit perfectly together—the mindlessness of the combat mixed with the brief run-focused nature of roguelite action is so good that it almost feels hard to believe that the team never thought to produce something like this earlier. The bad news is that its struggles with repetition keep it from being anywhere near as addictive as roguelikes such as Dead Cells or Slay the Spire. Luckily, Warriors: Abyss still proves itself to be a worthwhile new entry in the series, but only just.

Warriors: Abyss begins with you being summoned by an impish little god named Enma, the king of Hell, who was recently deposed when an ancient evil being named Gouma was released and took over the land of the dead. Eager to reclaim his throne, Enma enlists the stars of the Warriors franchise to fight off Gouma’s forces and ultimately send the creature back where it came from. Every now and then, Enma will pop up with a bit more of lore or some snarky quip, but there’s not much more to the storyline beyond this basic setup.

Gameplay in Warriors: Abyss feels like a typical Dynasty Warriors entry with a dash of Diablo and Hades thrown in for good measure. A total run shouldn’t take you any longer than a couple of hours and consists of rushing through four distinct biomes with eight levels each, with the final stages always reserved for that biome’s resident boss monster.

Each floor typically tasks you with killing a set number of enemies, who you’ll fell by the dozens as you tear through hordes with reckless abandon. After each floor, you claim treasure or summon another hero (more on this in a bit) and pick the room rewards you want to chase for the next floor.

If you’re remotely versed in roguelites, you’ll be familiar with the structure here, but that’s a good thing. Warriors: Abyss may not add a lot of interesting new ideas to the traditional roguelite style, but it executes on everything quite well. The power ramp is fairly satisfying as you rapidly snag buffs and power-ups that transform your character into an army of one, while the brutality of the ‘tough but fair’ difficulty can be softened through sheer persistence and playing the meta-progression elements right.

Warriors: Abyss is the kind of game where you’ll find yourself losing runs left and right at first, but the thrill of combat and progression is strong enough that (at least initially) you can hardly resist trying just one more run.

Part of what makes each run interesting is the sheer number of potential playable characters: 100. Everyone follows the same combo attack structure of combining either heavy or light attacks to pull off flashy moves, but the interesting bits come with the character-specific abilities and buffs.

One character will be granted a free instant revive once per run when they finally get overwhelmed by the enemy hordes, another might get a fixed percentage buff to their strength for each member of a specific clan they manage to collect. It can take a while to find a ‘main’ or two that really gels with your playstyle, but there’s no shortage of options to experiment with here.

The bulk of the level rewards come in the form of a crack at the Crystal Sapling, a tree that lets you commune with the spirits of other warriors you’ve unlocked and add them to your team. Not only will the first six of these become summonable for bombastic cooldown attacks as an extension of your base combos, but each one will also grant you a wealth of stat buffs and new abilities to make your character that much more formidable.

Picking the right hero at the tree can often feel a little overwhelming given how many stats and variables there are to consider, but the game helpfully summarises things by giving you a fixed power number as a rough estimate of how much that character will buff your combat abilities. This number becomes a little less useful if you’re going for a very specialised build, but it nonetheless acts as a good metric to gauge overall effectiveness.

When you inevitably fall in battle, you’ll be sent back to the Great Hall to start over from square one with a new character, though there are some ways you can fudge the odds in your favour. In the Hall of Bonded Souls, you can spend currency obtained from your run in a massive skill tree that grants you things like new characters and buffs to the experience that you gain in a run.

Every unlocked character leads to some sort of permanent stat boost that applies to all characters, which creates a noticeable effect once you’ve built up these buffs across a few dozen character unlocks. And even though everyone begins a run at level one, all accrued levels from across their many attempts feed into a ‘cumulative level’ that grants that character further permanent stat boosts. These metaprogression elements are a welcome part of the cycle, ensuring that sustained effort will result in you eventually managing a successful run.

Naturally, it wouldn’t be a Warriors game without a ridiculous amount of grind and that’s where Warriors: Abyss is both at its best and its worst. On one hand, there’s something brilliantly pleasing about a modestly difficult, but relatively mindless game where you can opt to do little else but hold down either ‘Y’ or ‘X’ and watch the fireworks as your character rips and tears their way through most of their foes.

On the other hand, run attempts soon start to feel indistinguishable from each other regardless of which character you choose, which makes further attempts feel gradually less appealing. Warriors: Abyss is the perfect ‘second monitor’ kind of game, something that’s at its best when you’re listening to a podcast or have a rerun of a favourite show on in the background.

Visually, it's rather disappointing, which contributes in a roundabout way to the grindiness of the gameplay loop becoming more apparent over time. The biomes all have a rather low-poly and unimaginative design, while the enemies are mostly generic soldiers and monsters. Given that there are sometimes literally hundreds of moving characters on the screen at once, the simplistic visuals feel like an acceptable compromise for keeping everything moving at a smooth frame rate, but even so, it doesn’t make for a very visually interesting or creative experience.