Warriors: Abyss Review (PS5) | Push Square
Truthfully, Warriors: Abyss feels like Koei Tecmo tried to cook up its own budget Hades from the leftovers of last night's Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors. That's not to say it fails to sate the appetite, though. Despite being a bit rough around the edges, Abyss is a solid and successfully addictive foray into the roguelike genre, and the series' signature hack-and-slash ingredients blend right in.
Mechanically, things can seem a tad unintuitive at first — especially since the first hour or so is littered with somewhat clunky tutorial messages, and pesky interjections from Enma (your guide, and the ruler of Hell himself) — but once the game's systems click, they reveal a simple yet varied gameplay loop which is consistently rewarding, whether you're amassing temporary strength during a run, or permanently bolstering your forces in the Hall of Bonded Souls.
When making preparations between stages, you'll have the option to optimise your build automatically. While this does render a lot of your own management redundant and can lessen your sense of agency as a result, it's an ultimately welcome feature which helps you get right back to the horde-hacking action — the most important part of any Warriors title.
Abyss reuses a great deal of assets from its predecessors — models, animations, music, and sounds — and while the end product is serviceable, we can't help but feel that a bit of added flair would've gone far for the game's presentation, and aided in distinguishing it from other instalments.
The four levels of Hell you'll be carving a path through are well-defined if not terribly interesting, and can get ludicrously cluttered with effects at times; so much so that brief frame rate dips can occur during particularly hectic moments.
These jitters constantly greet you as you enter new stages, too, and although these issues were never intrusive enough to rain on our crusade, it's a shame that the title doesn't perform more seamlessly given its basic graphics, and
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