The latest entry in Koei’s Warriors series is here, and it’s… a roguelike?
Revealed as a surprise drop during Sony’s State of Play 2025 presentation, Warriors: Abyss is a new take on the popular Musou franchise, giving players meta upgrades, structured runs, and a wide cast of characters to play around with.
Does the franchise translate well into a roguelike format? Is its wide cast of characters a detriment or a benefit? Should you still avoid pursuing Lu Bu? Find out the answer to these questions and more in our full review for Warriors: Abyss.
Warriors: Abyss
Developer: Koei Tecmo Games
Publisher: Koei Tecmo Games
Platforms: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and Microsoft Windows (Reviewed)
Release Date: February 12, 2025
Players: 1
Price: $24.99
Abyss is a Samurai and Dynasty Warriors crossover, bringing both franchises into the depths of hell to fight in service of King Enma. The game works just like the Musou titles players are familiar with, except now viewed from an isometric perspective and structured into runs.
Players tackle massive, ever-growing waves of enemy undead while acquiring allies and chaining alliances to unlock new powers, with each area featuring a fearsome boss at the end.
Dying takes you all the way back to the beginning, resetting your progress in that run but letting you unlock more playable characters and allies for your next attempt, thus continuing the cycle until you liberate hell for good.
Throughout their run, players will form alliances with other playable characters, who lend their power in the form of both passive and active skills, which manifest as combo enders. Most of the player’s damage comes from activating these combo attacks, which summon your ally onto the playing field to perform their signature moves.
Six allies can be equipped at the same time, but the player can make endless alliances for the sake of acquiring passive bonuses. When recruiting allies, players are looking for a balance between desirable skills, matching emblems, and unique tactics. If that sounds too complex, the game simply tells you which ally will increase your “battle power” the most, which is pretty handy.
The way the battle power system is calculated is a little vague, but the logic behind it seems to track for the most part, taking synergies and desirable effects into account. It’s not always that it seems to make sense according to your current build, but most of the time you can just trust the numbers and be fine.
Players can also equip their allies into different formations, which give unique bonuses depending on the symbol used and what slots they take up. Each formation also has both passive and active abilities, which gives players a good degree of customization over their build.
Staples of the franchise, like the Musou attacks, are also still present, as characters can perform their signature moves by filling up their Musou gauge. There is also a formation gauge that lets you assemble your allies, temporarily summoning them all onto the playing field to act independently.
Overall, the Musou gameplay matches well with this format, and it’s clear that Koei gave a lot of thought to the game’s roguelike systems to make it so players have a lot of build choices. There is quite a bit to consider when picking new allies, but players can also let Enma handle everything, skipping the decision-making process and simply focusing on the moment-to-moment gameplay.
The game’s story is delivered through visual novel dialogue between Enma, the king of hell, and the voiceless player. The plot follows the usual “hero summoned to another world” structure, although it doesn’t seem to be viewed from any specific perspective.
During conversations, the player is presented with a few dialogue options, but it’s unknown who the “canon” character would be in that situation. Regardless of that, Enma manages to be a likeable new addition, even if most of our interactions are one-sided.
For what it’s worth, voice actress Fairouz Ai does a great job as King Enma, despite not having anyone to act alongside. Here’s hoping the character eventually becomes playable or shows up in a future Warriors game, at the very least so we can see the king of hell interact with someone who can respond audibly.
Warriors: Abyss boasts a massive cast of playable characters, a staggering 100, to be exact. Each of these characters has been ported from their most recent appearances, excluding titles with either realistic or cartoonish art styles like DW 9, Origins, and SW 5. Most of the cast seems to have come from DW 8 and SW 4 DX, judging by their models and portrait art.
When it comes to games with such large casts, it makes sense to be worried that characters would either all be reskins of each other or have shared movesets based on their weapons, but that’s not the case here. Almost everyone you see has their own set of moves and combos, as well as a unique Musou attack.
The almost comes from characters with mirrored movesets, like Yukimura Sanada being the Samurai version of Zhao Yun, meaning they share some of their combos, but the similarities stop there as they have different musou attacks, character types, ally abilities, and emblems, as well as franchise-specific quirks.
After beating the game once, players unlock the ability to make their runs harder by increasing the traversal level, which serves as a difficulty modifier that gives enemies extra attacks and makes it harder to recruit allies, but also rewards players with increased karma embers.
Farming karma embers becomes a big part of the game after unlocking all bond souls, since each character’s unique weapon costs 50 thousand embers. Unique weapons can also be found during runs inside of challenge chests, but not only are they rare, they are also completely random.
The game selects “bonus characters” after every run, who receive more of these embers when played. This rotation helps incentivize the player to try out different characters, which is a needed system in a game with 100 of them.
The replayability in Warriors: Abyss definitely comes from trying out all of the game’s different characters, although there isn’t much of an incentive to give the rest of the cast a chance aside from the ones currently affected by the karma ember boost.
Most of the cast is underwhelming when compared to the major souls like Guan Yu, Nobunaga, and Lu Bu, as their kits feel more complete and they have a much easier time going through the game.
That isn’t to say the rest of the cast isn’t viable or unfun to play; on the contrary, there are a lot of fun characters that are considered minor souls and can get quite strong with their passive abilities, but the major characters move through the game with ease for the most part, although there are exceptions, like Guan Yinping, who are excessively strong without being a major soul.
Overall, Abyss is a fantastic way of turning the framework that Koei built with the Warriors series over the years into something that is fresh but doesn’t stray too far from its core premise. The Musou style lends itself really well to titles like this and makes the game quite fun to go through.
Warriors: Abyss is a clever way to reuse assets, and even if Koei has relapsed into some of their old habits with this one by including incredibly overpriced cosmetic DLCs as well as making a pretty barebones PC port, it still doesn’t ruin what is a very fun experience overall.
Abyss has a fun gameplay loop, held together by well-thought-out roguelike systems and a massive cast of characters for players to try out. This is a game that does a genre mixture quite well, being a treat for both Musou and roguelike fans without alienating Koei’s core audience.
Warriors: Abyss was reviewed on Microsoft Windows using a game code provided by Koei Tecmo. You can find additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy here. Warriors: Abyss is available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and Microsoft Windows (through Steam).
