WARRIORS: Abyss by developer Omega Force and publisher Koei Tecmo America—Sony PlayStation 5 feature written by Pierre-Yves with a copy originally provided by the publisher.
Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
Dynasty Warriors: Origin for the Nintendo Switch 2 came in at just the right time as I had been itching to play a musou. My January needed a bit more action than I was getting by playing slower paced horror games. But just before that happened, I took Warriors: Abyss back out of the archive for another spin through the realms of hell and towards my platinum.
So what did I think of Warriors: Abyss after my PS5 review one year later?
Getting back to Warriors: Abyss one year later was easy. The Roguelite style allowed for an easy drop into the action and to simply continue where I had left things off. Only adding to the experience are the many free content additions that have been provided since I last played. Plenty of new characters like Sophie, Ryza, and Yumia from the Atelier franchise to Ryu Hayabusa, Ayane, Rachel and Momiji from the Ninja Gaiden series.
If new challengers were not enough of an incentive, there are also new challenges to be had alongside the main gameplay mode. Similar in principle, these modes are called the Void of Ephemerality and the Depths of Torment. Both of these modes require that you’ve completed a full run of the core mode to create save data to be used. The higher the difficulty challenge, the greater the rewards to be had.
The Void of Ephemerality will have you trying to survive for a certain length of time with your saved character data. With the only goal to survive, it’s obviously not going to be all sunshine and rainbows. It doesn’t take long for champion enemies, mid-bosses and big bosses to simply show up and try to ruin your day. If you can defeat any of these as they appear in a normal stage format, you’ll get a few extra seconds to the timer to push further into hell and reap even better rewards. It’s definitely tough as you move through the stages because the bosses themselves are already one big challenge, but in a normal stage with a constant influx of everything else? Chaotic mayhem!
Unlike the Void of Ephemerality, the Depths of Torment will instead have you challenge yourself against an ever increasing amount of negative modifiers. Between the two modes, I found this one more interesting as you can be more calculating in your venture through the hordes of hell as you don’t need to worry about a ticking clock.
As for the rewards? The rewards given are items that can be equipped “by the player” as an overall bonus on top of the already existing bonuses granted by unlocking the huge cast of characters. Extra attack, defense, speed and other modifiers such as the fire element being more powerful overall. These items really help that push into the later difficulties that can honestly have you die in nothing more than a few hits.
Finally, added alongside the cast from Ninja Gaiden was a mode called the Training Hall which has its own quirks for traversing hell. In this mode there are “challenges” such as only encountering Dynasty or Samurai Warriors to aid you as you go through the core gameplay loop. The rewards for performing these challenges will range in extra souls to unlock everything to special weapons. The only catch is that some of these are “locked” behind difficulty levels so they won’t all be easy to get your hands on.
Out of all of the additions, my only concerns were how well the Atelier protagonists would fare as characters in a much faster paced action based environment. I honestly should have known better than to worry as Sophie, Ryza and Yumia offer great gameplay experiences. Each was a lot of fun to play and made diving through the difficulties easier than I thought they would be… until I took Ryu Hayabusa out into the field. I don’t even think I need to mention just how much of a force of nature our shinobi really is.
One year later Warriors: Abyss is even better than it was on launch. Between the addition of multiple new characters and gameplay modes, again, all for free, there’s no reason to not pick this back up to dive back into hell to cause some warriors styled mayhem.
0 comments:
Post a Comment