Warriors Abyss game review on PS5

It was for "free" with my membership, it has about a 3.5/5 rating on the PS network and about a 6/10 on the other major sites that exist out there.

After playing for an hour or so I feel as though people are being very generous giving it as high of marks as they have. After dying a couple of times I looked at what the overall game had to offer and decided that this game is not for me. I guess it's for someone, but that person is not I.

src

Initially I watched the trailer and thought that maybe it would have some sort of casual appeal to me because it is a hack n slash game. What that means to me is normally it isn't going to require a tremendous amount of actual strategy to get through it and the enjoyment factor will come from various unlocks you get by progression. It is a roguelike which to me mostly means I am not going to like it though. I simply cannot get on board the idea of needing to start completely over from the start of a game once you die and the only roguelike that I have ever truly enjoyed was Hades. Speaking of which I am yet to play the second installment of that game, even though I already have it on my machine.

src

It starts out simple enough with them giving you a bit of a tutorial about light and heavy attacks as well as some of your more advanced stills that are on recharge/cooldown. Then you have a "super" that is a bunch of cohorts that are "with you" and when you press that button it wipes out a bunch of enemies, which is your ultimate objective in all of the levels other than the boss stages - which I have only seen 3 of before I quit.

src

There are a ton of playable characters but when I was playing the 3 different ones that I tried I honestly didn't notice much of a difference between them. I am sure there are some differences and perhaps they become more apparent as you move on and up in the amount of characters that you have access to, but for me every single stage I played consisted of me hitting 2 or 3 light attacks followed by a heavy attack and this would wipe out 20 or so of the trash mobs that come at your relentlessly.

Then your strategy is simply dashing out of harm's way when you see a purple or other colored something or other either heading towards you or in a circle on the ground... and really, that was the entire game as far as I saw it.

you are constantly losing health and just like in Hades and other rouge-like games, finding health drops is a big part of the strategy if you can even call it that. You choose to go to a certain room that will fill up your health to some degree instead of pursuing other rooms that will buff your stats.

Speaking of which: Of the several dozen upgrades I received along the way I never really noticed much difference in my damage output and again perhaps it happens later, but I wasn't really offered any other sort of moves as time went by. The game truly is "hack n slash "because that was really all I ever did and the evolution of my playing simply lead to me dodging or dashing more frequently as the enemies became predictably more powerful the deeper you go into "hell" or whatever the crap this is all supposed to be.

src
_{this thing, Enma, is going to talk at you a LOT, and you, like me, will start to completely ignore it and just press whatever button it takes to make her shut up.}

The story is kind of dumb and what makes it even dumber is that you are given dialogue choices along the way and as far as I can tell none of your choices actually have any impact or effect on what happens in the really weak "story." I think the story was kind of unnecessary and it doesn't help that the game's voices are all in Japanese and I am just reading subtitles. At least almost all of this was very skippable.

From what I can tell the entire point of this game is to simply grind over and over until you unlock all the characters but I see no point in this because the characters I did unlock all seemed to function in exactly the same way as the other ones.

I cannot really recommend that anyone seek this game out to play it, even if it is for free. This is one of those PS-Plus games that I feel Sony throws at us because there is no chance anyone out there is going to pay any actual money for it. The monthly games for May were pretty terrible IMO. There's always next month though and at least it only costs like $10 a month anyway.