Abyssus Review - Does This Roguelite FPS Sink or Swim?

If you’ve taken a gander through the Steam store at any point in the last five years, you’ve probably found a lot of roguelites.  The genre’s popularity is without question, but I don’t envy any developer dipping their toes into this style of game, because any attempt to stand out faces an uphill battle.

That hill feels even steeper for a genre like the first-person shooter, which is so repetitive already by nature that creating a roguelite gameplay loop with enough variety to keep you coming back for more requires slick design and a whole lot of compelling content.  I won’t say it’s impossible to create a consistently good roguelite FPS, but any game that wants to try its hand at it better be prepared to offer more than just shooting stuff.

In comes Abyssus, a roguelite shooter aiming to combine a unique brinepunk setting evoking hints of Bioshock with the fast-paced baddie-murdering gameplay of modern Doom and the ability to play with your friends.  So was I hooked by the game's briny blasting or did it do an Abyss-mal job of holding my attention?  Let’s talk about it.

Before I get into it, I do need to throw a caveat out there – despite Abyssus being a co-op title, it is fully playable in single-player mode.  Which is good, because I could not manage to successfully join a co-op match at any point in my review period and we received only one review code - thus, it was not possible to try out the game’s cooperative features, and for better or worse this review only covers my single-player experience with the game.

Now let’s start with the story, because that’ll be the quickest part – despite the vaguely Bioshock-esque look to Abyssus, its narrative is minimal to the point where it may as well not exist at all.  The game starts with a popup that gives literally three sentences of context as to why you’re here and what’s happening before diving into the tutorial. 

You’ll find journal entries occasionally littered around the environment, but while the potential is there for them to paint a broader picture of the story at large, most of them feel too vague and short to be of interest.  If you’re looking for any sort of narrative hook here, reel your expectations right back in.  I respect the developer’s choice to make Abyssus as gameplay-focused as possible, but there’s no denying that the setting had a lot more potential than this, so it’s hard not to be disappointed.

Thankfully, the shooting is here to pick up the storytelling’s slack, and it does a commendable job of being… perfectly fine.  Each gun has a primary fire and secondary fire, and you’ll also have a tertiary ability like a frag grenade or throwable turret that regenerates over time.  Enemies are aggressive and require you to move quickly, hence the comparison to Doom, and accordingly you’re given a double jump and a dash to make sure movement feels relatively slick.  Each mode of attack can be enhanced with blessings, which are the core progression you’ll find within each run – enhance your primary attack with chain lightning that bounces between enemies, set them on fire when you throw a grenade, or build up a shield that allows you to take a hit without actually damaging you while active.  While the blessings you’re offered throughout a run can certainly vary in how they visually manifest themselves, what they all have in common is that they are quite boring.

Virtually every blessing I encountered in Abyssus felt like little more than a stat boost and barely changed the way I played at all.  Charms, of which you can carry one at a time by default, do manage to be a little bit more interesting, like the one that makes you move significantly faster as you blast enemies or the one that boosts your damage while at full health.  These, too, are mostly just stat modifiers, but at least they would make me think a little harder about when to use a health syringe and how aggressively to play.

There’s no point in burying the lead here – every single run I played in Abyssus felt almost exactly the same, and that’s not just the fault of the mid-run upgrades being kind of bland.  It’s also the fault of the level layouts, which repeat so often that I’ll sometimes see the same room more than once within a run, and it only takes a couple of runs to see every single location that a given area has to offer.  And the fault of the enemies, which have barely any variety and within each area include only a handful of basic enemy designs that often swarm you in large numbers, and mini-bosses and final bosses that are not only exactly the same every single time you fight them, but also become trivially easy once you figure out their relatively basic attacks.

And yet, all of this mind-numbing repetition could be somewhat forgivable if the game didn’t double down on it by having an absolutely relentless, soul-sucking grind to unlock anything actually interesting.  For a game boasting on its Steam page about having 8 weapons and 45 weapon mods, you’d think it would give you these upgrades regularly enough to keep things interesting.  And yet, it took hours before I even unlocked my first weapon mod, and dozens of runs to unlock anything more than the default machine gun or the shotgun that you get very early on.  The fact that you can only choose one gun for each run seems oddly limiting, because although the core gameplay feels kind of Doom-like, Doom keeps shooting interesting by giving you tons of varied, impactful weapons that you can switch between at any time, putting aside the fact that its bespoke level design also isn’t watered down by random generation.  Take that style of gameplay and force yourself to use the same gun throughout with unlimited ammunition, and you might get a sense of the sort of boredom I’m talking about here.

Meta-progression comes not just in the form of unlocked weapons and weapon mods, but also the Soul Wheel, which you can utilize before each run to spend any soul fragments you collected to unlock exhilarating features like being able to reload 3% faster or doing 3% more damage.  Thankfully, a few of these upgrades do feel impactful, like granting you a certain amount of spendable gold at the start of each run, but frankly, I feel like many of them are some kind of weird joke. 

My first dozen or more runs of Abyssus only yielded a single soul fragment, maybe two if I was lucky, so going into my next nearly identical run knowing my gun does some extra damage so slight I won’t even notice was hardly the invigorating pull I needed to continue.  Making matters worse was the fact that there were at least half a dozen runs where I breezed through the levels prior to the first major boss only to be utterly curb-stomped by him over and over, since he’s so much more difficult than anything that comes beforehand – again, at least as a solo player.  In my case, though, beating him once gave me enough soul fragments to upgrade myself to the point that neither he nor any other enemy in the first area gave trouble again.  That, in turn, made trudging through the first area each and every run feel like the game was telling me to eat my full plate of steamed, unseasoned veggies so I could have two M&Ms for dessert. 

Making matters worse yet again, some perks the game gives you in solo mode are only useful with co-op buddies around, like a blessing that deals increased damage for each nearby ally. The game is no stranger to some annoying bugs too, as enemies tended to occasionally get stuck and stop attacking me, in one case doing so deep enough in a wall that I would have had to restart the run if I hadn’t found one specific corner to throw my grenade and deal enough damage to kill it.

Let’s be real here – not every game should be a roguelite. While I acknowledge my experience could be colored by my forced solo play (after all, maybe things unlock a bit faster in co-op), a lot of these design decisions are broadly terrible for a roguelite structure, and make the game feel like it was designed this way to cover up a lack of budget to create meaningful amounts of varied content. Meta-progression doesn’t feel impactful, every run feels identical, and between the grind and the lack of any intriguing narrative, the hours it will take you to see what Abyssus has to offer are simply not hours well-spent. The act of shooting is not interesting enough to endure doing it the same way over and over and over, especially when there’s an entire genre of games just like this, albeit with a different and occasionally less glossy exterior.

If you can get over how much of Abyssus looks exactly the same, there are moments of brilliance in its visual design. Light shafts peeking through cave walls, the detailed designs of some of the guns themselves and enemies that look pretty cool the first couple times you see them (if perhaps not the next couple hundred) all make for a game that’s certainly decent to look at, and the fact that it supports native ultrawide and runs decently well on the Steam Deck is a win for everyone. Abyssus is very playable on Steam Deck at low settings and works fine with a controller even though the Steam page indicates that controllers aren’t yet supported. The only issue I faced in that regard was some overly aggressive aim assist that would occasionally cling my reticle so hard to enemies that they were ready to threaten me with a restraining order, but it’s not bad enough to impact playability much and will hopefully be fixed in due time.

As for audio design, I actually quite like the game’s main menu music, but all of the other tracks feel generic to a fault and appropriate but completely unmemorable. Nothing bad, to be clear, but sound design overall is perfectly competent – no more and thankfully no less.

Perhaps that can be said for Abyssus as a whole. The fact of its perfectly serviceable shooting and emphasis on cooperative play will make it so some groups of friends out there will easily get past its repetition and have fun shooting the same enemies run after run ad nauseam. Power to them. I am not one of those people – while playing Abyssus was hardly a chore with its core gameplay being as solid as it is, it took almost no time at all to tire of its sluggish progression, total lack of variety between runs and general dearth of meaningful content. Diehard shooter fans will certainly find some fun with this one, but anybody else may be better off skipping it.

MEDIOCRE