The Warriors Review

October 16, 2008

Relive the drama of the cult classic movie and more in this great underground street brawler.

Story

Cyrus, a man with a vision of the underground gangs working together to occupy the city is assassinated at a gathering where nine members of every single gang of the city is attending. A member of the gang named “The rogues” shot Cyrus but passed the blame on Cleon, the leader of “The Warriors”. Shortly after this, Cleon is beaten to death by dozens upon dozens of angry gang members, in an act of revenge. All this happens during the chaos caused by the police raiding the meeting and the remaining eight of The Warriors escape only to find out that every single gang of the city now wants them dead.

The Game

The goal of the game is to survive the following events, as depicted in the movie with the same title. Parts of the story has been changed a little to suit the game narrative better, though. The game begins with a new member looking to join The Warriors. Not long after is he revealed to be Rembrandt (also known from the movie). While he is still inexperienced when it comes to fighting, he is a very talented graffiti artist which gives him a key position in the gang.

You start off by learning some basic moves by practicing fighting against bums. This works as the tutorial of the game. The tutorial runs you through all the important features in the game such as stealing car radios, buying drugs, and robbing stores.

You also get to play and witness story events that happen before the movie takes place. You also get to experience events that happened before The Warriors gang even existed, back when Cleon was a member of the gang “The Destroyers”. The narrative of the game really fleshes out the lore in many neat ways.

Content

There are around 40 missions in the game in total, and playing it through all will take almost 18 hours of fighting, running, exploring, and interacting with the game world and its numerous NPCs.

During missions, you often encounter rival gangs, police, and civilians; they all play a big part when it comes to succeeding or not. For example gangs attack on sight while the police leave you alone if you aren’t breaking any laws. The civilians report your misbehavior if you are spotted doing illegal actions. You must then either chase them down and “neutralize” them or face the consequences.

A big part of the game is about collecting money which you use to buy drugs, weapons, and spray cans. The drugs heal your character or even better; wake up knocked out characters – using too much drugs results in the screen going blurry making it hard to see and play the game.

There are various weapons you can find to give you an upper hand. The weapons can vary from simple pipes, 2x4s, and knives, but this game has a lot of other things that can be used as weapons such as bottles, chairs, trash cans etc. Most of the things scattered around the city can be used as a weapon or a source for weapons – when a trashcan breaks you can find bottles inside it. Spray cans are used to tag other gangs tags resulting in score and sometimes completion of a mission.

The missions often have multiple objectives such as spraying over a certain amount of tags, escaping with your life or even protecting stores that pay for it. There’s a lot of variation in this game, and it keeps it interesting through the entire game with ease. Not only do the missions have many objectives but also extra objectives that unlock extra content for later use. You can even “free roam” the Coney Island area and there’s extra missions to find, or you can just run around your turf and show everyone who is in charge.

Multiplayer

The greatest feature in this game is the possibility to play with a friend. This works for all the missions in the game and also the free roam part. Together with a friend you can tackle situations with ease, and you can also perform team moves which often instantly knocks out the target. These can also be done with various weapons and trust me when I say that it never gets old – just grab a huge sledgehammer and introduce it to someone’s forehead!

You can also play against each other or with each other in other multiplayer modes such as 5v5, 9v9, wheelchair racing, and king of the hill on rooftops. There is one mode that sticks out the most and that’s the Survival mode, where you and a friend try to survive the longest against hundreds of gang members. You can either stay away from each other or try to ruin it for the other player. This is great fun as the amount of enemies on screen is just surprising and at one point or another someone will appear with a knife and that will cause panic like nothing else.

Controls

The combat system encompasses three main attack types; fast attacks, strong attacks, and grapples. You can combine these to perform new and other moves, and also the combos work similar to many other games where you alternate between weak attack and strong attack to do combos. It works great in this game and the game flow is fast and smooth. Grappling someone makes it possible for you to throw them, punch them in the face or the gut.

Each attack and move you perform fills a rage gauge and when it’s full, it starts flashing. You can then activate this to deal more damage, take less damage, and if you grapple someone you can unleash extremely violent instant kill moves such as stomping someone’s head against the concrete, etc. During these moves the camera focuses on the player doing the move, in order to give the player a more cinematic feeling – there are plenty of different such moves and most of them are pretty brutal, to say the least.

Most enemies will use all they got to kill you, so they will also grapple and shank you with a knife when you aren’t paying attention. You can die from one attack in this game, so you always have to watch out for enemies carrying weapons.

The game lets you play different characters depending on the mission you are on and most of the time you are accompanied by several other members which you control by shouting out commands like “stop”, “destroy everything”, and “retreat”. The characters all have their specialties, be it to deal damage or picking locks, and stealing radios. Most characters are good brawlers except Rembrandt of course.

Graphics

When it comes to the graphics you won’t be disappointed as the game runs at a good solid frame rate even when dozens of characters are on the screen. There are some negative things such as facial animations as they are non-existing but to counter this you have extremely well done level design and animations that really bring the game alive.

A fantastic detail in this game is that wounds and bruises are visible on your character when you have taken a couple hits; you can see bruises on your face and body, which further drives home the point of the brutality depicted in the story.

Sound

Something that really surprised me was the voice acting as they managed to gather the original crew to do it, and it just sounds amazing. The atmosphere this game brings is exactly the same as the legendary movie as the events are almost perfectly retold in the game. It’s just a blast to follow the story as it is told through the voice talent here. That is not all however, as the game also features the same soundtrack as the movie, and it’s just the perfect match.

Summary

This game is one of the best brawlers of the Xbox. It’s got a great story which is based on a movie that was based on a book. Not many can pull off this kind of thing, but this is one of the very few exceptions. The co-op mode is one of the best we’ve ever seen as it’s so much fun and so satisfying to play with a friend and experience the no-rules fighting madness. Sadly there aren’t many games like this, but this one does last a long time, and it’s just fun to pick up and play whenever really. So to wrap this up, this game is a must for anyone that likes beat ’em ups or those in the mood for a damn honest fighting game.