The Warriors Review

Based on the film of the same name, The Warriors delivers fast paced, beat-em-up action that is easy to get into but also surprisingly varied. Most brawlers are all “punch punch punch, kick kick kick” but here you have lots of ways to dish out punishment and battling multiple enemies has never been better implemented than in The Warriors. The game also does a good job of expanding on the story of the movie. It isn’t the prettiest game out there, but The Warriors is definitely a lot of fun.

Story

The Warriors follows a gang in 1970’s New York City called, you guessed it, The Warriors. The 1979 movie told of a huge meeting where the leader of the largest gang in New York wanted all of the gangs to join together in order to take over the city since gang members outnumbered cops three to one. A lone gunman fires and amid the chaos of fleeing gang members and swarming police officers, The Warriors are wrongly accused of the murder. The movie followed The Warriors as they have to fight their way through every gang in New York City as they try to get back to their home turf on Coney Island.

The game covers all of this, but it also goes above and beyond to provide a lot of backstory that the movie couldn’t. You start the game a couple of months before that fateful meeting and you are introduced to the nine primary members of the gang - Swan, Ajax, Cleon, Vermin, Cochese, Cowboy, Snow, Fox, and Rembrandt- and you get to learn how and why the gang started. The storyline is surprisingly well written and ties in with the movie incredibly well. If you are a fan of the movie, the game will make you appreciate it all the more. And if you haven’t seen the movie, the game actually does a better job of storytelling.

Gameplay

At its heart, The Warriors is a beat-em-up. You have weak and strong attacks as well as grabs, throws, ground attacks, jump attacks, and more. These can be chained together to create combos. You can also pick up and use a large number of objects as weapons. You can’t use any guns, but there are more than enough bottles and baseball bats and bricks laying around to give you some heavy weaponry when you need it.

What is nice about The Warriors is that it lets you fight multiple enemies better than just about any other game before it. Throwing a back elbow to force enemies to keep their distance while you’re fighting thugs in front of you is a piece of cake and you can seamlessly move from enemy to enemy. The game flows together incredibly well. Another nice aspect of the game is that since there are so many enemies on screen at once, the game has a bit of randomness to it that is very exciting. The other members of The Warriors are just as good of fighters as your particular character so there is cool stuff going on in the background pretty much every second of every fight.

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