Rockstar Toronto built The Warriors around a simple idea: a street gang is only as good as the ground it can hold. The 2005 beat ’em up takes the 1979 film of the same name and stretches it backward, spending its first half on events set three months before the events of the film. The Warriors are framed for the murder of Cyrus, a respected gang leader, and must return to their home turf in Coney Island while rival gangs and the police hunt them.
Coney Island Is the Whole Map
The Warriors is a brawler first. Combat is melee, close and heavy, and the game mixes in smaller systems — spray paint for marking turf, insults for provoking people — without letting them crowd the fights.
You control one Warrior per mission. The rest are computer-controlled. Cleon, Swan, Ajax and Rembrandt get the most screen time, and the roster runs deep:
- Cleon, the Warchief, leads until the meeting
- Swan, second-in-command, carries the back half
- Ajax and Snow, the heavy muscle
- Vermin, the bread man
- Fox, the scout
- Cochise, the Harlem native
- Rembrandt, the graffiti artist
The headquarters doubles as a hub. Train ten ranks of fitness — sit-ups, press ups, chin ups, heavy bag — to build stamina. Talk to the gang. Walk out to Coney Island for side missions. Or start the next story level.
Flashbacks, Armies of the Night, and the Missing Songs
Eighteen missions carry the story. Five bonus “Flashbacks” show how the Warriors were formed and how each member came to join the gang. Finish the main line and you unlock Armies of the Night, an arcade game built heavily on Double Dragon, playable as Swan and Ajax. Clearing missions also opens “Unleash the Fury,” where you control the Baseball Furies — and it plays as the hardest difficulty.
The gangs come from the film, even the ones only mentioned or glimpsed there: the Electric Eliminators, the Panzers, the Van Cortlandt Rangers. The Destroyers are the exception, invented for the game. Cyrus runs the Gramercy Riffs, Luther the Rogues out of his hearse, the Baseball Furies hold Riverside Park, the Lizzies their apartment.
Several cast members from the film came back to voice their characters. The soundtrack carries songs from the movie, but as of 2016 some were pulled from the PS3 and PS4 versions — “I Love Livin’ in the City” and “In the City” among them — over licensing restrictions.
That last detail is the one that stings. The Warriors came out in October 2005 for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox, reached the PlayStation Portable in February 2007 in a port by Rockstar Leeds, and was re-released on PlayStation 3 in May 2013 and PlayStation 4 in July 2016 through the PlayStation Network. The PS4 arrival shipped with holes in its music. A game this dependent on period texture cannot afford them. The brawling still lands, the hub still rewards the time you put into it, and the Flashbacks still do the work the film never could. But the music is thinner than it was, and that is the loss worth naming.
Score: 7.1/10 from the IGDB critic aggregate, based on 8 outlets.
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