Yes I know, your first reaction is probably the same as mine—“OH MY GOD, NOT ANOTHER DYNASTY WARRIORS GAME?!” and it’s true that there have only been brief periods during Gamecell’s lifetime when there wasn’t a Warriors game to review. The Franchise began on the Playstation back in 1897—sorry, make that 1997. The franchise has changed little in this time and has seen releases on PS2, PSP, Xbox, PS3, DS, PC, Atari 2600 and Mattel Intellivision (I may have made the last two up), oh, and Xbox 360... and amazingly still sells solidly in Japan, but less so in Europe for one very good reason. Utilising what is seemingly the same old game engine and button-bashing gameplay mechanic over and over and over again just doesn’t seem to hack it over here, so do the new 'tricks' up Strikeforce’s voluminous sleeves do anything to change things?
Strikeforce appeared on the PSP last year and Tecmo Koei have added the online co-op mode (a first for a Dynasty Warriors game) and tacked on some extra missions. The plot is the same old feudal China warlords bla bla bla and you have to kill all the bad guys using a character from either the Shu, Wu or Wei clan. Don’t expect a heck of a lot of tactical play, do expect to wear your right thumb out.
Initial impressions aren’t good as, despite a flashy intro, visually the game is undeniably disappointing with textureless and detail-lacking maps and locations. The hordes of lookalike enemies have had noticeably less care taken on them in terms of both detail and animation than the playable characters—who themselves look like PS2-era models and in no way designed for this generation of consoles. Early battles will be a matter of typical button mashing, hacking and slashing. So far, so uninspiring. Remarkably the same camera problems that beset the last DW game I played 3 or 4 years ago still stubbornly appear here, with the camera consistently pointing in exactly the direction you don’t want to see. You can of course manually adjust it to get the desired enemy in view, but that fact that you have to says a lot.
Once you’ve chosen a character you’re plonked into a town/village which acts as a hub for the game. From here you can get the blacksmith to make you new weapons or choose new missions from the quest board. Killing enemies makes them drop coloured orbs or blobs of something or another and these can be sent to the storage house and used to manufacture new weapons and upgrade the town’s shops. Strikeforce has a lot of RPG-lite customisation elements to add some variety to the gameplay, your character can be levelled up to 50 by gaining experience points on each mission. These additions to the classic DW mix act as a slight diversion but don’t really work as it’s all so simplistic that you’ll soon be back to the highly repetitive combat, and will be hard-pushed to tell the difference that many of the upgrades to the weapons make. You can also unlock new “Fury” moves and these include the ability to fly and change forms and certainly do look different and deal great amounts of extra damage, but even DW aficionados will tell you that for the most part it’s still all about button bashing and hacking and slashing.
The average mission typically involves hacking countless enemy soldiers to death, before eventually getting a face to face fight with their boss. Thankfully now you get to do it with three other people, but sadly I could only ever find at most two others to play it with. Only one of them was using a headset and was another reviewer, so the other one could have been a bot for all I know, but this did improve the experience considerably, and added a hint of tactics to the proceedings that always seems to be lacking from my solo sessions. You can also help out friends who might need items only available from certain missions/quests. The most memorable missions are ones that pit you against massive monsters, and you’ll be truly glad of some help with these colossal enemies. Many of the enemies are refreshingly different; there are magical creatures that have the ability to fly, and even mechanical contraptions to battle against.
Fortunately you don’t just lob ranged attacks at these new airborne enemies and can use previously unheard of flying and air dash attacks and combos on them. This adds some much needed variety to the DW gameplay, it plays a bit like the Dragonball Z games or Zone of the Enders, and means that Dynasty Warriors tired gameplay has finally climbed out of the rut it’s been stuck in for several years.
The voice acting is however stuck in the same rut, and is as bad and OTT (over-the-top) as ever, with some characters appearing to be on mind-altering substances while others seem to have phoned-in their voiceover.
This is definitely an ‘air dash’ in the right direction for the Dynasty Warriors franchise, but its PS2-ish visuals overlaid with a few flashy effects and inherent camera problems make it feel like a test bed for a true this generation Dynasty Warriors game—I doubt I’ll have to wait too long to see if that’s the case.
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