	Warriors Orochi 2
	Developer: Charles Manson maybe? Publisher: Koei Release Date: Out Now Players: 1-2	Words By:
Of all the games that necessitated sequels you'd hardly think that Warrior's Orochi was one of those games. Hell, the iterations of Dynasty Warriors alone must be in the double digits by now. But here we are, again thrusting the baddest dudes with the worst haircuts and the tightest outfits from Chinese and Japanese history books together. Except in the history books I don't think the generals were flipping around dispatching thousands of troops with what looks like a pair of metallic testicles, but I digress. That sod Orochi is back again as apparently you didn't kill him enough the last time and he's wreaking all types of havoc with his demonic buddies. Do you have the willpower and thumb strength to defeat him a second time? The gameplay is almost identical to the Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors which the title has amalgamated, with only a few differences. Absurd list of characters to choose from? Check (there's 90 this time). Hundreds of mindless zombie soldiers thrown at you who stand around and wait to be slaughtered? Check. Pain in the arse fiddly camera system? Check. Although the camera is mapped to the right stick it likes to swing around to wherever it pleases now and again, which is great. More importantly those reading the review who were worried whether they'd have to remember complicated combination moves will be happily reassured - you can still complete the game using only one button. If you tape the analogue stick in the forward position you can even play with one hand! The only difference in gameplay from the other games is the addition of a 'tag team' system, where you switch between three characters in-game, usually when one takes too much damage. There are massive problems with this as is turns the game into one giant cake-walk. Health and Musou (used for power attacks) replenishes over time where it used to have to be collected so you can simply run blindly into hundreds of enemies and once you've musou'd the hell out of them pull on the right trigger and hey presto! More Musou to school those savages with. There's an ‘insane’ difficulty setting available to compensate for this but throwing more of the same moronic enemies at me because your game mechanic smells like a hobo's undergarments is just not good enough. Let's not forget those stalwart KOEI fans will have already seen the fantastic tag team in action in the first Orochi game. So what's new for the public in this offering? Nothing. Naff-all. Everything is exactly the same even though the last game came out for PS2. The draw distances still suck, the environments are empty and boring and the game has a lovely tendency to grind to a halt when you have too many people on screen at once, which happens when playing a DW game is all the fecking time. Admittedly there are two player modes to try and spice things up. But the co-op is unplayable as the slow-down is even worse: it feels like you're watching CCTV of a cross-dresser robbing a McDonalds in Brixton rather than witnessing blistering action set-pieces. The Tekken-style 2 player combat mode feels terribly tacked-on and would only have worked if you could use more than one sodding button to attack. Even Street Fighter had two and that was quite a while ago now. Whenever I'm given a Dynasty/Samurai Warriors game to review I always wonder naively if they've tweaked the gameplay this time. Maybe just a tiny bit, so that I can play it for more than thirty minutes without losing the will to live. Unfortunately those hopes have been dashed again with another lazy, buggy cash-in that if anything is a step backwards from the PS2 original. KOEI, keep this up and you will make cynics of us all...

Best Bits
- Excitable American voice-overs make the game sounds more exciting than it really is.
- Enemies have names like 'Hooknose' and 'Bushman'
- I don't have to play it anymore. Ever

Worst Bits
- One button Musou-fest grows tiring even faster
- You'll want to Knife your annoying allies, who don't shut up
- Graphics, gameplay, longevity, story. You name it, it's not very good
- I won't get the hours I spent playing this back


by: Crazypunk