If you’ve ever wanted to play as a cool army general, slaughtering thousands of soldiers while only pressing one button (and maybe jump if you want to shake things up) then the Dynasty Warriors series has always been your one-stop shop. This year, however Capcom has decided to try its hand at this rather simplistic genre, combining swords and bows with gatling guns and lasers…
So what differentiates Devil Kings from the rather stale DW series? Well, to be honest, not really all that much. The controls are still very simplistic; press one button to perform the same combos over and over for about half an hour until everyone’s dead. Once you’ve killed a certain number of people you can go into “Hyper mode”, where the screen fizzes about a bit and you can kill the soldier drones even more easily than normal. With the word Devil in the title, and being made by Capcom, you expect a more complex combat system than simply a carbon copy of the aging and cumbersome DW controls. This game screams out to be given the Devil May Cry control system - at least they’d be copying something successful!
The main difference is that instead of playing as generals based on ancient Chinese conflicts, you play as fictional and completely crazy generals, complete with peppy, annoying American voiceovers. The generals all have slightly different attack styles and range from a pistol-toting woman, a six-sword wielding warrior to the Devil King himself (with a beefy shotgun-sword combo). As well as standard combos you are eventually able to use lightning and other magic to knock off another few hundred peons, making the game even easier!
Since the developers still refuse to believe that slashing through thousands of soldiers does not constitute a battle, they’ve taken a new route to make sure things aren’t too easy - retard your soldiers, throw even moresoldiers at you and restrict health pickups to one or two per level. In Dynasty Warriors your soldiers followed you around to at least give the impression that it wasn’t just you fighting the entire enemy “army”. In DK’s your soldiers will not only not attack other soldiers but after you’ve mopped up everything they’ll stand there for the rest of the battle while you get pummelled across the other side of the map – thanks guys…
I have tried about eight or nine times now to get past a certain stage on hard difficulty, until I snapped and lost my patience with this game. I fare fine slashing the crap out of everything for about twenty minutes but with no support or control system that rewards any kind of skill my health slowly gets whittled down by cheap shots (you’re constantly surrounded) until you die and are sent to the main menu… where’s the damn restart screen?! Every time you die the game quits and you have to load up everything again and again; an afternoon playing scrabble with President Bush would be less frustrating.
Devil Kings had the opportunity to do something different and revive the genre but has made an almost complete copy of Dynasty Warriors, complete with the same problems, none of which have been addressed. If you’ve never played a DW game then I think you’ll find this too shallow, and its frustratingly crap control system will drive you nuts. Dodgy camera angles and stupid opponents and allies that make Jade Goody look like an Oxbridge graduate. The game’s only challenge is whether or not you can play it long enough to write a review about it without turning to self-harm and let me tell you, it was a close one…
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