Mini Review – Dynasty Warriors 7

Hack and Slash

I can see things no-one else can see.

Rich

For a series that tends to overstay its welcome within a single game, it’s genuinely baffling to me how this series has managed so many iterations.  Aside from this and the other six Dynasty Warriors, you’ve also got the same thing in Samurai, Orochi, Empires and Gundam variations as well as miscellaneous additions such as last year’s sort-of-great Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce.  So what does Dynasty Warriors 7 bring to the party?

Well, after aside from a tutorial and a encyclopedia to help you differentiate your Xao’s from you Yau’s, the main stops on the menu are either the Campaign Mode or the Story Mode.  Story Mode gives you the chance to play through the stories of each of the four factions in the game (Wei, Wu, Shu and Jin).  Each story plays out pretty much identically with some stages being reused (presumably telling the same story from a different viewpoint) as you plough through hundreds of foot-soldiers occasionally punctuated by a bit of war machinery and one of the forty or so main characters.  Each story lasts around five or so hours from what I can remember.  I wasn’t timing it and by halfway through the first one I was basically in a horrible trance.

Imagine this but for about 100 hours. If that seems like fun, get this (and some fucking help).

After dispatching the four stories, I was hoping that Campaign Mode would bring something different to the table and a hex-based campaign board does initially trick you into thinking that there’s some strategy to be found here but alas this mode is an even less interesting take on the Story Mode minus the war machinery and is about five times as long as all the stories combined.  Fuck me.

The hex board is simply a way of picking your next mission, there’s no Empires-style strategy (which kind of played out like a game of Risk) and there’s really not very much variation between the stages.  Sometimes you get ambushed, sometimes you don’t.  There’s no scope for you to place generals on the stages (indeed there are no sub-stages in this game) so basically it all comes down to you mashing X and Y enough times to fire off your B attack (your ‘musou’ attack).  It can get very challenging on certain stages but that’s about it.  There’s really nothing here that needed extending out over hundreds of battles.  Once you’ve played one, you’ve really seen them all.  This is compounded by the fact that the stories here have been retold so many times and really do you really want to replay the fucking Yellow Turban Rebellion again?

Purists (read: fanboys) are already proclaiming this game to be a triumph but any more of this shit and I think we’ll need to invent a time displacement unit so that we can go back in time and kill the mother of the guy who keeps producing this shit.  I like the mass brawling and had a lot of fun with Strikeforce (before it too overstayed its welcome) but these games are too long, too similar to each other and far too boring to recommend.  Sure they look okay – they do sound fucking horrible thanks to the same old shitty guitar wankery on the soundtrack – and it’s always nice to see dozens of people battling on a screen but Dynasty Warriors 7 is as exciting and predictable as a new FIFA title.  Yes, it’s managed to get that bad.

Fans/apologists for the series feel free to add to the score.  Gamers, stay away.  There’s nothing here but boredom.

3/10