Wednesday 6 February, 2008

GAMEPLAY

Booting up Dynasty Warriors again, I decided to have a bit of fun. Since in the last campaign, I unlocked the strongest character in the game, Lu Bu, I decided to play with him. Lu Bu doesn't have a campaign of his own, so I was stuck with free play, that is, playing through the levels with absolutely no concern for history. I played the most populous level, Hu Lao gate (traditionally rendered as Hu Lao Pass). Since the real Lu Bu in that level ties up your allies, it is quite easy to get kill counts up around 1000 without much effort. Normally, staying away from Lu Bu is of the utmost importance, as he can easily kill you in single combat, but, being free mode, I just went ahead and challenged myself and won handily. The thing that stood out to me the most playing as Lu Bu was his remarkable difficulty with engaging multiple people for the strongest character in the game. Only with the last hit of his combo does he swing his halberd around himself, making it easy for my enemies to interrupt my combo from behind. That said, his brutal power and range more then made up for his lack of decent combos. In the end, I have determined that only Lu Bu is manly enough to pull off wearing peacock feathers on his head.

DESIGN

The thing that makes Dynasty Warriors stand out so much is its lack of concern over making anything particularly accurate to the period. Players receive radio transmissions from generals and officers on a regular basis, and combo moves often defy gravity in visually appealing ways. For example, Zhaou Yu's combo puts him into a horizontal in-air barrel roll slash that bounces clockwise, and then counter-clockwise for the length of the special move. In addition, the fact that the characters in the game existed along a period off approximately 300 years does not stop D.W.'s writers from putting them together in the same levels. That said, the almost constant war screams around you, and the sound of your halberd crushing masses of conscripts with the whine of an electric guitar playing Chinese-inspired songs certainly makes up for any reservations about the game's accuracy during gameplay. In the case of D.W. the player doesn't need to know that the game is contrived because the played doesn't care: he/she is busy killing people!

You do a good job of making a game that I would usually not give a second glance to sound fun; however, I wish you'd put a little more detail into each of the sections. Try making it clearer what genre the game is -- I had never heard of it before, and had to look it up on Wikipedia before moving on to your gameplay section. The gameplay and design sections should be a bit longer. You can look at the template for ideas of how to expand these -- there are lots of questions you can ask yourself while you analyze what you've just played.

-Gillian (TA)