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Thursday 6 March, 2008
GAMEPLAY
One of the things that gets old in this game is the level design. There are three kingdoms and they almost always battle against each other. As a result, almost all of the characters receive the same battles just on different sides. Once we play through a battle a few times we know what will happen. This cuts down on the necessity to experiment with strategies which is a fun part of the game.
The characters suffer from some of the same problems. A lot of characters have the same weapons (i.e. swords, spears) with slight differences. The skill trees help vary the characters but the play style is the same for many. It can be annoying to get excited about unlocking new characters just to find out they're pretty much the same as four other characters we've played with. This isn't as big of a deal as it sounds though because it is still fun to play through the individual characters' story lines and work towards powering up a character that I like a lot or unlocking more characters.
DESIGN
As mentioned before, the levels of this game could be better. Instead of making each character just play a different part of the same battle, the developers could have made the characters go through different paths and fight different battles. There are four kingdoms in the game, Wu, Wei, and Shu, as well as "Other" which is made up of characters with individual story lines and objectives. All of these kingdoms are essentially battling each other for control of China. The "Other" characters are often the most interesting because they tend to be unique in both their design and the path that they take through battles.
As a fan of the Dynasty Warriors series I have also noticed that this game has actually removed a lot of the things that were improvements on past installments. For example, there are actually less characters in this game than number five. The tribal, jungle inhabiting Meng Huo and his wife are no longer available for play, as are the levels that centered around their home land. This is unfortunate, as the jungle levels were a fun change from the traditional battle grounds found in the rest of the game. This seems lazy on the part of the developer; they seem to have not wanted to invest the time to add this part of the storyline into this installment for some reason.
Another thing absent from this installment is the weapon variation and individuality of characters from the previous installment. Many of the characters with unique weapons such as claws, nunchuks, or tonfas, have been given more generic weapons such as spears and swords. This makes the seem even more repetitive which is bad due to the repetitivity already inherent in the game play.
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