Samurai Warriors review

Samurai Warriors brings the hack and slash, one-against-thousands style of gameplay of the Dynasty Warriors series to ancient Japan. And after seven games set in ancient China, the change of scene is welcome. The basics of the gameplay remains the same: enter a battle of hundreds of troops and try to make a difference by achieving specific objectives on the battlefield and slaughtering scores of opponents as you go.

So people criticise the series for being repetitive, as you end up repeating the same movements again and again, with only variations in timing and order changing between missions. But no once criticises Dance Dance Revolution for making the same demands on its players. Just as Dance Dance Revolution is generally referred to as “That Dancing Game”, Samurai Warriors should rightfully be “That Killing Game”.

Unlike most fighting games where one-on-one skills are paramount, Samurai Warriors (and its predecessors) is all about crowd control. You need to be able to walk into a crowd of opponents, killing as many as fast as you can, without letting them overwhelm you. A successful battle can end with the blood of hundreds on your hands. This is the satisfaction of Samurai Warriors - a game of bloody excesses. In a strange way, it’s the quantity, not the quality that counts. No one ever criticised the Diablo series of games for being nothing more than killing monsters and collecting treasure (I did – ed.), in fact, that was the key to their success.

The Order of Death

Just like the best addictive games, Samurai Warriors provides a system of steady progression. Even more so than its predecessors, since your characters become stronger with each battle and every new conflict brings opportunities to find new weapons and learn new special abilities. Samurai Warriors’ new system of rewards allows you to pick different skills for your characters to learn, besides just increasing your attributes.

It’s a gradual progression, but it’s satisfying to grow in destructive power as you go along. And there is variation as well. Each mission changes around you depending on each minor defeat or victory, allowing you to take a different route to victory each time, with new characters like ninjas allowing you to sneak behind enemy lines and take out key generals with minimal conflict. Although you might just prefer to take “the path of greatest resistance”, instead of the way of the ninja, just to up your kill count. There are also indoor missions, where you avoid traps and sometimes eavesdrop on your enemies behind closed doors. It may always come down to pure bloody slaughter, but it’s nice to have had a choice.

Total War

If you’re destroying hordes of opponents on the battlefield, you need to do it in style, and the Japanese setting offers just that. The characters are slightly less garish than their Chinese counterparts from the Dynasty Warriors games, with more variation between their looks and fighting styles. True, there are only fifteen, but they each have their own storyline, to add a bit of colour to your journey through Japan’s violent history. From the ninja, Hattori Hanzo to the sinister Nobunaga (who seems to enjoy dressing up like Batman)

With the character roster as it is, you can still choose to create your own character from a range of designs, with the new create-an-officer mode taking the form of a Samurai training camp. In which you can choose to practice different skill events to build up your attributes before choosing which side to fight for and battling for their approval.

A Flash of Steel

Samurai Warriors’ dramatic art style carries off the scenes of battle well, with the distinctive characters standing out against the dark and moody backgrounds which are a departure from the Dynasty Warriors series. The characters themselves may not look completely historically accurate, but their dramatic uniforms set them apart and give them a dramatic feel while still retaining a Japanese flavour - you’ll see a lot of elemental ninjas and masked monks. The graphics engine puts all the characters in action without any struggles in frame rate. There may still be fogging in the distance, but you never have any problems seeing the twenty people that you’re currently fighting with.

The sounds of battle are impressive, with a real impression of combat all around you, clashing swords at your ears. The music, in comparison, can seem a bit subdued, with traditional Japanese instruments blending with a more mellow type of techno. Definitely not grating, but not something you always notice behind all the screams. The voice acting, on the other hand, could use a bit more work. Though it is tolerable, it still sounds like the dubbing from a seventies film.

The More the Merrier

Samurai Warriors also offers the required multiplayer modes, with co-operative modes, as well versus battles. But in my humble opinion, the most fun comes from the challenges to see who can kill the most people the fastest. True, you need to find someone else who’s already into the game in order to enjoy these modes, but they are a nice aside to the main game regardless.

There have been many games of this type, but Samurai Warriors is undoubtedly the best. What counts against it is that all the preceding games have been quite similar, and some people may have just had enough by now. What counts in its favour is the enduring addiction of constant carnage, which always seems to have lots of fans, and if you haven’t tried any of these games before, this might just be the perfect place to start.