Review: Samurai Warriors
Four Dynasty Warriors and nine Romance of the Three Kingdoms later, Koei decides to plunder feudal Japan in this quasi-historical hack-n-slasher.
If you are a fan of or have enjoyed Koei's Dynasty Warriors series, then you?ll probably dig Samurai Warriors. It's got the same albeit slightly updated game engine with a feudal Japanese milieu as window dressing and a couple of new features thrown into the mix.
You can now invade randomly generating enemy castles, which force you to adapt your fighting strategy to enclosed spaces and hidden traps; you can also use experience points gained during combat to develop your character's skills and take advantage of alternate paths during missions that lead to multiple story lines. Samurai Warriors also moves at a brisker pace than Dynasty Warriors, and although the graphics still seem antiquated on the whole, this makes it so enemies can fill the screen.
But barring these slight variations of form, the core gameplay is carbon copy stuff you've been through before: point to the swarm of guys with the red bars over their heads, keep mashing buttons until they're all dead, find another group on your map, repeat ad nauseum.
If you're into that breed of simplistic hack-n-slash, then by all means toss down the coin because it definitely provides immediate, if repetitious, thrills. Otherwise, you?re likely to get bored after about half an hour. At 50 bucks, that comes out to roughly a dollar a minute of fun -- do the math.
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