GAME REVIEW: DYNASTY WARRIORS 2

Every once and a while you get a game with optimistic expectations and end up severly disappointed. This is way I feel about this game. I read reviews for this on both videogames.com and games.ign.com, and amazingly enough, those idiots at videogames.com gave this a higher score than Shenmue, so I figured it had to be worth looking into. You have got to be kidding me. This game pretty much sucks, but I'm willing to back up my claim that it this game is a piece of shovelware and explain to you why you shouldn't own a game this shoddily produced. This is a very run of the mill one day rental type game.

Probably the only thing this game has going for it are the graphics, and even here there is quite a bit of room for improvement. The character models and design are along the same thing we saw in kessen, only you actually get to control these guys. They are detailed and all the opposing armies troops and soldiers are detailed enough to be acceptable, however the environments of the game are monotonous and boring, lacking much interesting scenery other than crates, tents, gates, and jars. Nothing special or unique about the surroundings of these wars that impressed me. The FMV's are okay, but are too far and few between to keep the excitement up on this one. Something that might have made the game more exciting would have been if you could slash the guys arms and heads and stuff off and have them leave behind bloody pools and corpses scattered around like a real war. Perhaps vultures could come and start picking at the carcasses. That's how they faught them back in the 1600's, so why not make a War Sim game that looks real.

This game bombs in terms of gameplay. All you do is walk around and hack stuff. There are like 1000 troops, you have guys on your sides fighting along side you, but they are almost of no help. If you stood around you would loose. That's all you do is run around and kill guys with your sword or your only weapon. That is the only weapon you get throughout the game is what you started out with. You have life meter and a Mosou Meter, if you get these turnip looking things your get more life and stay alive, if you get these red colored things you get more Mosou. All Mosou is, is a "insane" attack where you flail your weapon around killing a lot of guys at once. Sometimes killing tough guys like commanders, and gate captains give you power ups that increase your stats like an RPG, but nothing else. That's all you do, is kill guys, lots of guys, with your weapon. You don't get any new weapons, you don't get to fire a cannon at the troops or anything special, you run around and kill stuff for hours until you finish the stage, and god forbid you die or you have to start all over again. There is usually like only 1 save point on the level, and it takes an annoyingly long time to beat a level. Once you finish the stage you get a little FMV and they tally up all your kills and your rank goes up and you get a little bit stronger. This game is boring. I swear by the second level I had enough, but I pressed on, until I was spitting mad, and I said that was it, and took it back to the store. The gameplay sucks, and that's what kills this title.

The plot of this game is below mediocre. It's supposed to take place in China during some historical war, but this game doesn't make me feel like I'm in an epic battle. It's boring, and to hard to merit wanting to proceed to find out the outcome of it's lackluster plot. There is little reward or fun in spending all that time on one battle. It's more of a chore like coallating documents than a game due to its monotony. Don't expect much of a great story here. So much more could have been done with it.

The sound effects mostly include the sounds of guys fighting, and this generic heavy metal background game music. Why they chose heavy metal for a game like this is beyond me. It just doesn't wash with this. Now if they played "Gladiator" type music then it would probably work better.

This game is not a matter so much of being difficult as much as it is tedious. I swear that I just can't stand games like this, that make you do the same thing a 1000 times in a row like Smash TV for the Super Nintendo. That's not fun after the first 5 minutes, it's boring. Why bother. I killed well over 1200 guys on one level alone. You get no bonus swords, armor, shields or other weapons. You do get to ride a horse sometimes but it doesn't actually do anything for you to ride the horse. What really pisses me off is when you get all the way to the end of a battle area and you killed hundreds of guys, and there's this one commander that is almost impossible to beat. I hits you with one blow, and you're gone after all that wasted effort.

The way I see it, I think those asses at videogames.com must have been drunk when they played this below average game. They gave Dynasty Warriors a higher score than Shenmue, and I wonder what the hell they were thinking (or smoking for that matter...) because this game just plain sucks. I ended up putting it back into the case and taking it back to the store and got my money returned for it. The way I see it, go rent it first, there may be a remote chance you will like this, it's not the worst game I've played, but it's in the lower echelon for sure. Koei did a pretty good job on Kessen, a game that I enjoyed considerably more than this screw up of theirs. I often wonder if these companies ever give a game to real gamers to have them evaluate its quality first, prior to releasing it. Developers seem to continously pump out titles like this expecting to make huge profits, and they often wonder why those profits never materialize. Hell, hire me and I'll show you how to make a game and we'll all be bling blinging to the bank, but no, I'm just some zero in the general public that these companies will not even talk to because I don't have a degree is something.