Dynasty Warriors 6: Empires
Paul slashes in ancient China
It's hard not to admire the sheer bloody mindedness of Koei, the people behind the long running Dynasty Warriors saga. We may be a few thousand games down the line (or at least it feels like we are) yet they still show no signs of paying any attention to the myriad of problems critics of their games constantly point out. Instead they seem fully focused on churning out version after version of each subtly different branch of the DW family tree, content in the knowledge that somewhere, somehow there's an audience for them, even if the majority of the gaming world finds each new title as bafflingly flawed as the last.
This time out we're in feudal China for Dynasty Warriors 6: Empires. Here your not inconsiderable task is to help reunite the fractured country using a tantalising combination of new high level battlefield strategies and the more traditional brute force. The introduction of the new strategic slant to things is what sets Empires apart from previous DW games and, on the face of it, looks like an interesting twist.
However, get past that initial promising first impression and there's very little here that's worth continued effort. For all its possibilities the strategy side of things ends up as nothing more than a vaguely distracting card game that allows you to enact political policies as well as improve the abilities of your men. Between battles you're also able to upgrade your character using an admittedly pretty deep and well designed skills tree. There's also is the ability to form (and break) allegiances with other military leaders with your choices having a real impact on how hard each of the five scenarios on offer are. In a no doubt realistic but slightly irksome move you'll not be able to partake in the more interesting areas of this new strategic approach if you choose to play the game as a warrior or vagrant because they're simply too far down the social order to have any real impact at first. This may well make historical sense but it also means you've got two wasted character classes if you've picked up DW6:E for its most high profile new feature.
The real problem facing DW6:E however is that no amount of fannying around, tactical or otherwise, can hide the fact that once you make it through all that preamble the battlefield action itself is just as cripplingly dull as normal. The shame of it is that there's absolutely nothing wrong with the basic idea. On the face of it, hack-n-slashing your way through ye oldie China sounds like a blast, it's simply that the execution remains so clumsy and outdated that any sense of enjoyment is stifled almost instantly.
DW has always been a fully signed up member of the button bashing school of gaming, sure there's a combo system hidden in there somewhere its just that there's no real skill involved since combat is essentially a one button affair. Normally games in some way push you to learn their intricacies, either by rewarding you when you do so or simply pushing the difficulty upward till progress demands a more considered approach. Not so DW, mashing the buttons is as effective (perhaps even more so) than trying to do things properly and this perhaps more than anything else renders the experience dull and more than a little repetitive.
Even if you decide mindless un-involving combat is for you there are more flaws to trip you up just waiting round the corner. Uppermost among these is that the almost nonexistent AI which has long been a series problem remains as hopeless as ever. Enemies regularly appear completely unaware of your presence only coming to life, albeit briefly, when you take a swipe at them. It matters not to these hardy warriors that you've slain hundreds of their colleagues while stood three feet away, they'll stand idly by until you turn your attentions to them directly. If this was merely an unusual quirk you could almost forgive it but it's actually pretty much the standard for all the everyday grunt soldiers you'll be cutting swathes through. There's a bit more of a challenge offered by opposition officers who at least give the indication that they've had some kind of AI routine behind them.
Unfortunately when you come across them the combat's other serious failing raises its misshapen head. While there was a time when simply having a load of enemies on screen at once was a cause for celebration it's not quite as impressive when you realise it's just made things a crowded mess. When you're in the midst of thirty or forty of the aforementioned mindless grunts it's a sad fact that random button pressing with your eyes shut is more effective than bothering to find your character on screen and do anything deliberate. Throw an enemy officer into the mix and it becomes not only that little bit more confusing but annoyingly tricky at times too as you're clobbered by the one dangerous enemy in a crowd of virtual Muppets.
It's not even like all this all looks amazing either. In fact 'average' would be a far better word since it doesn't even once threaten to push on into the realm of 'good' let alone start to trouble 'amazing' . The identical rent-a-foe's you spend most of your time hacking through are hardly worth looking closely at and the battlegrounds it all plays out on are basic and featureless with what buildings they do contain looking like something from a previous console generation. In keeping with the half-baked visuals things don't improve in the audio department much either. The script has all the narrative subtlety of a Hollyoaks episode while the voice acting is am-dram panto at best. The music is, almost inevitably, a wildly inappropriate rock guitar squeal of a soundtrack while the sound effects are; well; actually I guess they're okay really. Every cloud has a silver lining and all that.
It surely can't all be horrible though can it; there must be some plus points to the whole sorry experience? Well yes, there kind of are but it takes a lot of barrel scraping to find them. In a series famous for the depth of its game world there's an impressive array of biographical detail available on all the characters and fans will no doubt enjoy delving through the huge in-game encyclopaedia. There's also a well developed character creator available for those who don't want to play as one of the existing warriors, although it feels a little like it's waiting for some DLC to flesh out the clothing options. Other than that, well I do like the menu design.
It seems to matter little how scathing the critical reaction is to the Dynasty Warriors family of games, whatever happens we'll no doubt be seeing another one roll around in the not too distant future that will likely prove to be just as flawed as this. Perhaps it's time to stop moaning about them, they must after all cater for their market and who am I to say niche gaming is bad? The truly frustrating thing however is that with some rather elementary things fixed (AI that isn't so terminally stupid, environments that don't look like they were made out of papier-mache, an involving combat mechanic) DW games would become not only more enjoyable for the mainstream but also surely more enjoyable for their fan base too. Until then however this is, and will continue to be, an experience to excite the devoted few rather than tempt the masses.
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