When development teams and publishing houses sit down and think about what’s really been successful in the world of gaming in the last few years, it can sometimes be that train of thought that ends up at a truly awesome destination. When the team behind Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce saw that they could take bits and pieces from the bestselling titles in Japan, and add them to KOEI’s already massive Dynasty Warriors, the train came off the rails somewhat.
I’m going to give up on hoping that one day, someone does something truly decent with the idea behind Dynasty Warriors, since I don’t think that it’ll happen. With Strikeforce though, the development team have at least tried, mixing the hacking and slashing of the “full sized” games with new RPG elements that provide an entertaining diversion, if nothing else.
The RPG side is light enough that it won’t bog players down in endless wading through stat-heavy menus and whatnot, and at the same time gives you the feeling that each level isn’t just another hack-fest, since you can create weapons and power-ups using the spoils of battle. All good.
There’s a bit of a limitation that was soon going to become pretty obvious, and that is the platform on which the game is running. The PSP can’t match the massive battlefields and hundreds of enemies that appear on screen at once on home console versions, and doesn’t try to. Instead, the developers have – correctly – limited the action so that only a limited number of enemies are on-screen at any one time. This also has the pleasant upshot of stopping battles from taking too long to complete – which is an absolute must, given that you might want to just rattle off a quick battle during your morning commute. As it stands, most contests will last between five minutes and a quarter of an hour.
But, something is missing, and that is the overall reason for playing Dynasty Warriors in the first place – “the panic”. The panic is a phenomenon known only to players of the Dynasty Warriors series, and occurs about ten minutes in to a thirty minute battle. You’ve killed five hundred enemies and are doing alright, before every one of your allies suddenly needs your help. You run to help one…then another…then another before you realise that you’ve just spent ten minutes blistering about the map, trying to overthrow the opposition forces pretty much by yourself. When you succeed, it feels sublime and really makes you want to play on. Its like mainlining digital crack, and you’ll just never get a hit of it in Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce. The maps aren’t big enough, the waves of enemies not dense enough and the battles not long enough to ever come close to bringing on the panic. In fact, the actual battlefield action provided in this PSP edition of the game is pretty dull, to say the least.
Unfortunately, that’s a real killer for a title that – despite the new pre-battle options and RPG-ness – pretty much depends upon the battlefield action to see it through and keep you playing. Multiplayer sessions can be occasionally fun – as the publisher is desperate to point out – but the fun just isn’t enough to keep you coming back to play the game time and time again. Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce is a nice step in an interesting direction for the series, but I can’t help thinking that the improvements to the off-field system would be far better off going into the home console versions.
