Good things come in small packages ‘ or so the saying goes. With the second Warriors release on the PSP from KOEI, the company have decided to scale down the combat and create a mixture of tactical decisions, RPG elements and the hack and slash action from the home console versions of the game.
And nobody can say that the company hasn’t thought of gamers who are genuinely using their PSP on the go. That action comes in really small bite-size chunks of combat, generally with a less-than-strict time limit and a less-than-difficult challenge. Upon deciding to attack an enemy’s position, you’re either asked to defeat a certain number of enemy soldiers in a certain amount of time, defeat all of the higher-ranking officers, or take down the enemy commander. In all of these cases, completion is just a quick hammering of the square button away, with your character wildly hacking and slashing his or her way through fields of opposition combatants as if threshing a field of corn.
That isn’t to say that this is sometimes fun ‘ far from it ‘ just that after you’ve been asked to do the same thing for the tenth time in one scenario, you’ll feel a little exasperated. For some reason, you will play on for a while, in the hope that something will change ‘ but it never does. This is a real shame, since State of War is technically better than the PSP version of Dynasty Warriors, with the ‘fog of war’ seemingly being rolled back a fair way for this version. In between battles, the game takes a somewhat more tactical bent, giving you a simplified top-down view of the various theatres of war, and challenging you to make effective progress through the horded opposition. ‘Charms’ and other pickups can be used to aid your travels or damage your opponent’s armies, but when the in-game action is as simple as can be, you’ll find that there is rarely any need ‘ unless you need to use one to breach the enemy’s gates, since there is no other way to do it.
What is most annoying is how the game sets you up. On the first load, State of War proudly declares that if you haven’t played the game before, you really should consider starting on the easiest difficulty level. ‘Woo-hoo! A challenge!’ I thought, and selected the regular difficulty setting. I had to check a few times to make sure I hadn’t made a mistake.
Later on, the game does provide a stiffer challenge, but by the time this happens, you’ll have given up on ever finding gaming nirvana. The difficulty level notches up far too gradually, with the early level opponents providing little to no defence of there selves as you hack them to pieces, and the next level up being an enemy who blocks one out of three attacks. Further on, you’ll find a foe that requires you to use your ‘Musou Attack’ to penetrate his formidable defence, and your Musou Attack and Musou Attack only will defeat him. On the tactical front, there is little challenge either, with enemies pretty much just attacking any space that you have claimed ownership of, regardless of whether you’re making speedy inroads towards attacking their base camp on the other flank or not.
All of this makes me sound like I actually despise Samurai Warriors: State of War, which I don’t. As a third-person hack-’n-slash ‘em up, the game doesn’t do that badly other than when speaking of the difficulty curve. As a tactical simulation of war, it provides a functional interface that works admirably, but AI that unfortunately doesn’t perform anything like as well as you’d want it to in order to make you think. If the AI was worked on, the rest of the game could stay the same ‘ and I’d be much happier with it than I am in its current state. As a fan of the series on the Xbox and PS2, I would so love to love this game, but I just can’t.
