Dynasty Warriors 7
The art of score
Review Parkouring across the backs of galloping horses; fighting while cascading down a majestic waterfall; evading a ball-and-chain attack before using the weapon’s momentum to swing to safety. What do these things have in common? Simply that they’re all shown in Dynasty Warrior 7’s rather epic FMV intro and they’re all acts you’ll never get to actually do in-game.
Lightning strikes
A bit of a tease really, and an insight into the fact that Omega Force – Dynasty Warriors’ long-standing developers – know exactly what people want from a current-generation take on their ageing franchise, but seem unabashedly indisposed to developing it. Instead, after an intro which promises so much, we’re left to button mash our way through the same old waves of enemy armies as has long been de rigueur for the series.
Before embarking on a discussion of whether this is a disappointment the game overcomes, let us return to the start. Dynasty Warriors, for those unfamiliar with the franchise, is grand-scale beat-em-up set within the Three Kingdoms period of China’s illustrious history. It was a time when tactical dominance of the battlefield was everything and legendary texts on war and psychology were penned - Sun Tzu’s The Art of War amongst other works…
The historically accurate – at least in terms of overarching facts – story mode boasts four contemporaneous campaigns: Wei, Wu, Shu and Jin; the player cast as any one of a number of high-ranking generals and bodyguards. Each campaign has its own cutscenes to reveal both story and history (who said games aren’t educational?) while the more studious will enjoy reading the biographies and descriptions, which appear during loading screens. Overall an improvement on previous offerings, but nothing we don’t expect of current generation games.
War chest?
On that subject, loading times are just long enough to be annoyingly noticeable. Most, especially upon dying mid-mission, can take an age (well, 30-plus seconds) for the game to reload the scenario. This is surely an issue well up there in the dos and don’ts of videogame development.
Next page: Choose your weapons
COMMENTS
such a shame
the original game was so much fun and different when it came out
shame to see the franchise has become just another typical uninnovative franchise :(
Ummm
It's been a long time since I was a hardcore gamer but Crysis springs to mind. That's on PC tho, maybe the fib factor is higher on teh consoles?
re: ingame trailers
while your example is correct, i've noticed that trailers featuring in-game graphics or even gameplay are getting much more common - ala cod modernwankery2 and blackops etc.
the concept of a very flash looking prerendered trailer or intro movie is fast being replaced by ingame examples, due in no small part to the rapidly improving in game graphics.
10 years ago an FMV was needed for people to drop their jaws, nowadays just look at the frostbite2 engine gameplay trailers for battlefield3, or gameplay footage of crysis2, both of those can acheive the same effect using only what the game is built from already.
OT: the game looks bad. :(
I mean, no offense....
But, when was the last time you saw an intro video to a game that showed you ACTUAL game footage/activities you can do....
If a Deathwing attack actually LOOKED like it does in the intro vid to WoW's Cataclysm, I MAY actually be terrified....but it doesn't.
So, one needs to think of these ads as just that, ads that are made to mind-fuck people into paying for said product.
Ah well, sigh.
Cheers!
I'm a fan...
...and even I am not going to buy this. The first DW on next-gen consoles had only marginally better graphics than the PS2 version, and less missions. It also had a pitiful view distance and number of on-screen enemies. This got even worse, to the point of being nearly unplayable due to inability to figure out what was going on around you, if you played split-screen coop. This when at roughly the same time on the same platform we had Heavenly Sword and its countless legions of enemies, stretching for what looked like miles. Burn me once, shame on me - not going to get burned twice.
As I find myself saying all too frequently these days: if you can't do graphics, do gameplay; if you can't do gameplay, do graphics; if you can do neither graphics nor gameplay, do another freakin' job.
