You then have to go out and fight, bringing back resources from your conflicts to expand your little village and build your big castle. You take the role of any hero you choose and stand in front of a part-built Tongquetai. This isn’t a grand strategy enterprise, al a Empires, but it’s a mode that adds a diverting spot of architecture in between the mass-murder. This mode is independent to the core story and introduces a nice spot of agency for the player. The new Ambition Mode, on the other hand, is a blessing. Considering that the quality of the dialogue is certainly faithful to past iterations of the franchise, I’m not sure if that’s such a blessing… 10 new playable characters (the full roster is somewhere in the region of 80 – 90) and 40 “new” stages make for some strong back-of-box facts, while “what if?” branching narratives allow Omega Force to explore new avenues of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms tale that they’ve been re-tracing for years.

So what’s actually new? Let’s cover that first. But it’s the same core concept. It is all presented in an unwavering 60 Frames per second mind, can’t argue about that part… There are a few new tweaks and additions but pretty much, yeah, it’s Dynasty Warriors. A field, some enemies, and a whole lot of hackin’ and slashin’.Īnd it is.

Which is why I expected Dynasty Warriors 8 to be an absolutely unashamed return to what the series does “best”. Dynasty Warriors does tinker with its foundations in its various offshoots – the Empires throw in a little more RTS, for instance – but through this outside experimentation, the core franchise has remained somewhat vanilla in flavour. So what does a franchise do when it gets to entry number eight? To be honest, I expected very little.

And those are just the ones from Tecmo Koei… Pile on top the Fists of the North Stars, Bladestorm: The Hundred Years War, the Samurai’s, the Orochi’s and the Gundams and you’ve got a huge swath of mob-squash games. Actually it’s more than 8 when you think about it. You don’t get to eight titles by being a bad game. There is something rather cathartic about it, isn’t there? I mean, there must be.

Dynasty warriors 8 pc weapon guide