Cards on the table: I love Dynasty Warriors. I love its repetitive, therapeutic approach to action. I love that it claims to represent Chinese history, but still throws in people with magical powers or who use wolves’ heads as weapons. I love that its solution to getting bored of a character is to include 80 more to try. God, I love Dynasty Warriors.
Its spin-offs, however, are another story. With a few exceptions, the licensed side-series Koei Tecmo regularly creates have consistently disappointed, whether that’s because they’ve felt less well thought-out, dropped a core idea, or simply lacked the charm of developer Omega Force’s key franchise.
After going hands-on with it for a couple of hours, the upcoming Warriors All-Stars looks like a welcome break in that slightly sad tradition. A celebration of Koei Tecmo’s many franchises - from the big (Dynasty Warriors, Ninja Gaiden) to the new (Nioh, Nights of Azure) to the confusing (a strategy game set in feudal Japan where real-life historical figures are replaced with cats) - All-Stars not only feels like a competent new take on the Warriors formula, but adds some good new ideas to the mix. Here’s how:
Warriors spin-offs have a somewhat deserved reputation of transplanting the Dynasty games’ most basic structure (wade through several thousand identical enemies across a battlefield) into whatever license they’ve acquired most recently, removing its more esoteric ideas (changing history with specific battle outcomes, for example) and adding very little else of worth. All-Stars is pleasingly well thought-out by comparison.
Emphasising the idea that this is a cross-franchise team-up, your main character is accompanied into battle by up to four other main cast members, who can be called on to perform special moves, or add bonuses to your gigantic Musou Rush special attacks. You can also take full control of any of them for a short time, using their attacks instead of your main character’s, if they suit you better. Summon all four extra characters and your team becomes a strange chain-gang of death, sweeping across the battlefield together before performing a special move together and retreating for a cooldown.
The game’s general structure is a new one too, stuck somewhere between the old style of a series of major battles and the pitch for Dynasty Warriors 9’s open world. Each of the game’s factions has its own set of main missions to be completed, but there are dozens of side missions to tackle in between. These can offer extra treasure, new Hero Cards (which replace weaponry as the key way to alter your character's stats and abilities), or new characters to unlock for your support team. In short, All-Stars doesn’t want you to feel like you’re doing the same old thing.
If you’re a fan of the series, you might be asking the same question I was - “isn’t there already a Warriors crossover spin-off?” Correct! Warriors Orochi primarily brought together characters from the Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors series, but eventually included members from across the Koei Tecmo-verse. So why bother making an entirely new version of what’s seemingly the same idea?
For a start, Omega Force clearly wants to make a much more focused game. Where the final version of Warriors Orochi 3 brought together a frankly absurd 145 playable characters, All-Stars has 27. That's actually something of a turn-off for me, but the reasoning is sound at least - the plan is to offer a much more complete, uniquely tailored story for each character.
That ties into the other main goal for All-Stars. Where Orochi told the grim story of a demon-beset alternate universe, this game is a lot brighter. Of course, there’s still a lurking evil, and warring siblings - but the evil is trying to dry up a life-giving spring, and those siblings are disturbingly muscular human-wolf hybrid things. It’s as pleasantly silly as a game in which a feline version of Japanese warlord Oda Nobunaga and William from Nioh can meet and have a chat deserves to be.
Warriors games have been dogged on and off with performance problems. The sheer number of enemies on screen has always meant they look a step below less enthusiastically ridiculous action games - that was only a problem when they still chugged under the mountainous weight of their digital armies. Thankfully, this game seems to be coping just fine.
In my time with All-Stars, I didn’t spot any troublesome slowdown, even in the biggest crowds, during the most ludicrous special attacks. As if to show off, the Musou Rush attack spawns quite literally hundreds of new enemies around you, simply as cannon fodder for your eventual K.O. bonus - it’s a confident way of allaying any fears.
It won't be truly clear until the game arrives on August 29 (or September 1 in the UK), but All-Stars feels like Omega Force on its best form - a worthy celebration of the characters it includes.
Joe Skrebels is IGN's UK News Editor, and he is regularly watching the Dynasty Warriors 9 gameplay trailer to make him feel all good about the world. Follow him on Twitter.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire