Dynasty Warriors 5 Empires is everything a fan of the series is looking for.
Firstly the fantastic story of Dynasty Warriors is ruled out as this is basically a attack anf defend territory game featuring the gameplay and characters from dynasty warriors. China is divided out on each campaign between different powers, including Coa Coa, Sun Jian etc and any can be chosen to use at your command which is great. The chance to finally play as about 200-300 characters from the franchise is a great asset. The aim of the campaign then is to build up an army, and take over China. Simple really.
The campaigns are divided up into 2 sections, the turn phase and the battle phase. The turn phase consists of positioning your army, increasing production, recruiting more troops and officers, building items etc. basically all the admin sort of stuff for the army. And second is the battle phase, where you will attack or defend territories dynasty warriors style.....well, kind of.
The battle system differs from the original games because this time the map is divided up into bases. Capture the enemy base by taking smaller bases and making a supply route towards it or kill the enemy commander. simple again but there is a lot of running through levels and not enough fighting. Troops are now not freely anywhere around the map, they are either with enemy officers or in bases which limits the amount of fun each level and limits the amount of kills compared to the original games.
Dont get me wrong, the new graphics are really good and when you get in between a swarm of enemies it is fun but this sort of thing happens not very often. Replay value in this game is also scarce, after playing the campaigns (which are not much different besides from 1 extra bonus mission) the game will become quite dull. After taking over Xia Pi castle 800 times using an officer which says to have 20000 troops but actually has about 10, it is quite frustrating to play.
If you are new to the franchise, please dont buy this, stick to the originals but if you are a fan and like repitition then buy it by all means.
Pros
+ New great graphics
+ Loads of characters to mess around with.
+ Any army is playable
+ Free mode again
+ A range of difficulties but the hardest is stupidly impossible.
+ Lots of RPG like leveling up with hundreds of characters
Cons
- Repetitive gameplay
- Not much variety in campaigns
- Battle system is awful
- Story abolished
- No challenge modes