Dynasty Warriors DS shapes up to be a 2 hour romp in a world that makes the Super Nintendo visually shine.
I'm not going to blame my wonderful DS for this shoddy title. The terrible graphics, sound, and overall presentation of Dynasty Warriors DS makes it obvious that creating this game must have taken around the 2 hours it takes to complete it.
The fighting mechanics similar to past titles can be enough of a push to play through this game, while the collection of moves and abilities can add an interesting flair. Any enjoyment from this game is then rapidly offset by the enormous amount of annoyances and frustrating indecencies.
A raw fighting game, Dynasty Warriors DS has players choosing one of 3 ancient Chinese warriors and pitching them in the fight for majority domination of 11 regions. Within each region is then a smaller range of control points to navigate through and conquer all while watching your enemy eventually approach ally territory.
It's a reasonably solid gaming precipice. Race for base and beat things up, it's tested, it works. It's about 2 minutes into the game when one begins to notice and feel what can only be blamed as a result of terrible game development. If the audio similar to that of someone crashing garbage can lids in your face doesn't throw you off at first, or watching the horribly pixellated 2D sprites attempt to manipulate themselves around a 3D world of low visibilty, the feeling that you're the first person to actually play this game will.
Examples of poor game design are numerous and frequent. Completely un-avoidable enemy abilities such as "Great Freeze" (freezing you in a block of ice) will pop up and the most unreasonable times. The vigor of defeating an enemy boss to gain power is soon lost when left in a completely empty room - only to be frozen in a block of ice for no good reason. Next step is to sit and wait for this move to expire, all the while watching your enemy slowly move closer to your allies camp on the lower screen.
The lower DS screen serves as a map of the overall battlefield and it's control points, as if there were any way to strategize a decent attack. It's when defeating the enemy leader only to find you've in part transported him to a spawn point right inbetween two of your camps that you realise this is futile. One could then take advantage of this at times by dying on purpose in an attempt to spawn within your enemies territory.
Perhaps you could concentrate on your own travelling direction - until a whirlwind emerges from the sky, throwing you to a random point on the map and completely invalidating your path.
While a few fun moves and attacks can give the game some actual decent content, the pain of field of view and bad camera angles once again detract from the experience. While not exactly detrimental, Dynasty Warriors DS has no touch screen controls whatsoever.
I could seriously list specific game flaws here for quite a while, but it's really un-necessary. Dynasty Warriors DS: Fighter's Battle is a short, ugly, frustrating game that feels as though it has never been play-tested.
Dynasty Warriors DS: Fighter's Battle
50%
The Good -
* Some nice fighting mechanics from the Dynasty Warriors series
* Game length shortens the pain
* Other games will be better in comparison
The Bad -
* Will take you around 2 hours to complete
* Makes SNES games look great
* Many frustrating and illogical moments