Nowhere as bad as Gamespot thinks however improvements and features would have made the game alot better
Warriors orochi 2 brings in a tag team system of play where you can have a team of 3 characters and, switch between them at any time and cunningly use them to perform combos and connected musou attacks, this aspect makes the gameplay even more fun then before however I find it very strange in how if one of your characters die then it's instant defeat, in fighting games that works and makes sense but here it doesn't, Losing one character should not mean defeat, it should only mean the battle becomes harder.
Now maybe it's just me but is the voice acting the best yet? yes it still has it low moments and poorly delivered lines however it generally works well, some lines are also really funny in a good way. Maybe it's just me also but my fellow allies need more babysitting then ever! your only facing a few troop Cao Hong so I shouldn't have to help you! 'Cao hong has been defeated' bugger..
The Battle of Guan Du on Wei was particulary bad for this, I babysitted everyone I could and still the plan failed. I do think also the enemy block alot more then ever..too much I reckon and that you cannot stop attacks of some powered up officers using the X button is just very cheap. Survival mode takes the general battles of DW4 and the tag team element and mixes them together. It works rather well with good AI and online leaderboards. My record is 14 wins, number 1 on 360 has 108, I have a long long way to go.
The best feature of the game in my opinion is the weapon fusion which allows you to merge one weapon with another and swap skills and add attack and slots. This customization aspect is particulary gripping and so it adding ablities and unlocking treasure to unlock power-ups to add to your weapons. It fits in very nicely and adds more to the simple levelling up and costume unlocking of other DW Games, Shouldn't there be more costumes though? at least theres loads of characters, 94 is a fearsome number.
Like other Koei games it's very challenging. I play on normal and a few officers like Sun Wukong and Hitori (is it Hitori?) are very very hard to defeat. One small note, why is a pre-teenage looking and sounding girl harder to defeat then the serpent king Orochi X..who I'm now going to refer to as Baby Orochi.
Warriors Orochi 2 is a good game but I get the feeling that Koei are missing out a number of things that would truely make Warriors Orochi 2 and perhaps future DW/SW games brilliant. Dynasty warriors 6 improved the graphics and from what I saw they looked good but could be better, In warriors Orochi 2 it's back to DW5 level for some reason and that means bland and blocky texures, poor character detail and Dull environments, To quote Ben Crosshaw 'That's what we in the gaming industry call a Dick Move'
Also the game is crying out for online co-op or online 3v3 battles. It might only be a minor add-on but for casual and hardcore fans alike that would be an amazing thing to have. In my view a few new unlockable combos as you level up would add a little, A battle creator where you choose the battlefield, what officers fight on what side, the commanders and troop sides would add more hours to the lifespan of the game. Some games in the series have character creation, some don't. Why not a fairly in-depth one for all games and also why does empire mode have to be a stand-alone game, it should be an unlockable in this and DW6!
A very minor thing about Warriors orochi 2 the character viewer and preview model in missing, it's a very minor annoyance as I can no long preview my model to know which is which. A more greater annoyance is the slowdown which has been fixed and there is less now then what there was however it's still there and Koei really need to release another patch to fully remove it
In conclusion Warriors Orochi 2 is by no means a bad game, infact it's rather good however Koei and Omega force need to make improvements to fully make future games better. They can afford to leave the gameplay fairly untouched and the renbu system in DW6 has angered a large number of fans from my understand but no-brainer things like better graphics, empire mode, character creation and online features need to be the standard