A mixture of Samurai and Dynasty Warriors
For those of you never to have play either of the two previous installments of KOEI's Warriors series, you play as 3 chosen heroes in one of the four campaigns, each having 15 individual battles within them. After choosing the three warriors, picking their weapons which you pick up off of defeated enemy officers, picking your abilities that you get from meeting certain conditions attuned to each character, you're thrown onto a battlefield.
You play as one of the three warriors which you can switch around seamlessly. The wars are really quite epic, considering there can be thousands of people on the battlefield, filling both sides of the army. Your goals are varied depending on the mission, and many events can happen that you usually have to personally take care of. For example, reinforcements appearing behind your main force that threaten your main commander, which if he dies, it's game over.
As for the combat itself, it's extremely fast paced, but the controls are intuitive enough that the speed isn't a burden. There will be times you will face 150 enemies at once, with 2-3 officers leading them. The officers are generally lead characters in the opposing army, of a considerably higher strength then the army that they lead. Killing the officers reaps a higher reward though, as they drop new weapons and experience scrolls upon their untimely demise. As you level up, your combat ability increases seamlessly, unlocking new combos each time your proficiency increases. Every character fights with a different weapon and a different style. On top of that, every warrior has what is called a Musou ability, which is a very powerful, and flashy, attack that at higher levels, can wipe out an entire force. But beware, the enemy officers are capable of them also!
Each warrior has 4 tiers of weapons per warrior. As you pick up more and more weapons, you start seeing certain abilities on them, like the ability to freeze enemies in a block of ice, steal their health with every hit, or speed up your attacks with that weapon. Luckily, the game gives you the ability to merge your weapons together with up to 8 slots each for abilities. Each time you run across the same ability, and it's already on your current weapon, you can level up the ability itself up to a max of 9. Once you reach that point, your enemies will see you as a force to be reckoned with.
The story of the game is really quite unique, and delves into multiple dimensions and the concept of time travel. I won't give too much away, but it'll keep you going, just to see who's going to do what next.
The graphics are easy on the eyes, the design hasn't changed a lot since the earlier installments, but they've stuck with what works. The characters sprites are definitely what the designers put the most work in, leaving the actual battlegrounds leaving little to be desired. Many of the maps look similar, but if you can look past that, and see the amount of unique characters on the map itself, you'll be surprised.
The music is repetitive but not obtrusive enough to be annoying. The music is generally active and upbeat, and it suits the combat quite well. The only one you will get sick of is the menu music. At least it does change depending on what you're doing in the menus. The voice acting is pretty well done, and the narration before each battle explaining the story is excellent.
There are a few flaws to the game, namely one major one that can seriously detract from the game at certain points. Every time you kill an officer, or reach a certain amount of kills, and go through a story event, or take over a base, or an event is happening with another officer, they tell you. Usually by way of some sort of congratulation for something small, but sometimes they can talk A LOT during the battle. Which can lead to certain problems like having to wait for a door to open that you had to kill a guard to get through, and the officer on your side is almost dead and through that door. And it won't open. And there's no way around. It can get really annoying, but fortunately, it's only game breaking a few times, where you're forced to restart because of it.
Other then that, the difficulty scaling is appropriate dependent on the level you choose, the loading times are miniscule, and the game doesn't suffer from any crashes.
So, all in all, this game is excellent if you're into an action/fighting game. It's lengthy, and there's a lot of hidden characters and achievements to keep the hardcore gamer right into it to the very end.
I rate Warriors Orochi 9/10 for taking an old idea and giving it a new spin and pulling it off.