Yet another Dynasty/Samurai Warriors game.

User Rating: 8 | Warriors Orochi X360
If you've ever played Dynasty Warriors before, then you'll know what's in store inside the box. Sadly, most people have already grown tired of the DW formula, but I personally haven't (this is my second DW game). If you have at least the decency to look past the "yet another DW game" thing, you might actually enjoy it. If you haven't played a DW or SW game before, they're basically about choosing one warrior, and going about in a pretty big battle zone and taking people out in the hundreds, and soon the commanding Officers, and finally the opponent's Generals. It's all loosely based on historical events, except for this title, it's fiction.

First of all, Koei basically mashed together Samurai Warriors and Dynasty Warriors, put in a few (2 or so) new characters, and made a new story. That sounds great, not playing the same thing again, and the story is decent, but the cut scenes are horrible. You're tortured with just completely lame voice acting. There are a few who have just great voice overs, but then the rest of the cast have really stupid actors. It WILL make you wish that Koei put in a Japanese voice option, or had at least kept the VA from DW5.

I didn't really care about the voice actors much myself though. Then you've successfully ignored all the game's crap! There's a new Three Person system that allows you to switch between three chosen warriors simultaneously, and those that aren't out recover in Musou and Health, until you just hit Right of Left trigger, and in less then a second, they're out fighting. With the DW + SW thing, there's almost 80 characters to choose from, and any of them can be put into a 3 man team, so you could just make a team that works pretty well together. Each person is also categorized in Technique, Speed, Power, which is pretty stupid. Power basically means the Person's special attack rapes, but wastes a big chunk of musou. Technique is basically average everything. Speed can double jump and doesn't waste any Musou doing special attacks. IMHO, these don't really matter once you reach Lv99, but Speed characters do help a bit in terms of speed running.

Finally the game. The stories are split between 4 factions (Wei, Wu, Shu, Samurai) and not by warriors, like DW4. The warriors aren't faction specific though, you will use Samurai characters in the Shu story, Shu guys in the Wu, and so on. The story is decent, thats about it. The game has some pretty great replay value. Now there's a maximum of 99 levels per warrior, which can be achieved pretty fast, 4 different weapon levels for each person, and one unique item, but if you even consider getting all of those for each character, you're insane.

While playing the game, you might notice that starting off in Normal is pretty psychotic. I started out in the Shu story, and with everyone Lv1, it was pretty horrible. I found out pretty fast that Musou attacks are garbage (Which they are in WO) and the new "Special Attack" is A LOT better (Right Bumper) and uses less Musou (What the hell?). Immediately, the commanding Officers will take a while to kill. Then the Generals are complete crap. It took me about 5 minutes to take one out because I was doing so little damage, and probably not using Special Attacks. Once you get to higher stages, the Officers start doing A LOT of damage, especially the Generals. If you get caught in one combo, you lose GG. Same goes for Hard and Chaos. In Chaos, hell, you can be Lv99 and get killed by a mere soldier doing a combo on you, so consider to hit them while not being hit.

Overall, if you like DW, you'll probably love this as well, some do hate it though. If you're new, then this game is a gamble. Try DW5 first (the regular one, not Empires, not Xtreme Legends). It's worth the money to me though, I loved the game.