This review contains spoilers, click expand to view.
When I first bought this game I was very excited at the prospect. I had just finished the excellent "Hyrule Warriors" (Which was a crossover between this franchise and the Zelda franchise) And I was excited to see what it would be like to experience the source material. not to Mention I love war stories and games which allow you to select and play as different factions. when I got this game I actually was really enjoying it. the soundtrack seemed great, the characters seemed memorable and the game play looked like it had everything good about Hyrule Warriors except with more Characters. This game has a total of 6 campaigns. "House Shu" Which obviously has the moral high ground of the three main factions, "House Wu" which is the descendents of the great warrior and philosopher "Sun su". "House Wei" which is lead by the great emperor Cao Cao, who wishes to bring peace to the land through sheer power" "House Jin" Which is just an extension of the Wei campaign but following on of their more powerful clans...I think. "Lu Bu" which is an addition from the original version of this game following the godlike warrior Lu Bu who wanders the land being a bad ass and betraying almost every alliance he makes at one point or another. And who could forget "Other" where you play as all of the small factions who didn't last long enough to be considered important to the plot. Like I brought up earlier, I loved this game when I first got it, (Actually I added it to my steam "favorites" list two days after buying it) but once you get to playing as the factions you don't care to much for, the game becomes tedious, where in previous campaigns you can get behind the motives of the warriors you play as and truly wish for them to come out victorious you will end up playing as groups you disagree with and find yourself killing all of the characters you grew to love before. the best example of this being the Jin campaign in which the main protagonist is just a puppet for his evil accomplice. to make him look more likable he is shown growing resentful against his allies who push him to do this, but he never acts on it. even when asked what he wants to do with an enemy kingdom which he has nothing to gain from, he still invades claiming he has something he need there but never saying what. this leads to the player slaughtering ALL of the shu commanders (remember, the good guys?) and letting the bastards get there way. but hey, look at history the endings all ways suck. and by the end of the Wei campaign it was taking so long to finish that I found myself verbally begging the game to end, as if this game was some kind of purgatory and I was a confused sinner. But enough Religious metaphors for bad games lets get on with the review. It is also notable is that the level design is massive and labyrinthine causing you to run all over the map looking for the objective, just to find the next objective is way across the map for no good reason. The game also has a massive player roster, each one with their own type of primary weapon, and two special moves, however the character development in this game ranges from okay to abominable, some characters which are playable never appear in the campaign or aren't explained as to why they are there. the only time for them to appear is in "Ambition mode" what is ambition mode? False advertising. In the trailer it is claimed that ambition mode allows you to "forge your own way across the land" what they ACTUALLY meant by this was that you would have a small city you will build from materials gained by timed battles. Maybe I was expecting to much from one tagline but this game mode still has nothing to do with forging your "own way" across china. And there is NO REASON for every mission to be timed. I have plenty of other complaints but I will try to just focus on the big ones. I was looking forward to the idea of the military battle experience this game promises but it lacks in that regard too. you have to do everything while your allies stand around like morons barley doing any fighting. this games AI is actually so bad that characters will stand still while being repeatedly struck by catapults, not giving it the slightest thought. The voice acting is terrible and the Japanese voice option is only available in DlC, there are so many enemies that killing armies isn't satisfying or heroic, its just repetitive. cut scenes are poorly executed in many ways, from the CGI movies looking blurry or distorted to characters literally letting wounded enemy officers walk away for no good reason. Not to mention many characters are heavily sexualized, I wouldn't mind this if it weren't for the fact that many characters in this game are based off of real people this just makes you feel awkward. And most notably the game uses the poor ps3 graphics when it should use the ps4 graphics, it has no reason not to.In the end this is just too disappointing to buy and you should probably just move on.… Expand
Dynasty Warriors 8: Xtreme Legends Complete EditionYour Score0 out of 10User Score
