Dynasty Warriors 8: XTreme Edition is a Hack and Slash game where you control a single hero and fight your way through a vast horde of enemies to single-handedly win battles. You will regularly kill hundreds if not thousands of enemy soldiers and a dozen or more enemy officers – characters like yourself on the opposing side – every mission. The game is very much about the light experienceDynasty Warriors 8: XTreme Edition is a Hack and Slash game where you control a single hero and fight your way through a vast horde of enemies to single-handedly win battles. You will regularly kill hundreds if not thousands of enemy soldiers and a dozen or more enemy officers – characters like yourself on the opposing side – every mission. The game is very much about the light experience of running through and killing massive numbers of foes; while the core gameplay is decent enough, and there is some amount of character-to-character variability, on the whole the game itself is fairly repetitive as all of the levels boil down to almost exactly the same thing, just in a different environment with different orders of objectives. There is little meaningful variation in the enemy units, and thus the game is pretty samey from level to level. It is decent enough as a passing experience, but it is not much fun to sit down and spend hours fighting through the game.
Story
The game is based on the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a culturally-important work of historical fiction about the unification of China in the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE. All of the major characters – all 77 of them – are given unique appearances, and their personalities from the stories tended to be reworked to give them more dramatic impact. As it is an old Chinese story, in many ways it seems odd to modern sensibilities, and many important events occur between battles, summarized in telly text. The story isn't great, and isn't what you're here for - the characters are mostly flat, uninteresting, and unsympathetic, and their motivations are often very shallow and yet still confusing.
Gameplay
The gameplay itself is all about visceral satisfaction; you play as a single hero who wades his way through hordes of enemies, with some friendly officers and a handful of soldiers at your side who are, by and large, worthless. It is your job to do everything, your job to beat your way through the enemy lines, your job to keep your own officers alive, to complete all the objectives, and to otherwise do everything.
But that’s what you’re here for, right?
The protagonist you play has can switch between two weapons of the player’s choice, though it is always best for their primary weapon to be the weapon that they gain an ex bonus for, which grants them special attacks with it. The character can equip two of the same weapon, or can equip two different weapons to get a bit better versatility. Depending on which weapons enemies are you using, you may get an advantage or disadvantage, and because you have two weapons, you can always work out to at least be on even footing with them.
Each weapon has its own unique attack pattern, and as noted each character additionally has a special set of attacks with their preferred weapon. The character also has three “super” attacks which are built up by killing enemies and collecting dropped items from slain foes, as well as a secondary super meter which causes them to go into a “rage” and make a very powerful area of effect attack which will usually wipe out entire enemy forces by itself, killing hundreds of enemy soldiers and possible multiple enemy officers at the same time.
Each level consists of the player walking around it (or calling in their horse to ride around on it), fighting their way through an enemy army to try and capture various objectives, protect their allies, or just kill the enemy officers or general. These levels tend to mostly feel very similar; while there are differences between the levels, most of the levels are not very different in effect as the environments usually matter little (with a few notable exceptions) and the player is mostly just going from one place to another, fighting their way through the enemy horde.
While the weapons and characters all have their own abilities, ultimately the gameplay isn’t very different, and the enemies tend to feel very samey. Still, there is some satisfaction to be found in occasionally jumping in to murder large numbers of soldiers in a stage or two; it is not the sort of game to be sat down and powered through, but the large number of game modes, levels, alternative levels, collectables, and other things that the game offers means that it is possible to keep playing the game sporadically and still have a feeling of making progress for a very long time.
Final Summary
Dynasty Warriors 8 XTreme Edition is a game which is best in moderation; it is fun to run through and kill large numbers of enemies, but the gameplay gets monotonous after a few levels and stops being as interesting. Still, as a “sometimes food”, a game that you play on occasion, it works well enough – it just isn’t much fun to run through the whole thing in one sitting. If you’re looking for something other than mindless killing, though, like plot or challenge, you’re better off looking elsewhere.… Expand
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