Dynasty Warriors 9

Dynasty Warriors offers a plethora of playable characters, large-scale battles, and a feeling of godhood as you smash through scores of enemies with a single thing. What more could you ask for from a Warriors game?

Although Dynasty Warriors 9's hack-and-slash fighting is fun for a while, and it contains a deep roster of characters, a sprawling story and an even larger landmass to explore, it's hard not to conclude that the franchise is in need of a more radical re-imagining than this installment provides. While there is challenge to be had in the boss fights and the carnage of the large-scale battles, Dynasty Warriors 9 feels awfully familiar.

First time for a Dynasty Warriors game to head into an Open World environment and it stumbles doing that. It sure is a new way to experience an old franchise with many new options and rework of the combat system. But the game tries to put in all of the open world tropes and systems all at once without previous experience on them by the development team, which leads to many bugs, glitches and bad optimization.

Dynasty Warriors 9 still retains the fun factor of its predecessors but has not built upon them. The inclusion of the open world and 90 playable characters does not add as much value as it should but does only a little to take away from the experience. If you are a fan of the franchise, you will enjoy this game despite its limitations and glitches.

Open world turned out to be a huge letdown as it brings nothing to the table and makes the rather average campaign drag on forever. [Issue#228, p.68]

DYNASTY WARRIORS 9's gameplay has a relaxed feel that allows you to choose what to spend time on. There’s plenty to explore, missions to complete, and tons of options to customize your character. The only real problem is occasional laggy graphics. If you enjoy the JRPG genre, I recommend getting it.

Unfortunately, the changes in Dynasty Warriors 9 are a bit too superficial and kept too much of what made the series suffer in previous titles. The controls and animations need tightening, and the storytelling needs to evolve to a point where it's more coherent. If you're a fan of the Musou franchise, there's a lot of new stuff to experience and enjoy here. Dynasty Warriors 9 isn't likely to attract a ton of new fans, but it sets the groundwork for the future of the series, and we'll likely see the real fruits of this new direction in the next few entries in the franchise.

Dynasty Warriors 9 is a significant departure from past titles, but a poorly implemented open world leaves much to be desired.

Featuring reworked combat and open-world story mechanics, Dynasty Warriors 9 is a definite step in the right direction. But even without the technical issues around its framerate, Dynasty Warriors 9 feels like a fundamentally compromised game that lacks depth.

The PC version of Dynasty Warriors 9 is frustrating, more for its wasted potential than anything else. The game is difficult to control on PC, and that significantly hinders a lot of the fun, fast-paced combat, which is all-too scarce at times. Additionally, while the open-world approach is a great direction for the series, it doesn't capture the epic battles that the series is known for in the same way. Maps are either too crowded, or frightfully empty. It's nice to see Omega Force taking the series in a new direction, but this entry hasn't quite found its footing.

Neither Omega Force, nor the series were ready to handle so many changes at once. Dynasty Warriors 9 disappoints wherever you look, from performance issues and dumb stealth to ugly cinematics and boring open world.

The concept of fusing open world and Musou is interesting, but it misses the mark due to poor performance and numerous bugs.

Dynasty Warriors 9 suffers from a lot of issues, most stemming from the terribly implemented open-world. Assets are reused, it’s buggy, repetitive, bloated, empty and bland. These shortcomings are made all the more painful by the obvious potential this game had, and how fun the base combat can be once players waded through all the other nonsense.