"Promising signs for a more tactical based Dynasty Warriors in the future"

I think that pretty much everyone reading this would be familiar with the Dynasty Warriors concept ie repetitive yet amazingly addictive running around hacking and slashing behaviour so I won't delve into it here. What the Empire editions of the DW games involve is slightly more strategic and fairly much removed from the history of Three Kingdoms China that the actual straight DW story mode follows.

In Dynasty Warriors 5: Empires, the aim of the game is to start with a small amount of land, usually one single region, and fight to unify China by invading surrounding regions and defending your kingdom against enemy attacks. Players are given the choice of entering the game at a number of different historical points relevant to the Three Kingdoms period, including right at the fall of the Han dynasty against The Yellow Turban Rebellion, right up to events that have barely been touched in the DW series such as when Liu Chan ruled Shu with Jiang Wei by his side just before the Sima family united China to form the Jin dynasty. Or, players can choose to start from absolute scratch in a completely fictional setting, even incorporating characters they have created in the Edit Mode.

Gameplay pretty much runs in these steps: firstly, you will have a list of tactics to choose from including promoting production, raising the number of soldiers in your army, and selecting tactics for battle, for example. Then you will decide if you want to invade, rest, or defend if you are being invaded. In the event that you invade or defend, you will fight a battle in the said Dynasty Warriors style.

Tactically, there are a lot of options to choose from: who to ally yourself with, to tax your people or not, train your officers, and utilise in-battle tactics like setting fire to the enemy grounds, getting an enemy officer to defect, or raise the speed of your troops for a short amount of time. Unfortunately, in the end none of it matters because with or without tactics there is absolutely no challenge here. One of the long-standing criticisms of the DW series is just this; that the only tactic is being able to race from one spot to another, almost simultaneously attacking the enemy and defending your allies given that no matter how strong they are, as soon as you're off the screen they're likely to lost the battle because that's just the way the "AI" goes. In DW5: Empires, we are starting to see a move towards a more tactical style of gameplay, but there is still a long, long way to go.

Having said all this, DW5:E is still a very fun game with enough satisfactory additions to warrant adding it to your DW collection. It's not a revolution compared to Dynasty Warriors 4: Empires, but it's still a very enjoyable play. There really is something enormously satisfying about taking over a massive country...

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 01/31/07