Samurai Warriors Review

I made the decision to do my game review on Samurai Warriors. When I first started playing this game it was very hard to not notice how much Samurai Warriors had in common with Dynasty Warriors. The graphics that was used in Samurai Warriors was pretty good for the time that that the game came out. Though there were a few rendering issues that bugged me. The game play for this game is awesome, there was not too much that I could complain about when it came to game play. The biggest issue of this video game is the game’s logic, the logic used in this game is completely off and make no sense at all.
First off I want to go over the good graphics of this game. Samurai Warriors is a five year old game. So keeping that in mind the character design and game rendering was really good. The physics of the game worked out well also. For example hair and clothing moved in ways that would be expected. One of the best parts about the game rendering was that there were not any characters that had hair that would go through their hand when they tried to scratch their head. There happened to be two small, but noticeable, problems with the graphics and maybe one issue that was just the game artist being creative. The first issue is with the way the horses in the game run. They take off running just fine but when you jump off or make them stop, their hind legs slide out and forward in such a way that is completely unrealistic and would cause a real horse’s legs to break. Another issue that bothered me was some of the character’s eyes. A few of the character’s eyes did not move at all. Their eyes would stay fixed on one thing and not move at all even if the character turn their head or blink. I found that to be just a little creepy. The last thing that I noticed may not really be an issue, maybe the artist did it on purpose, but there are red horses in the game. I mean like really red, not that sandy brown color that looks slightly red. These horses are like Crayola crayon red, but there are also normal colored horses and these same red horses are in Dynasty Warriors as well. At first I thought I it was my television so I tried other TVs and played the game at a more than one friend’s home, so maybe the game artist got creative I am not sure but it bugged me.
When taking in account the game play there is no real difference between Samurai Warriors and Dynasty Warriors. One really annoying part of the game play is how the characters will repeat the same lines over and over again. It gets really frustrating after a while but besides that the game play is pretty solid. The object of the game is complete the story of a samurai that is fighting for a certain army. The player can pick one of the game characters or make their own samurai. If the player creates their own character then they must go through training to become a samurai; samurai training takes a year, in the game’s time, to complete. In training the player will practice skills that the game feel is important for you to know even though you do not use them unless you are trying to join an army. You are graded on how well you do during the exercises but the game does not do a good job of telling you what it want done and how they want it done, so you may have to try a few parts over. After completing the training the player gets to pick what army they want to try and join. In order to join an army you must pass two tests, if you do not gain at least 100 points then you fail and if you fail you cannot retry that army’s test. There is also a Survival Mode where the player can either try to make to a specific spot on a hidden map in a certain amount of time. If they make it to the spot then they get to fight a random character from the game. Along the way the player must avoid traps and fight enemy forces. The other option in the Survival Mode is to explore the basement of a castle and fight a random character. There is a Challenge Mode where the player can work on their skills like killing people while riding a horse or deflecting arrows with their weapon. In the Versus Mode two players can either fight against each other or fight together and destroy the enemy. In the Free Mode the player can pick a character they want to use and pick which battle they want to fight in. All of the game modes follow the same basic game mechanics. The fighting in this game is really easy and is not much more than dodging and mashing the attack buttons, but it is time consuming and fun.
The only serious problem that I could find with this game was the logic. As I mentioned in a previous paragraph if the player creates a character they must go through training. Well you can completely fail every part of training and still qualify to become a samurai and all you have to do is pass the two tests that the army you chose to join gives you. However you must pass with at least 100 points to join someone’s army. So you can flunk most things as long as you pass the things that matter (kind of like college). A bigger issue can be found in the Free Mode of the game. Since you can pick a character and a battle instead of following the story line of the game, this means you can play as a character from one army but fight on the side of a different army. If you do this and happen to pick a battle where the character you selected is fighting against the army you are fighting for there will be two of your character. That is bad enough but it gets worst. You can actually kill the other you, which would be good because they are the enemy so your team will win but at the same time they are you. Since you killed yourself while you were fighting for someone else the first thing that happens is you win, you defeated the enemy. They give you your rewards and let you save, then you lose and the “Game Over” screen pops up. So you win and you lose, because you killed the enemy but you died because the enemy was the character that you were using at the time that you killed you.
Samurai Warriors is an overall good game, it does seem like they just took Dynasty Warriors, changed the name and added a new line up of characters. The game play is solid and will keep you entertained for at least for a little while. Graphics are great, at times creepy, given how old the game happens to be. However the logic of the game is horrible and would make my Philosophy professor slap the game’s programmer repeatedly. Besides that the game is good and should totally be at least rented for a few days I give it a strong 3.58 out of 5.