Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

40 to 100 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Best in series"

Dynasty Warriors is back again with its latest install of the game but how is it and is it just another hack and slash or have the new features made it something more. Well if you've noticed my score already you must be guessing yes? Well yeah they have made changes to the game and added more things. So

Whats new?
Well they have added a very in depth storyline which is really quite something. The Storylines have increased in the length of the story of The Romance of the 3 Kingdoms timeline and has added the period of Jin. Jin is a new team which is Chinese History ruled china as Wu, Wei and Shu were coming to an end. Jin adds more new characters along with Shu gaining 2 new characters. They have added some new weapons like the chain-sycle and Flails. All the Characters Designs have been re-done. Every character can have the weapon of your choice though females can not have great swords and males can't have whips. Besides that a conquest mode has been added which is a map of china which you conquer by taking parts of the map through missions. If you do that mission the tile flips which lets you carry on to new missions. They have removed the levelling system and added skill points which are spent to on a skill tree, each skill tree is different for each character some take longer than others and some gain more than others. Along with this stats are no boosted by defeating officers, They will drop a stat item which will increase attack. Defence or Hit points.

The Gameplay
Its the classic hack and slash with the new features though the maps seem to be improved. The main thing with this game which is remarkable is the in-depth storyline which is quite lengthy. The game seems very fresh and new when you play at first and it feels great but after a long time of playing it looses that factor. The conquest mode is great but you'll find yourself playing this part of the game the most and if you are going for platinum you'll spend the majority of your time here boosting characters skill points.

Graphics
The graphics are quite remarkable and done very well. I haven't seen anything to moan about with the graphics and I've felt they are reasonable and good.

Music and Sound
The sound track is great at first and is quite similar to other dynasty warriors games. But after a long time the music seems to sound quite samey. The voice acting and sound effects are reasonable; I can't thing of anything to complain about them.

Trophy list
Though the trophy list doesn't seem too hard, it is very time consuming. The scholar questions take a long time along with getting a million fame points but worst of all you have to max out every characters skill tree which can take between 1-2 hours per character so its very time consuming. I think in total it took me about 80 hours to platinum

Summary
A great game the new changes and features have kept a long running game fresh and exciting and I really enjoyed it though going for platinum did drag a lot.

+ Great story mode and in depth story
+ Great new weapon system

- Some trophies are very time consuming