Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Highly addictive"

The Dynasty Warriors series is very popular in Asia but in the west it receives more mixed reactions and is known as being repetitive or being milked but the same could be said about all those Halo and CoD games which are popular in the west.

Anyways,as you've probably heard,the series is based loosely on the Romance and the Three Kingdoms novel.

First I'll start off with what it does differently to the other Dynasty Warriors games.Obviously it takes advantage of the VITA's touchscreen functions and it's kinda cool to use at first because you'll need to tilt your VITA to see where enemies are on the screen who are rushing at you and you can tap on the screen to eliminate enemies/projectiles that are coming towards you and there's duel segments where you'll need to swipe or touch certain parts of the screen to defeat an opponent.I guess they sound gimmicky but if you fail to pull off the touch screen commands it will result in a loss of health and since the game has no mid-mission save feature it adds tension to the gameplay because if you fail a mission you'll need to redo it from the start.

The two main modes in the game are campaign mode(which is story mode)and conquest mode(which is more strategy oriented).

Campaign mode is made up of numerous character stories.You play as various characters and see the story from their perspective.You can use a bit of turn-based strategy and select officers in campaign mode but it's a bit gimmicky.The gameplay for campaign mode is very fun but it's story and story presentation are nowhere near as epic as that of Dynasty Warriors 7.

Conquest mode makes you think more carefully about how you use turn-based strategy and you can capture more than one territory at a time but it only allows you to invade territories that have a level lower than yours.

I like how the game allows you to marry certain characters or make pacts with them,I know the marriage feature isn't new to the series but I like it anyways.

Otherwise,it's the same old Dynasty Warriors and it has some great and spectacular CGI's and it's great to see them on a portable console.

For people who are unfamiliar with the DW series,much of the gameplay involves fighting past lots of enemies,capturing enemy bases by killing many enemies in those bases and after you capture a base ally soldiers will respawn from your base unless it gets captured by the enemy(enemy soldiers/officers will try to swarm your bases to try to capture your bases).The gameplay can be exciting when you're trying to capture enemy bases while trying to prevent your bases from being captured and enemy soldiers and your ally soldiers are everywhere.

I like how each base has a counter that represents how close it is to being captured.

The bottom line is the gameplay is fun and I still find it fun to hack n slash through thousands of enemies and even though it's not as good a game as DW7 is it's still a great DW game to have on a portable console.

I like how the CGI's show the traditional Chinese clothing and hairstyles and facial hair style.

Overall,it's my favorite Vita exclusive game right now(not counting remakes),I like it more Uncharted Golden Abyss and Gravity Rush(even though they're very good games too).