All Games You Need: Dynasty Warriors 7 - Full - Game

The original Dynasty Warriors 6 hit the PS3 and 360 early this year and now Koei's button-mashing extravaganza is making its way to the PC. This new version offers all the content from the current-gen console release but oddly lacks all the new content from the recently released PS2 version. To me, the entire game feels like a step backwards, despite the extra nine months of porting. The PC version not only looks atrocious but just doesn't feel satisfying. As has been the case for years, the Dynasty Warriors games aren't fun any more and any positives that can be found in the experience are lost in a sea of overwhelming issues.

If you're incredibly late to the party, Dynasty Warriors 6 yet again follows the exploits of ancient Chinese warriors of legend in the time of the Three Kingdoms. Names and places are thrown around flippantly in the game's Musou mode, the main source of "narrative" and the game type you'll be spending most of your time in. Dynasty Warriors 6 also has a Free mode which lets you revisit previously beaten scenarios, and special Challenges that are set in the same gameplay mechanics but task you with different goals, like speed running through an environment or destroying environmental objects. These Challenges are a joke, honestly, but I'll touch on that later.

The primary gameplay components in Dynasty Warriors 6 are depressingly familiar. When starting up Musou mode, you're shown a few quick cutscenes which do a poor job in setting up the action, then you're escorted into a pre-battle menu where you can equip weapons, work on your skill tree and scope out the current mission objectives. Ultimately, most of your objectives will be to mow through hordes of poorly animated enemies and slowly take over bases strewn across the map. It's a formula that Koei games have employed for years and it's still present in the PC version.

Taking your warrior onto the battlefield is pretty straight-forward. You have a series of Normal attacks at your disposal, as well as Power attacks that can modify your combos. After building up your Musou gauge, you'll be able to pull off the franchise's iconic Musou attacks which can chew through enemy soldiers with ease. One of the biggest problems with the PC version is how terrible the game feels on a keyboard. It just doesn't work well. I tried pairing a 360 controller as an alternative but that was buggy at best, so control schemes are definitely lacking with this game.

One of the newer additions to actual battle that came with Dynasty Warriors 6 was the Renbu system, and it's still in place here. By attacking enemies, your Renbu Rank will go up and give your warrior stronger attacks. You'll even be able to chain more techniques together to create longer combos. As fancy and exciting as that sounds, you're actually just mashing away at two keys in order to mash away at two keys even more. These systems might have been interesting a while ago, but when you consider the infinitely refreshing and unique gameplay experiences that have emerged in other games in just the last few months, the Dynasty Warriors battle mechanics feel tragically stale.

The only appealing aspect of Dynasty Warriors 6, which taps into a gamer's inner RPG enthusiast, is the potential to level up your officers and unlock new abilities. I'm a tremendous RPG fan so giving me the option to level grind always has a certain appeal, as long as the manner in which you grind is fun and fulfilling. But therein lies the problem: there's nothing fulfilling about battles in Dynasty Warriors, especially when you consider how little the franchise has progressed over the years.

Trying to seek refuge in the game's Challenges will offer little relief because they're boring spin-offs of the same experience you'll have in the main Musou mode. I had a fairly hardy laugh at Speed Run's expense (I felt a bit guilty afterwards) because the challenge is completely ridiculous. Your goal is to travel to every base on a map as quickly as you can. That's it. The developers took one of the most boring aspects of the experience (running around) and built a whole mini-game around it. I suppose, if you're a hardcore Dynasty Warriors fan and a racing game fanatic, you could glean some enjoyment from this distraction, but I doubt it.

Let's face it: there are enemy soldiers in Speed Run, but some of them don't even have AI programs running. They actually stand there and will let you push them around like inanimate pots. The only thing that attacked me the entire time was a dedicated pack of wolves. I admire those wolves...

These many issues are exacerbated when you witness (and you'll most certainly witness) the technical hitches that plague the title. Not only do character models and environments look terrible (especially for a PC game), character pop-in seems worse than ever. Your opponents will flicker in and out of existence mere feet in front of you and the whole affair feels cheap and poorly executed. Playing co-op on the PC is a complete joke because -- as I have said many times before -- no one gathers around a single PC to play together. It's either online or single-player. Dynasty Warriors 6 has no online modes.

Game Information
Number of Players: 1-2

Minimum System Requirements
* OS: Windows XP/Vista
* Processor: Pentium® 4 1.6GHz
* Memory: 512MB RAM
* Hard Drive: 5GB
* Video Memory: 128MB or more
* Sound Card: 16-bit stereo with 44KHz playback supported by Windows XP/Vista
* DirectX: DirectX 9.0c+
* Keyboard & Mouse
* DVD Rom Drive

Recommended System Requirements
* OS: Windows XP/Vista
* Processor: Intel® Core™2Duo 2.4GHz
* Memory: 512MB RAM
* Hard Drive: 5GB or more of free space
* Video Memory: 128MB or more
* Sound Card: 16-bit stereo with 44KHz playback supported by Windows XP/Vista
* DirectX: DirectX 9.0c+
* Keyboard & Mouse
* DVD Rom Drive
* 12-button game pad

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