The Dynasty Warrior franchise must have something special about it to spawn so many sequels and spin-offs. It has been around since 1997 and twelve years later Koei is still giving fans what they crave. Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce is now available for the PSP and with it comes a new multiplayer focus. Will the game still appeal to those loyal to the series, while offering enough to bring in first time players?

Gameplay

For those who have never played a Dynasty Warriors game in the past, this is a hack-and-slash action game where you complete missions to help your Kingdom defeat a bevy of different opposition. You control a member of one of the Three Kingdoms during the later parts of the Han Dynasty in China. Each Kingdom has a variety of different characters to choose from, each with their own specialty with a primary and secondary weapon.


Attacking is done using the square and triangle buttons with your X button for jumping and circle to switch between weapons. To spice up the action, each character also has a Fury form that they can take on when the meter charges up. Once filled, by pressing the circle and triangle buttons together you enter Fury Mode. While in this mode, your character is quicker, can deal some significant damage and can really turn the tide when surrounded by a swarm of enemies. The meter eventually depletes so if you want to stay in this mode, you need to continue to attack to keep it filled up.

While past Dynasty Warrior games on the PSP did offer some rudimentary multiplayer options, Strikeforce is clearly geared towards multiplayer enjoyment. Here you can essentially play with up to three other people in the game’s story mode with some pretty good results. The Ad-hoc multiplayer works generally well since friends can drop in and out at anytime with their characters. Slow down does occur when four are playing together, otherwise there are no noticeable issues that ruin the experience.

Where Strikeforce works well as a multiplayer game, it suffers greatly as a single-player adventure. The game’s difficulty is ramped up under the impression that most people will be playing the game’s missions with other players. If you want to attempt the game alone or do not have anyone to play with, you will be forced to grind through the game’s early missions a few times in order to level up your character and have a reasonable shot at completing the game’s 5 chapters.

There a few other problems with the game. For starters, the camera can be quite cumbersome, especially when trying to target enemies. Since Strikeforce is a hack-and-slash game, you will often have plenty of foes to handle and the game has a hard time selecting which enemy to attack. Rarely is the case that you will lock on the closest target and trying to re-adjust with the directional buttons will only cause you to lose precious time.

Another issue occurs with the game’s collision detection. Thankfully the game does have some good level layouts with high elevation, but this does become a problem in some situations. Ranged enemies can easily shoot through the earth and obstacles to cause damage, something that should not happen.

The last major gripe with the game is the poor draw distance. Enemies will appear and disappear at various times. At first I just assumed this was due to the game’s frequent re-spawning of characters, but that was not the case. I would have enemies take damage then suddenly disappear, only for them to reappear moments later with the same amount of health left needed to finish them off. It doesn’t happen too often, but enough to notice.

Even with the problems, Strikeforce does do something right by offering the ability to install the game onto your PSP memory stick. This 300mb install significantly reduces load times to next to nothing. If you have the space I strongly recommend doing this.

Graphics and Sound

The animations of your characters both in normal and Fury states are really nice. There are some cool attack animations which in general work very well with only a few minor slowdown issues. But as stated before, there are a lot of pop-in and collision detection problems that seriously hurt the game. There is some decent variety in the areas where you will battle, but those who are forced to replay missions in order to level up will be disappointed with the limited amount of selectable locales early on
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Sound is fair with some nice tunes but nothing really stands out as being memorable. I was expecting more music that would fit the setting of the game, but instead, the majority of the music is J-techno tunes that feel a bit out of place. The game only features limited voice-work and while the Narrator is not bad, he fails to offer anything special to the game when you hear him. All other voice work in the game is quite laughable and pops up most of the time just to make a comment about the current situation.

Value

Considering this is a truly multiplayer focused title, if you can get some friends to play with you, you will be spending plenty of time with the game. Ultimately, this is the only real way for anyone to enjoy the game. You can attempt to play through the story on your own, but be prepared to replay missions a few times in order to level up your character(s). The game will eventually feature downloadable content with extra missions and other goodies but at this moment nothing has been announced.

Conclusion

As stated before, portable Dynasty Warriors fans who have wanted to be able to play with their friends will be extremely satisfied with what Strikeforce offers and will be able to overlook the obvious deficiencies. While it might work for fans, new people looking and hoping that this would be the perfect title to jump into the series will be utterly disappointed. It is extremely difficult to recommend this game to anyone other than die-hard lovers of the series. I would suggest those tempted to try this out to download the demo and ensure they can play the game with at least one other person.