Dynasty Warriors 5 Review

By Martin Coxall Published 9 October, 2005

Watch the Chinese population die-nastily. Again.

Version tested: PlayStation 2

As the 'Dynasty Warriors' series has marched inexorably on, the raw numbers quotable for its various metrics (missions, characters, objects, etc.) have grown steadily with each release too. With this latest release, you will be forgiven for losing count or exaggerating the expanses. With this game it's hard to avoid that. Dynasty Warriors 5 is the, oooh, let's say the 39th 'Warrior' game in total that KOEI has committed to consoles - if you include the Samurai/Misc. Warriors games that fill the gaps between dynasties. There are 48 playable characters in this game, six entirely new, most borrowed from earlier incarnations.

Each character has 20+ missions available, through his own unique storyline, and each mission will involve hacking and performing deadly Son-et-Lumière spectacles for maybe hundreds of thousands of minions with a bizarre tendency to stand there and wait to die at your hands. A quick calculation shows that anybody who has played their way through all the games in this series could easily have hacked to death more than 12 billion people, or more than twice the population of the Earth.

For fans of this series of orgiastic frenzies of limb-hacking and metal-edged death, the good news is that the orgy goes on. And, sure, it's been altered a tadge to make you feel briefly that this a new game, and therefore is worth handing over another £35, but when you get down to it and put metal against guts, you realise it's not really a new game at all. It really is all alarmingly the same as before.

More Dallas than Dynasty

'Dynasty Warriors 5' Screenshot tiger

Gah, even *she's* got a pet tiger. I'll have to get rid of mine now.

DW5 doesn't strive to be a realistic portrayal of Great Dynasty-era China in any meaningful way. It's absurd in many respects, both from the inappropriate and entirely over-the-top music used throughout, to the ridiculous overacting of the budding Shakespearean actors that Enunciate Every Line like Olivier's Othello or some such. The thought occurs that since you're not expected to believe that that's how people spoke in Three Kingdoms China, maybe some internationalisation team had decided that the voices given are a realistic portrayal of how Brits speak.

The all-too-limited changes that have been made in this iteration feel as if they come primarily as a result of the iterative process, rather than any great driving force for renewal; yet many of the game dynamics feel refined and polished, even if it's still lacking a certain graphical prowess.

The enemy draw-distance problems that marred the earlier games have been mitigated against substantially, and rarely appear in the main game at all. Whereas previously one would just be able to see minions nearby, you will now be able to see further and without the frame rate taking a dive, a marked improvement over the previous Dynasty Warriors. Note, however, that the draw distance problems are still in evidence in multiplayer modes.

Out of style

'Dynasty Warriors 5' Screenshot force

The force is strong in this... sorry, wrong game.

Stylistically, the game has changed little. The models aren't phenomenally detailed, the textures are a little washed out, the fog effects average. Yet, none of this necessarily matters since too much of the game is far too dark. On a relatively average living room television, the game managed to render itself unplayable during the hours of daylight due to glare.

At a time when the current generation is drawing to a close, these end-of-lifers should be squeezing their parent consoles for every last drop of rendering juice. This game, however, doesn't really do that, and, despite improvements to frame rate and draw distance, doesn't really push its own envelope. In the final assessment it all looks decidedly current generation. Its graphics don't significantly extend what has gone before, and what remains is something that is inoffensive, but no more than that.

The enemy's AI throughout is hit and miss. Among the quadrillion soldiers placed there to be taken out by an amoral sword-wielding psycho, many do nothing more than just act as screen-filler, which is decidedly the wrong thing to do when confronted by a psycho. Too many soldiers just stand around doing seemingly nothing at all, and it can come as a relief when they do decide to attack and surround you. Killing the tigers is fun too. What is it with game designers and their love of encouraging the destruction of endangered species?

Back to the grind

'Dynasty Warriors 5' Screenshot sclub

S Club 7 were a guaranteed floor filler in dynastic-era China.

Because of the numerical vastness of the legions that you'll want to brutally murder in cold blood, this is a game that could suck up much time and interfere significantly with your working day. With the masses of different playable characters, soldiers, weapons and other goodies available, you need to have the time and the inclination to do it justice, for if you don't, the endless enemies falling on your accoutrements of death will begin to wear you down after a while.

There have been few changes made to the game formula compared to earlier incarnations to add some spice to the hack/slash recipe, so Dynasty Warriors 5 just won't stop feeling like well-trodden ground. Having hacked your way through billions of enemies in the previous incarnations, do you really want to do it all again with only minor cosmetic differences?

As a game series, the law of diminishing returns definitely comes into play; the death and destruction on display is almost identical to the countless of hours of death and destruction that has gone before. For those that have played previous games in the series and mildly enjoyed them, Dynasty Warriors 5 delivers virtually nothing new for your money and on that basis is very difficult to recommend.

The game remains the same

'Dynasty Warriors 5' Screenshot bucket

We invented fireworks, you know. And using buckets as hats.

Delivering any sort of satisfying score is almost impossible on a game like this, because you'll be approaching it from so many different angles. If you're the type who loved the previous incarnations with an almost carnal bent, you'll be screaming out for more of the same, and the fifth Dynasty Warriors delivers industrial quantities of he stuff: for them it's worth an eight. Arguably, though it's most suited to the hackandslash fans who are coming to it with a fresh pair of eyes, and if we were being charitable then, yes, the game is a vast and expansive prospect. But we're not known for our charitable remarks.

The bottom line is that there are so many more exciting games in this genre to recommend: God of War, Devil May Cry 3, the Onimusha series, the forthcoming Genji (and even Ninja Gaiden if we extend the argument to Xbox), and the 396 budget-priced Dynasty Warrior games doing the rounds. KOEI really needs to go back to the drawing board with its cash-cow series, and not simply regurgitate the same game. It might get away with this tactic back at home, but for us, Dynasty Warriors 5 is the dictionary definition of the average hackandslasher. It's a brand well and truly stuck in a rut of its own making and deserves no more than average marks.

5 / 10

Read the Eurogamer.net scoring policy
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About Martin Coxall

Read more articles from Martin by visiting the Martin Coxall archive page.

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Comments (20) Latest comment 6 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • GuiltySpark #1 6 years ago

    well i got bored of ten minutes of dynasty warriors 2 so im hardly gonna be buying this....

  • caligari #2 6 years ago

    Wow, the game looks to have inspired so many comments amongst the Eurogamer-ites!

    Guess what GuiltySpark...I played this game for 10 minutes and was BORED!

  • Hunam85 #3 6 years ago

    what would the score be if id never played a DW game before?

  • Swannzie #4 6 years ago

    Hunam85 it would be like a 7/10 if you have never played one before.

  • Yama #5 6 years ago

    The game's amusement comes from making you feel cool. You're singlehandedly destroying entire armies, after all. But after a while you see that the only reason you're capable of that is because the enemy AI stands around 90% of the time. Also, you realize that the army AI on your side is just following you around and mopping up the scraps you forgot about. And then it all sinks in:

    You have done nothing but press the same two buttons for hours, and it required virtually no skill on your part.

    At which point the feelings of coolness that came from slaughtering armies is gone... and replaced with the feeling that someone has been handholding you and losing on purpose just to make you feel good. And so you stop playing and look for something else that actually requires cognitive thought to succeed at.

    The concept is brilliant and cool, they just need to redesign it so that there's an actual semi-challenging game supporting it.

  • Kami #6 6 years ago

    My main gripe is that Dynasty Warriors 5 is just... too much of the same!

    I used to LIKE Dynasty Warriors. I speak in past tense though, because in all honesty, I'm now officially fed up. Dynasty Warriors 5 is more of the same, with a side order of unoriginality and a boring relish of stale ideas.

    While single-handedly taking out vast armies is "cool", the fact that anyone with half a braincell and two opposable thumbs can play this game really grates - no skill required in this game - hammer square and triangle a bit, when outnumbered or versus a boss, get out the Musou attack with circle. There are games out there which do this MUCH better, and reward skill.

    And the "new format" sucks when you compare it to what I found to be a polished DW4. The missions format just doesn't feel right. Not being able to make your own character a la DW4 is noticably missing. The new characters - only ONE character peaked my interest - Xing Cai, the most interesting character addition to date. But that isn't saying much...

    Not to mention, once again, your army could have a 100-1 advantage and the battle would STILL be a stalemate until you walk in to land the final blow. Maketh no sense, it does. Come on, would a LITTLE freakin' decent AI kill Koei?

    I feel DW5 was a step back - DW4 brought in some rather interesting ideas, and Tactics furthered that interesting step. Two steps forward, DW5 feels like it's taking three steps back. Back to the basic stuff, the stuff that we're just so very, very bored of.

    I've just done this game to death so many times before, that it just feels stuck in a time-warp. When it came out originally, it really was a breath of fresh air - DW2 was great fun and I remember a lot of people chirping about how clever it was. Now at #5, the fresh air has very much become stale. DW needs to progress - it needs new ideas, it needs to reward skill, it needs a newer, fresher approach and perhaps even a little bit of army management and tactical application. It needs to change. I don't see it lasting too long into the next generation of consoles if it doesn't...

  • Aysir #7 6 years ago

    Jeezus christ these reviews go from bad to worse. If you don't like a game why bother reviewing and telling eveyone how much you don't like it?
    The fact that you didn't even notice a) Theres a fortress system in place that adds to the strategy of the title b) the levels and in some respects a lot of movesets are very different from DW4 and c) you can't kill tigers - makes me question whether you really played this game at all for more than a few minutes.
    And again with your mixing up genres. DMC? Ninja Gaiden? Genji? Those aren't like DW at ALL. DW is a genre to itself that spawned games like Drakengard, Altered Beast, Yoshitsune Eiyuden and Capcoms upcoming Devil Kings. Just because it's third person and has melee combat doesn't put it into the same genre as those others.

    Please Eurogamer, don't bother reviewing DW5:XL when it comes out. You may as well let people read IGN's reviews. They may have given DW5 a fiarly average mark too (by thier standards) but at least the review has All the right information to let people form their own opinions.

  • Kami #8 6 years ago

    Aysir, they're more than entitled to review a game they don't like. I thought the review was rather fair, stressing that fans who like this stuff will still find everything here.

    But I'm just Dynasty Warriors-ed out. It's a running joke of it's own making - damn straight we should criticise that Koei haven't changed or added nearly as much new stuff in DW5. These are the games we gamers despise - frequent updates with little to differentiate. It's hard to believe that this is from they who made Samurai Warriors, which really mixed things up and kept the game remarkably fresh despite the familarity of the kill-thousands-and-a-boss. A little clunky in comparison but Koei have TRIED these ideas. And don't get me freakin' started on "Xtreme Legends"... Koei can take that idea and stick it up their (WHAY-HAY! Not very nice wording here!)...

    The other games are of the same genre, so comparisons are justifiable since the titles REWARD skillful play. Dynasty Warriors is a sub-genre all it's own - but not for much longer. Capcom are creating a title called Devil Kings, which is meant to be pretty similar but sounds like it's adding a lot of what DW lacks - originality and new ideas. Which can only be a good thing, and hopefully get this ailing sub-genre back on the right track.

  • Aysir #9 6 years ago

    How can a review be 'fair' when it doens't even tell us what's new in the game and doesn't even try to weigh out both sides properly.

    Haven't added anything new? A narritive mode for each character, not just Kingdom story lines. Fortresses' in each level that controls the flow of the fighting. Tiger units and beastmasters. Individualised bodyguards that actually help. Musuo Rage. 9-Hit combos. Weight variations to all weapons. Jumping attacks have All been changed. The level maps and objectives are all done differently. Character models have been redone. Backgrounds now have a distance image that merges in with the foreground, giving an effetive illusion of distance.
    How's all that? Go actually play the game. Besides any DW fan knows Dynasty Warriors 4 was the worst of the series. Empires made up for it, but before 5, Dynasty Warriors 3 was the fan favourite.

    How the heck is it the same genre as Devil May Cry? Dyansty Warriors is a mass army game. You don't get allies in DMC or any of those others. Onimusha3 has one scene which comes close to bridging the genre gap, but they ARE different.
    As for Devil Kings (Sengoku Basara) it looked promising but it copied Dynasty Warriors Exactly and did nothing new, but a lot of things worse. Fewer characters, less enemies and not nearly as glitzy as the screenshots promised. Dynasty Warriors is of its own genre and it's also the best.

    I don't disagree that not enough is being done to push it forward, but saying it's a bad game because of that is just plain stupid.

    'These are the games we gamers despise'
    No there not. If they were we wouldn't buy games like Pro Evoultion Soccer every year...Or Jak 3...or Ratchet 3. Innovation's good, but it's overated.

  • GuiltySpark #10 6 years ago

    "Besides any DW fan knows Dynasty Warriors 4 was the worst of the series"

    WHAT?
    this game has fans?
    wow
    you learn something everyday
    its shit and boring
    just admit it

  • Kami #11 6 years ago

    Aysir, I HAVE the game. I did actually buy it - I'll confess that much. I also regret buying it, because it's almost exactly the same as DW4... and DW3...

    You act as if we're saying the game is bad, when we aren't. We're just royally fed up of the same freakin' rehash - the sequels you mentioned furthered the storylines and developed things. Dynasty Warriors is still set in the same warring era... we're just doing the same thing over and over. THAT is what we hate. This is a cash cow and Koei have milked it too much.

    I just want a game now which rewards skill and thought in a way Empires did, but I want that rewarded ON the battlefield, IN combat. DW requires no skill - once, I said I enjoyed the brainlessness of the DW series... but there comes a time you have to ask yourself how they get away with rehashing this stuff over and over...

    ... and as for narratives, gawd almighty... I gave up listening to that stuff. Was laughable for ALL the wrong reasons...

  • GuiltySpark #12 6 years ago

    erm
    im saying its bad!

  • Chtulie #13 6 years ago

    No mentioning of Spartan for comparison?

  • Aysir #14 6 years ago

    "WHAT?
    this game has fans? "
    Over a million actually. It always sells fantastically in Japan and doesn't do too badly over here in europe. Yup that's right despite the bitching and moaning that goes on in reviews and message boards people still enjoy this series.

    "Dynasty Warriors is still set in the same warring era..."
    In that respect I can see where your coming from. I don't agree mind, but I have a lot of friends that feel that way. However, fans of the series are also generally fans of the novel and enjoy seeing more of the characters and battles expanded on. Remember Koei made the Romace of the Three Kingdoms series and that's been going on for 10 iterations with the same story. The fans don't mind, in fact, it's what we want. When we want something different we'll go play Samurai Warriors or the upcoming Bladestorm.

    "because it's almost exactly the same as DW4... and DW3..."
    Only in as much as all Resident Evils (apart from 4) were the same or all Pro Evolution games were the same or all Tekken games are the same or all Street Fighter games are the same or all the Gran Turismo's were the same or .... it goes on.

    Dynasty Warriors brand of combat won't appeal to everyone. The sense of fun that comes with slaughtering masses of troops as you fufuill each battles objectives is a joy only some wil share. But nobody said everyone has to like it. It just deserves a better review than what was given here. IGN gave DW5 a mark lower than DW4 or DW3 because of the whole repitition issue, but they informed us at least that it is the perfect evolution of the series. They told us what was in it. Eurogamers review, months late as it is, seems to have little point, other than to bitch.

  • GuiltySpark #15 6 years ago

    i was talking the piss with the "this game has fans?" thing

    and resident evil doesnt count
    *thinks of a reason why*
    erm
    because its the best game ever?

  • Aysir #16 6 years ago

    "and resident evil doesnt count
    *thinks of a reason why*
    erm
    because its the best game ever? "
    Still can't tell if this is meant in sarcasm...
    but nonetheless I mentioned those games in a positive way. The resi series and all the other series I mentioned are all ace.

  • GuiltySpark #17 6 years ago

    damn right they are

    and dynasty warriors isnt that bad
    they just need to do a "resi 4" and kinda change it a bit

  • Aysir #18 6 years ago

    I agree. I'm certainly hoping Omega Forces Bladestorm title changes things a lot and not just the setting and characters (though medieval characters and weapons sounds cool)

  • bloodflowers #19 6 years ago

    I can understand the score (not what I would have given it though), but drawing comparisons with DMC and God Of War? They're not the same thing at all. May aswell say it's similar to Tomb Raider and Freedom Fighters too. Spartan is the only thing comparable.

    I always look forward to the new DW games - I treat them more like new level sets. While the main battles depicted have been used again and again, they're always done differently. That and I never, ever tire of killing things. I'm a very bitter person.

  • Dartagnon #20 6 years ago

    WoW this is kind of a late post.
    I just had a comment to make about the lot of you that think the game is just sitting around and bashing 2 buttons and the 'repetitive' fighting.
    Obviously you guys haven't played it on the hard difficulty, might i add that i haven't actually had the privilege in playing DW5 yet, but DW4's fighting is probably the samy, and i saw a huge difference in having to 'try' using hard difficulty as opposed to easy, where i can literally sit in the middle of a crowd and go take a shower, and come back and have 90% of my hit points still. (exaggerating of course)
    Basically, try playing it on Hard and see if you have the same opinion about it, im sure you'll use less hacking and slashing and more blocking and jumping.