Devil Kings Review

Devil Kings may well be a forgery but it’s certainly not faking it. To rub salt into angry-looking wounds, Capcom has taken the Koei’s long-running series and audaciously improved upon it at the first attempt. Now don’t get me wrong - if you’ve not shown the Dynasty Warriors games any love before then Devil Kings won’t fan the flames of your heart. Instead, it takes the source material and walks it down the bigger-better-more path that Capcom likes to call its own. The action is faster, the special moves are wilder, and the onscreen carnage is off the scale. Tapping the standard attack button is surprisingly effective - anyone within spitting distance will fall beneath your blade - but by combining this with your secondary attack (which ‘primes’ your enemies ready for the kill) you can supercharge your Fury Gauge and unleash a Fury Drive! This special move, aptly described in the game’s rolling demo as “ultra radical”, sees your character swirl around the screen, sucking up enemy soldiers and spitting out their lifeless bodies. It’s classic Capcom.

This has to be one of the worst cases of penis envy we’ve ever seen.

While many of the special moves and attack combos are completely over the top, the gameplay is actually more measured than in Dynasty Warriors. This is mainly thanks to the introduction of a guard move which you must use to block enemy attacks (and as an added bonus, if you block at exactly the right time, the attack will be returned to sender). In easy mode you can slaughter entire armies by bashing the attack buttons, but in normal and hard mode several direct hits will result in death, so you must play with far more caution. In fact, the difference between the easy and normal difficult levels is alarming at first, being more of a leap into the unknown than a step up. This will certainly test your revolve; possibly your patience too.

The game’s 18 stages are nicely structured, with new areas opening up as you fight your way through the enemy ranks, leading to a confrontation with a rival general. Sometimes you’ll be required to complete certain secondary objectives along the way, ensuring that the game never quite becomes just a mindless melee. That said, the more enemies you slay the more experience points you earn, which in turn can be used to level-up your character’s stats, so the emphasis is firmly on hack ’n’ slash.

The circus comes to town!

To stave off monotony, Capcom has introduced a combo system where attacks can be linked together for massive bonuses. Keeping an attack flowing for any length of time requires a surprising amount of skill and proves to be a fun mini-game in itself. After prolonged play I finally managed to reach the magic 1,000 hit marker, only to later discover on the web that some kid from Kyoto has already topped 11,000. Doesn’t he know that you’re supposed to take a 10-minute screen break every hour?

The only thing Dynasty Warriors has in its favour over Devil Kings is co-op gameplay. Quite why Capcom chose to forgo a multiplayer mode is baffling as it would have prolonged the game’s somewhat limited lifespan. Still, between the two competing titles Devil Kings comes out on top, bloodied and battered but victorious nonetheless.

I make no apologies for writing a comparison review rather than considering Devil Kings on its own merits, because let’s face it, if you’re still with me then you’re obviously a rabid fan of Dynasty Warriors and other games of this type. You’ve possibly even played Sengoku Basara, the original Japanese version of Devil Kings. If you have then you’ll be disappointed to learn that Capcom has made a real mess of the localisation.

Please feel free to discharge yourself.

Capcom is well known for its lazy PAL releases, going right back to the awful Street Fighter II on the SNES, but here it has gone to the other extreme in foolishly trying to westernise the game. Sengoku Basara is based in feudal Japan, like Koei's Samurai Warriors, while Devil Kings takes place in a purely fantasy universe. The names of the historical characters have been changed, lots of modern weapons have been added and several of the stages have even been altered to reflect the new made-up scenario. There are six less playable characters too (12 instead of the original 18), making this inferior to the Japanese original in almost every way.