Dynasty Warriors 5 Preview

The Dynasty Warriors series has been a long-standing staple on current generation consoles. The fifth entry to the series hit PS2’s earlier this year, offering a plethora of new playable characters and larger battlefields over its predecessor. Now, Dynasty Warriors 5 is gearing up for its release this fall on the XBox, and the results are shaping up nicely. While this version won’t differ too much from its PS2 older brother (it will feature Dolby Digital 5.1 surround and the original Japanese voiceovers), it will still be a fun and exciting endeavor that Xbox gamers will enjoy if they’ve been fans of the series.

The basic thought behind the Dynasty Warriors franchise is that it puts you smack dab in the middle of huge-scale battles, playing as a true person from Chinese history as you lay the hammer down on hundreds of enemy soldiers. It sounds pretty simple, but it does require some degree of strategizing and thought to progress through the game.

In Dynasty Warriors 5, you can perform combos, pick up power-ups and ride horses across the battlefield to complete certain goals and skew the clash in your favor. Dynasty Warriors 5 keeps in line with the principles of the series, not really innovating much, but definitely building upon the series’ beloved gameplay and giving fans more of what they want with larger battles, more onscreen enemies and more playable characters.

The game moves pretty fast and intensely, but the controls do a fine job of keeping up, especially on the XBox. Your character can switch between melee weaponry and a bow with a tap of the trigger, and performing intricate combos becomes second nature before too long. One problem that I personally had with the controls, however, was the fact that you couldn’t control the camera angles, which did get a little awkward at times. It would’ve made the gameplay a bit more fluid if you could manually adjust the camera with the right analog stick, but hey, that’s just my opinion.

The series’ staple butt-rock power anthems are in place, which you will either love or hate. Personally, I enjoy a good wailing ninja guitar solo when I’m beating down a grunt soldier with an axe in medieval China, so I’ve never had much of an issue with the music of the series. But I will acknowledge that there are some haters out there, so know that if you haven’t been a fan of the franchise’s score, Dynasty Warriors 5 won’t do much to change your mind.

Graphically, the game is a nice improvement over prior entries, with longer draw-in distances and less fog, as well as cleaner textures and framerates given the power of the Xbox. The character models are also well represented and the environments look pretty good. 

Dynasty Warriors 5 is a good entry to the series, giving fans more of what they want and coming out of the corner bigger, better and badder. However, the Xbox version won’t offer much in the way of change from the PS2 version, so if you’ve already picked that one up, you won’t find much of a reason to get this one when it hits next month.