It’s always been a hard sell to the Western gamer. As many a copy as this series sells in the East, we just don’t get the point of its existence. Don’t worry, we’re not about to explain to you why you should, because as much as Dynasty Warriors 6 attempts to apply both an action RPG and an RTS framework to the game’s structure, neither smoke nor mirrors can disguise the fact that this is about as bad as games get, without crippling bugs.

The cardinal sins of any game are frustration and repetition. While the latter can be acceptable in racing games and the like, generally neither has a right to be anywhere near your console. Riding on the back of Dynasty Warriors 6 comes both evils in almost biblical quantities. Gone are the days when having a thousand enemies on the screen impressed anyone. Gone are the days when hitting the same button 100,000 times in a row could be referred to as ‘gameplay’ and thank Lord Crikey that gone are the days when it was acceptable to include hour-long levels of thumb-aching tedium.

The problem with Dynasty Warriors is that with each outing, the developer seems to think that adding arbitrary and ineffectual bells and whistles is what the gamer really wants. We’re the gamer. And what we really want is to play something else. Any series that comes around every year or so suffers from diminishing returns from its initial ideas and innovation, with only the very best yearlings managing to justify their existence. Here, new features boil down to a couple of additional attack options, a Final Fantasy-style skill board on which you move a counter around to spend XP, and a slightly more dynamic battlefield. It still boils down to herds of mindless skittles either standing around waiting to be knocked down, or swaying slightly to show that while lobotomised, they are at least alive. Collectively known as an ‘inevitability’ of Dynasty Warriors peons, these guys will pour out at you in their hundreds, and slapping the X or Y-button a few times will see them turn tail and leg it. Unless of course it’s an officer or one of the many historic generals that appear; you can tell who these are not only by the excellent names they have, like Kong Rong and Bang Wang, but also by the slightly longer than average health bar they sport above their heads. As joyless as this all sounds, we know that this series has its fans and no matter what we say to those people, they’ve probably already bought it anyway. If, that is, they found the time to get away from their other hobbies… like anvil-staring. They’ll have already checked the score and jogged on, so now they’re not listening let’s move onto the gameplay.

The first level takes part in some snowy hills in which you’ll have to randomly mash the weapon of whichever of the three initially selectable warriors you’ve chosen. The first thing you’ll notice is the inappropriate music. Moving from the ludicrously frantic Jmetal dirge of the menu screens, the level opens with a rather pretty cutscene. Warriors dressed in epic clobber exchange the odd good luck and farewell and ‘Ooh, isn’t whatshisname an evil so and so’. It would serve to bring you into the world of its ancient Chinese setting, were it not for the hard-rock power-ballad being strummed out so loud as to drown out the dialogue. Whatever happened to emotive twanging from traditional Chinese instruments like the guqin or guzheng? Instead our ears are assaulted and all sense of atmosphere lost. Having then spent the best part of an hour getting to the top of the castle, Lu Bu shows up and kills us instantly. Remember when we said that your thumbs are actually going to hurt? We’d just like to say that again; your thumbs will bloody well hurt. Back we go to our last save, having played one hour of one level and already wishing a colleague would arrive to saw a leg off to take our minds off it. Three attempts later and it was time to drop the pad and try another day.

Despite an improvement in the draw distances and ‘HD-ness’, nothing has been done to this series to significantly improve the visuals since its PS2 days. And while it’s always nice to finish on a positive, to be frank the only one we can think of is that if there are people out there who actually get pleasure from this, then the game at least acts as a social service to the terminally deranged in keeping them indoors and away from the normal people.

Dan Howdle