Let us start with a short history lesson. Sometime during the late 1920s, Koei created a monster, and its name was Dynasty Warriors. It was an uninspiring one-on-one fighter in the Tekken mould, destined to disappear into the annals of time. That is, of course, until Koei released a sequel; the first in the very, very long line of hack-‘n’-slash misery-’em-ups that have decorated console release schedules for what seems an eternity.

We’ve had Warriors games where you can ride elephants, we’ve had ones that have featured pointy horses, others that have different hat types… there’s even one with good graphics. Oh no, that was Halo. Now, the latest Warriors fashion, sadly, is strategy. Yes, just like Dynasty Warriors 5 Empires before it, this latest Samurai Warriors is a strategy game. Damn.

As if the indignity of slashing through hordes of low-poly identikit non-player chumps wasn’t bad enough, Samurai Warriors 2 Empires dresses up its hideous action with a turgid and utterly confounding strategic front end. Imagine Risk if it had been designed by a deranged child and you’ll begin to get the idea. Essentially, you’re asked to select a region of feudal Japan to rule over and from there you can invade neighbouring provinces. Sounds thrilling, right? It isn’t.

As well as bothering your surrounding warlords, you can recruit new soldiers, farm your land and toy with the tax system. In a game like Civilisation or Age Of Empires, these sorts of options are welcome – they genuinely impact play and form the basis of the whole experience. In Samurai Warriors, though, it matters so little what you do because really it all just amounts to the same thing. Hitting idiot soldiers in the face with boring combos ad infinitum. Who cares if they’re playing less tax? They’re idiots! No doubt they’d only end up spending their money on lottery tickets and candy floss anyway!

So, when presented with this garish slide show of map screens and menus, the reaction is always the same – you can literally feel the fun being sucked from your body. Your eyes begin to glaze over, your lungs get heavier. None of the menus make sense without first consulting the instructions, and even then, they are worded so obliquely thatit’s never particularly clear what your actions will achieve. After compiling your army of generals and lieutenants and identifying your goal (find, kill, stand, turn off your 360), you’re free to enter the battlefield.

And, of course, it’s very familiar territory. As always, Samurai Warriors is a vulgar representation of conflict, with terrible draw distance, stupid characters and amazingly poor graphics. Back in the last generation these shortcomings could be forgiven; after all, the Warriors games have always prided themselves on the amount of characters they could cram on screen – it’s a crowd management brawler. On Xbox 360 though, the console that lays host to the likes of Dead Rising, the woeful production values evident in Empires are an absolute insult to the next generation.

The aforementioned draw distance, for example. How, on a machine that has given us Crackdown – a game where you can see all the way to the horizon in any direction from any point of the map – can Koei produce a game that draws in its scenery mere feet away from its protagonist? It’s not like the processor is being overloaded with data – the 360 doesn’t tend to have too much trouble drawing in a handful of morons to arbitrarily stroll around the environment, so the blame has to be laid at the door of the developers.

You see, Samurai Warriors 2, and the Warriors franchise as a whole, has stopped progressing to the point where it’s almost going backwards. We don’t want a half-baked representation of conflict where our imagination has to fill in the gaps, we just want conflict. Visceral, engaging, enthralling conflict. In the right hands, the 360 could play host to a truly incredible Feudal Japanese theatre, but if people keep buying Warriors then there’s no reason for Koei to change.

Yes, despite the barest of barebones combat – it hasn’t changed from Dynasty Warriors 2’s repugnant hack-‘n’- slash – horrendous visuals and the single most annoying selection of voiceovers outside of Fuzion Frenzy 2, there’s still a huge market out there for these truly awful videogames. Who is buying them? Why are they buying them? And what can we do to stop it?

X360 is here to make a stand. We implore you, our loyal and intelligent readers, to vote with your wallets. Stay away from Samurai Warriors 2 Empires. Buy Crackdown. Buy Viva Piñata. Hell, just buy Heavy Weapon for everyone you know. Anything but this. This a game stuck in a time warp – a cynically produced, ugly, boring and miserable piece of digital trash that takes up space on the shelves where greater titles should sit. Do the right thing, readers. Do the right thing.

Jon Denton