Warriors Orochi 2

Primordial slush

Koei are certainly not ones to look money-spinning gift horses in the mouth and they've taken the time over the last decade or so to ensure they wring every last possible penny from the increasingly old fashioned hack and slash template behind their 'Warriors' games. With six games so far in the Dynasty franchise (those old enough may remember it started life as a traditional one on one beat-em up), three from the Samurai line and now this, the second in the franchise blending the Orochi saga you'd be forgiven for thinking the aforementioned template would be honed into something magical eleven games in. You'd be wrong of course, but at least you'd be forgiven for thinking it.

The first Orochi game attempted to fudge history and bring together characters from the Dynasty Warriors (third century China) and Samurai Warriors (16th century Japan), games using the old rift in time and space opened by nasty evil Serpent King idea to get round the thirteen hundred years of pesky reality between the two series. Now, in the sequel, the brave new world created by said rift hasn't improved much since the defeat of Orochi with his henchmen leading various warring factions and a plot to raise the main man himself from the dead also underway making it generally a nasty place to holiday.

What this means in practice is that you get a grand total of five different story modes (one each for the three Chinese kingdoms, one for the Japanese and one for Orochi's men) all of which are presented horribly and all of which involve exactly the same mindless gameplay simply with different characters.

The action itself takes place on massive open battlefields, which actually sounds quite impressive now I come to write it, but trust me when I say massive battlefields what I mean are large empty expanses of game world complete with woefully short draw distances, invisible walls aplenty and barely a scenic feature to be found. The conditions of victory in each battle tend to centre on each side's Captains, kill theirs and you win, lose yours and, well, you lose. You get to choose which three of the games 4257 characters (okay, so it's 92 but really, who cares) you want to venture forth with, not that you can have all three in the battle at once mind you, instead you get to switch between them at a touch of a button tag team-style with the unused characters recovering health while they rest. This is clearly supposed to allow for some 'tactics' based around the characters' strengths and weaknesses but in reality just means you pretty much play them on rotate, recharging them all in turn.

Silly character swapping aside the central 'one against many' combat that the two franchises survive on has obvious possibilities for fun; who doesn't like the sound of wading through huge armies as a whirling dervish of death after all? However, almost inevitably, these are possibilities that Orochi 2 fails to fulfil on every level. It's a button-basher in every negative sense of the phrase, whole levels can be completed with little or no skill bar patience and playing with your eyes shut barely hampers your progress. Taking the idea of hack and slash combat to its most boring extreme the game essentially involves nothing more than running towards a group of identikit enemies and mashing your attack buttons until they all die before moving onto the next lot who have helpfully stood around waiting a few yards ahead. Yeah, okay, so the enemies you face vary a tad and you've got different attacks mapped to different buttons including special moves and combos to pull off but really, if we're honest, any pretence of depth here is simple misdirection offered up to try and hide the galling simplicity and laziness of the combat.

Things aren't helped by some of the worst AI seen in many a year. Not only do enemies fail to even try and make their numerical advantage work for them, they often don't bother to attack you at all preferring to gather politely around you while you swat them to death in your own time. This absence of challenge manages only to highlight the already repetitive nature of the gameplay as you plough through wave after wave of enemies with no effort at all.

As an experience it's simply not fun; in fact worse than that, it's boring. Bad games can sometimes still be entertaining in their own way; sadly Orochi 2 is bereft of even that saving grace. There's weapon and special moves to upgrade, experience points to earn and various modes to allow you new ways of experiencing the same dullness with all kinds of character and battleground combinations but none of it makes any difference, it never gets any better.

It's not even all held together with a decent graphics engine to distract you, in fact it's held together with ten year old sticky back plastic and some toilet rolls by the look of it. We're talking the very worst kind of PS2 era graphics given a HD makeover that somehow actually makes them look worse. The story, in all its nonsensical glory, is told via the wonder of static images and text that, along with all the game's dialogue, seems to have been written by a six year old and voiced by the least charismatic actors they could find.

There's obviously a market out there for this kind of thing. Both parent series have been around a while and the first Orochi games was, one assumes, financially successful enough to warrant a sequel. That the appeal of it all passes me by is, to a degree, perhaps a fault of mine as on some levels, no doubt hardcore fans (of which there are surely many) will feel I've missed some subtlety or other along the way. However, as hard as I try there's really nothing good I can find to say about Warriors Orochi 2. Its already simplistic gameplay becomes mind numbingly repetitive after a few minutes, it looks like a high resolution version of a first generation PS2 game and has some of the worst dialogue ever written delivered by a cast of actors so bad it stops being even accidentally entertaining painfully quickly.

Even if the Warriors sagas are your 'thing' then this release is still of questionable value given that you've probably already played the incredibly similar original. For fans unable to wait any longer for their next fix I imagine there's a similar amount of pleasure to be eked from this as from others in the series. Personally I get a similar amount of pleasure from cleaning the oven or mowing the lawn, both of which I can do for free and both of which provide some tangible benefit when I'm done rather than just making my thumbs hurt.

35%

By Paul Newcombe