Recent reviews by SirHenryMOFO

Surprised at how good it is. Best visual novel

Best simulator game so far.

TLDR: This is a shoddy, unoptimized, buggy game that was rushed out. Insulting to fans of this series.

I'm a hardcore Dynasty Warriors Fanboy. I loved DW4,5, and especially 8. I tolerated 6 enough, and never really played 7(due to the clones). So when they announced 9 would be open world, I was a little bit skeptical of the game. Even though I'm an open world addict, I imagined that Koei would make the world a giant version of the in game camps.

First off the game runs terribly. I got it to run a little above 30 FPS pretty stable on medium 1080P due to having dual xeons, an over clocked GTX 970, and 32 gbs of ram. It still chugs in battle fields and does not look pretty. At least we have better performance than consoles. PC MASTER RACE BABY! Surpirsing for Koei's track reccord on the PC actually.

You'll need an Xbox Controller. The game is even worst than DW8 XL at button prompts and automatically assumes you have an Xbox One controller. Now I have always used a 360 controller and used the keyboard controllers sparingly. But here, the keyboard controls are almost unplayable. It feels REALLY REALLY clunky. And REALLY REALLY BAD.

Also the English Voice Acting is so bad, they might as well not even had a dub. Zhou Tai went from being a badass to a dork. Xu Zhu, who always sounds like a cheerful Winnie the Pooh character now sounds like he flunked out of special ed class. Zhen Ji is a Jewish American Princess with that nasally voice. I would be more OK with this if they let us use the Mandarin Dub like PS4 or Xbone. But NOOOOOO, they deliberately patch it out instead. No more pretending it is an ancient Chinese Drama anymore. At least Xiaoqiao still sounds cute in Japanese.

New Combat System feels dumbed down funny enough. You have your standard S Strings, but none of the Weak-Strong Chains from previous games. Instead they change based off the status of an enemy, which you can do by holding R1 and pressing a face button. I end up just stunning them, launching them into the air , and hitting them off the ground in that cycle over and over until the instakill button shows up. This system actually feels more repetitive to me, but maybe I need to unlock the ability to jump cancel and abuse attack speed boosting gems. So far I'm not impressed and I resort to sneaky arrows on bases just so I don't have to do combat.

No more big scripted battle. This game is just doing small skirmishes and watching your allies run to the next skirmish. No fun epic battles like before. Not even Lu Bu felt epic once you realized Hu Lao gate was just another small side mission.

Open World is where they put their heart at and it shows. I think the whole map was rendered with alot of love. It just doesn't looke gorgeous enough because a lack of optimization. And lack on NPCs in some cities hurts the immersion factor. Animals randomly spawn and just stand there like a group of vegtable. The AI is really insulting for these guys. I once found a bunch of wolves stuck in a mountain. In fact the spawning is ridiculous. A horde of hundreds of bandits just slid down an unclimbable mountain once. Other than that there is nothing really to do but explore. Side quests are the same few things that feel extremely repetitive after the fourth time. There are only so many time you can kill the same bandits before it gets boring.

At least it is easy to farm for good times when fishing. Fishing is a chore where you wait before mashing a button, but at least it does not feel grindy.

Clones are a disgrace. They declawed Zhang He. Sun Ce lost his Tonfas. Have they not learned from 6? Also why the bloody devil is Zhang Fei a clone of Zhao Yun in a fat suit? Why do three out of five tiger generals clones of each other?

If you treat this game as a open world RPG, it is passable. It has alot of potential and the Three Kingdoms is a great setting. This would be a great Empires game if you could command your troops and gradually watch the conquest of the entire map. Right now AI is bugged and your allies just watch you beat up mooks.

Overall shame on Koei. I bought this game and took 2 free Steelbooks from Gamestop just to show I support them. And I am not impressed with this rushed job of a game. I do like the Steelbooks though, so if ever get a chance, ask Gamestop for one. I know alot of people never picked up their pre orders after hearing about this game. IF you do get a steelbook put DW8 XL in it. That is a much better game.

These girls look great in their ancient Chinese underwear. I don't know if I would spend money on this though.

Still a great game after all these years.