Published by Jeremy on 2/20/2009 09:16:00 AM
I gave it a play last night. I must say it's a bit disappointing.It's a "Samurai Warriors" engine- large numbers of identical, easy-to-beat enemies that you hack through with swords. Which can work... but what made Samurai Warriors great is a hindrance. The Wii is a glorified Gamecube at the core, and doesn't have the power to control dozens of enemies on screen at a time to give the "oh shit mob" effect the SW games did. You end up with an unimpressive number of enemies, and the graphics turned down so low you're more likely to be ripped apart by the jagged edges than the zombies.
It relies heavily on the "barriers appear to trap you in a zone till you kill everything" method, and has an annoying power-up mode that activates automatically and actually kills you as you use it. If you don't have an item to stop it, or can get to one of the few save points in time, you die.
Very limited number of attacks, as it uses the Wiimote to control sword swings. But it only has one swing- a vertical waggle of the wii. No changing up between vertical, horizontal, or lunging movements. Your one sword move is controlled by how many times you swing the remote up and down. There are a limited number of secondary attacks available using the other hand, but they're generally weak or annoying- you end up just sticking with the sword.
Got bored within a half-an-hour. Popped in Chocobo's Dungeon instead. Why? Because I'm a Final Fantasy whore. It's an overly-cutesy game with big, bright, cartoony graphics and voice acting on-par with the Dragon Ball Z dub. I figured with the graphics it was kind of like Dungeon Crawler Light, or an RPG aimed towards kids. If it is a kid's game, apparently the Japanese hate children.It's basically a 3-D version of the old DOS game "Rogue." (Or NetHack, or Moria, or whichever one you remember where you move around a grid- you make one move, the enemy takes one move, etc.) The story line is average so far, but not the worst I've seen, and the gameplay is the old dungeon crawl. Maps are generated at random, so sometimes you appear in a dungeon standing right next to the stairs leading down to the next level. Other times you get gangraped by a room full of nasty. Repeat for 40+ hours.
I'm going to get Deadly Creatures next. It's got surprisingly good reviews for a game who's premise is about as simple and pure as "Snakes on a Plane."Apparently you play as a spider. Or a scorpion. And you wander around down kicking random other creature's asses, because that's what pissed off venomous arachnids do for fun.
