Once Upon a Time in China...
Where to begin? This game is excellent, but it has it's faults. The greatest thing about this game is, naturally, being able to take a one-man army (or one-woman army) into historical battlefields in China during the Three Kingdoms period and being able to change the entire course of the battle through your actions. This, of course, means lots of killing one guy and his 10,000,000 clone brothers. I cannot comprehend how this is so boring to me and yet so addictive and fun. I personally feel compelled to play through with each character, level up their weapons all the way, unlock all of their costumes, all the equipable items, harnesses, and orbs, and discover every unlockable single level. This game is ADDICTIVE, yet has some important flaws.
Flaw-wise (if there is such a word), this game, like the previous installments, has the same type of gameplay, which, mind you, is fine as long as they make improvements on the flow of the gameplay. I'll be honest- I have not played DW2 or DW3, but I have played DW5 and I personally liked DW4 better. However, DW4 has a smaller scale battlefield- which makes getting around easier since the player-controlled character determines how the battle goes. Also, DW5 differs in that each character has a story, which determines which battles they participate in, and it also provides perspective from each character (if you care about story in a game about wiping out thousands of soldiers with one guy/gal). Other than that DW4 has pretty good graphics (I'd say on par with Devil May Cry, if you can compare those in terms of graphics), but the game does slow down if there are too many soldiers on the screen, which happens often, but not often enough to lessen the experience. If anything, the lag is welcome if you find yourself surrounded by enemies and you need a "Matrix" moment to regain control of battle. The music is a rock/metal mix, and it does wear on the nerves if you play it alot. One more bad point is the character creation mode- it only offers you three choices for four categories: 3 for head, 3 for chest, 3 for torso, 3 for leg guards. Plus, you only have a choice of around 12-14 different weapons modeled after the original characters. This needed improvement, but was scrapped in DW5.
On the up-side, the gameplay is solid, the character selection is wide (40+), stage selection is wide (50+), and the voice acting is actually pretty good despite some being very annoying, and some having questionability (How come Jiang Wei has a Chinese accent and no one else does?!). Other than that, no complaints. The real attraction to this game is definitely REPLAY VALUE- this game has lots of characters with lots of weapons, lots of unlockables, lots of stages, and lots of stories (even if they are historically inaccurate, WHO CARES?!).
Bottom line: Play this game if you like having the opportunity to play many characters, play many different stages... alot, and kill many of the same soldier. If you hate repetitiveness, then this game will get old fast. I recommend that you rent it first (if possible), then make the purchase if you like it.Read full review
