Samurai Warriors 2 Empires review (Xbox 360)

Feudal Japan was a treacherous place, warlords invading each others regions, stabbing each other in the back just to expand their territory. Samurai giving and taking away their loyalty depending on whose got the bigger forces, if you were a warlord back then you’d have to watch your back and always have a plan on the go to keep yourself ahead of the game.

Until time travel is invented there’s not much chance of that happening though, but if you really fancy it the next best thing is to pick up a copy of Samurai Warriors 2 Empires and live your dream of commanding an army of Samurai in a virtual world.

Turning Japanese?

When you stick the disk in your 360 you’ll find the game is a mixture of turn based strategy and action. The strategy side of things is pretty comprehensive, there’s plenty of options at your disposal for building your armies, recruiting generals and lieutenants, managing battle strategies and formations, everything you need to manage your warring forces. But war is an expensive business, so you’ll have to make sure you keep your coffers topped up, this can be done by a number of means. You can tax the people, but it’s not a good idea to do it too often or you could end up with a revolution on your hands. And if you fall out of favour with your subjects then who is going to mine the gold and farm the fields, you need to keep the people sweet if you want to keep your armies battle ready. Every turn you’ll get a certain amount of orders you can dish out, the more territory you control the more orders you can make, and you can either use one order to do one thing, recruit soldiers, build armaments, mine gold, or you can consult one of your generals. The advantage of consulting a general over a standard order is that it’s like a buy one get one free, each of your generals will give you two suggestions to use, they may not be exactly what you wanted to do, but if you’ve suffered a defeat and want to rebuild your forces as soon as possible the extra orders do come in handy.

Bash that button

After you’ve handed out your orders then it’s on to the action, you can chose a neighbouring territory to invade, or if one is attacking you you’ll have to defend it if you want to keep hold of it. This is done on the battlefield, each region has its own map with a network of bases which you have to capture to win the battle. This is done from a third person perspective and is a pretty standard hack and slash affair, but with only two buttons for attacks, one of which takes some charging up, you’ll be spending most of the time hammering the same button over and over. You have computer controlled troops to back you up, but their AI is not particularly good, and you’ll also have some lieutenants to control via a map too to cover your bases, but like the troops the AI isn’t the best so you’ll have to carry most off the battle yourself. It’s all a bit repetitive really, run from base to base, repeatedly hit the same button for a couple of minutes and repeat until you get to the enemies main base. It’s a shame really, as a strategy game it is let down by the action sections and people looking for an action game will find the action as dull as the strategy parts.

Attack of the clones

Seeing as a good portion of the game is just menus and maps the action parts of the game are the one chance the game has to make use of the 360s high definition graphics, but unfortunately not much effort has been put in to the visuals. Despite the high definition output of the console all we get is a straight port of the PlayStation 2 version, that’s not to say that they are bad, but they could have been improved greatly. It’s not just the graphics themselves that are a bit of a let down though, there is almost as much repetition in the character models as the games button bashing gameplay. Fair enough with the troops, you expect an army to all pretty much look alike, but the samurai that make up the games generals and lieutenants don’t have much variation either. According to the blurb on the back of the box the game has four hundred samurai characters, but on the battlefield you’ll keep encountering the same ones over and over. Their names may be different, and maybe their clothes have a different colour, but their can’t be more than a couple of dozen character models between them.

Americans in Japan

The audio side of the game's presentation is more of a mixed bag than the games visuals, whilst the sound effects are passable and there is a good range of tunes the voice acting ranges from the passable to absolutely cringe worthy. Obviously they are going to change the language from Japanese to English, but couldn’t they have got some Japanese actors to do the voice work, it just doesn’t sound right having a samurai talking like some surfer dude. That’s a worse case scenario, but when they’ve obviously gone for historical authenticity in the other departments it doesn’t help that the characters don’t even sound like they’ve visited Japan. It could be worse though the game could have some multiplayer options and you could be cringing through the cheesy dialogue friends. But the game is seriously lacking in the multiplayer department, theirs is no versus mode, only a co-op mode, not even online, just split screen. It’s a shame because a competitive mode could have alleviated a bit of the monotony of the games actions sections if you were playing against a friend instead of the all too predictable AI.

Not a good mix

It’s very hard to recommend this game, not only do the combination of strategy and button mashing not sit well together, but the game is exactly the same as the PlayStation 2 version. If you have an interest in Japanese history it might be worth picking up, but if you have access to a PS2 you would be better off going with that version and saving yourself a bit of money.