Samurai Warriors: Katana review (Wii)

Way back when I started reviewing for Boomtown, I made two promises. One was that I would make a point of spending as much time as possible with a game before reviewing it, to give you guys a fair view of the title in question. The second promise was one to myself – I would never play another Dynasty Warriors title. I reviewed DW 4: Hyper for the PC and found it to be horrible in every way. Samurai Warriors: Katana is a Dynasty Warriors title in disguise, and it made me break two promises, nasty thing that it is.

Say Hello, Wave Goodbye

The basic premise of the Wii game is the same as all the other DW games – battling warlords; you’re working for one of them; help him conquer everyone else. As before, this involves wading through wave upon wave of identical bad guys with relative ease before you meet a commander. Learn their pattern, defeat them, do more of the same. As with DW, in battle you build up your Miso soup meter until you can lay some serious damage on a whole screen full of enemies at the same time in a charged attack of doom. Bosses can block this, of course, which makes using it strategic. Or something. Meh…

There’s a pseudo-rpg element where things stumbled across on the battlefield grant you coinage or weapons or whatever, but it’s not vastly interesting and upgrading doesn’t feel like it affects anything (though buying rice balls helps you not die in combat). It doesn’t help that, early on certainly, you can only upgrade a weapon once. By 5%. In one stat. Woot… You get different weapons as you go, including ranged weapons like the bow or musket, and then the wretched game shows its true colours even more clearly.

Ancient Transit Systems, Ancient Gameplay

SW:K is, at heart, a lightgun game, and an on-rails one to the greater extent. You can prod nearby enemy with the A button or, later, shoot them with your bow on the B button. However, the main method of dispatch is the sword slash. The game wants you to be impressed with its sword mechanics, but you’ll generally only feel frustrated and hard done by seeing as they don’t actually work.

I took this game in to work to torture a guy there who’d been playing the recent Dynasty Warriors release on the 360. I was impressed to see that it looked very like the PC release I’d hated, and enjoyed the fact that my colleague hated the 360 version too. Leaving him to get stuck in, I went off to make tea. I came back to see my mate having a chat with someone else while vaguely waving the remote at the screen. I swear that, without looking up even once from the conversation, he cleared the entire first stage right up to the boss.

Boss encounters are only marginally better, requiring you to learn their patterns of attack, and where their hugely labelled vulnerables are, and then smack them down. Adding to the lightgun feel, this is usually done with a targeted prod or a ranged shot rather than a sword slash. The whole process would be easier if it weren’t so deeply, stupidly dull. Much like my colleague, you’ll stop caring very quickly, put off by the nasty presentation, uninspiring graphics, horrible, horrible, horrible sounds and voice sampling, and lacklustre controls.

Broken Promises

I have to hold my hand up and say that I got stuck on SW:K only halfway through the second chunk of the game – I suppose it was the second campaign, but I wasn’t paying attention to the cursory plot so don’t know for sure. I’d reached a bit where I had to defeat a mid-level boss as quickly as possible then, in a tribute to Mario & Sonic At The Olympics, wave the ‘chuck and remote as fast as possible to sprint madly to meet my ‘owner’, then defeat the actual end of level boss.

I missed some subtlety of doing things quickly (you can’t make actual sword swipes with the remote, just sharp little jerks, if you want to nail the guys on screen in any kind of good time), kept reaching my boss too late, and then the last bad guy kept handing me my head. This was partly because I was chuckling at the fact the guy was using a European lance to beat me with, but largely because I’d just stopped caring. Still, the lance was better than the firework-filled football another guy used…

No Flies On Me!

Sorry about that, dear reader. I’d have liked to be able to say more about the later stages of the game, but I can’t. I’m sure that, as with last time, some Dynasty Warriors apologist will weigh in and point out that I suck and that his big brother is going to give me a kicking, but I don’t care. I don’t want to play this game anymore, and I can unreservedly suggest you don’t play it either. Go swat flies instead – you use the same motions and will achieve more satisfactory results.