Conquering China
Strikeforce is a third person action game where players choose between one of three ancient Chinese factions. The goal is to conquer all of China through force. Each faction has about ten Officers to choose from that give players a nice variety of character types to play. All told, there are over forty playable characters. You will choose one character to start with, but as you play through the campaign, you have the ability to switch between characters before a mission starts (unfortunately, not during a mission). Characters vary by name, appearance, weapon proficiency, HP levels, and so forth, and all of this information is nicely presented to you (along with a brief bio) as you make your choice.
After selecting and naming your character, the game begins in the City. Here, you’ll find nine facilities including an Academy, Blacksmith, Market, Storehouse, Mission Bulletin Board, Workshop, Exchange, Shrine, and Gatekeeper. Think of the the City is the hub in between missions. Facilities like the Academy, Blacksmith, Market, and Workshop require a mixture of Gold and Items to utilize. At the Academy, players can trade in Items like Earth Stones and Malachite for new Chi abilities. There are a variety of Chi abilities that players can equip in the pre-battle screen. Chi abilities allow you to do things like jump higher or dash farther, or recover from a knockdown faster. At the Workshop, players can purchase enhancements for their weapons such as increasing its effective range or increasing the chance that slain enemies will drop health items, for example. The Blacksmith can strengthen and build new weapons, while the Market is the place to go to buy and sell goods like Elixirs and various Stones. All of these facilities allow players to customize their character to their liking. That’s one of the best parts about online co-op play: being able to see other’s customized characters, and even trade them.
During battle, players will pick up various items that are all sent to the Storehouse for later use. In the City, you can view what goods you have in the Storehouse and can then also use them at the Exchange, in combat, or sell them at the Market. The Mission Bulletin Board is where you will find optional missions, while the Gatekeeper provides story-advancing missions. Finally, the Shrine is where you go to switch to another Officer once you have unlocked them in the story.
Whether you take on a side mission from the City Bulletin Board or embark on a story mission from the Gatekeeper, the pre-battle screen is always the same. Here, players will want to spent a few moments going over the objectives and preparing their character. You’ll want to pick the right Chi abilities, primary and secondary weapons, and Items to carry with you to get the job done. Under Tactics, you can place Officer Cards that are given to you by NPCs in the City on different areas of the battleground. At first I found this aspect to be a little confusing, but the idea is that each battleground is split into zones. These zones, and the battleground map itself, are viewable in the pre-battle screen. For each zone, you can use an Officer Card. While in this zone, the attack ability of the weapon category corresponding to the Officer Card will increase. Up to four cards can be set for a given battleground.
When you’re all set, the game drops you into the battle. Each mission has clear objectives and criteria for victory and defeat, and there is usually at least one optional bonus objective that nets you an additional reward upon completion.
In Combat
When not in the City or at the pre-battle screen, you are in battle. For anyone who has played any Dynasty Warriors
game before, even just a little, this will be very familiar. The goal is to get from the start point to the objective, which generally means opening up a few gates and going through several zones along the way. A very useful map complete with icons is situated in the upper right corner of your HUD. Without the map, it’d be easy to get lost, but even with the map, knowing that the entrance to the next zone is above or below you can sometimes be confusing. Other notable icons on the map include enemy Officers and objectives, as well as the light blue walls that separate one zone from another. Approaching these takes you out of your current zone, to a brief load screen, and then into the next area. Enemies from one zone do not traverse into another, but you’ll never run short of enemies in Dynasty Warriors. It’s not uncommon to have fifty or sixty enemies on screen at once, most of them looking exactly the same as one another and all eager to attack you. This is a staple of the series, and while it does make for some cool “one versus many” moments, it also gets repetitive and fatiguing. Fortunately, your CPU controlled allies do a lot to keep these ‘throw away’ enemies off of you, leaving you to focus at least a little more on what you want to specifically do (like attack an Officer or locate an objective).
Battles are usually littered with enemy infantry, sorcerers, and weaponry. Fortunately, the CPU AI are capable of dishing out a lot of damage and more than a few times they actually defeated the final Officer during a mission rather than me. This wasn’t by coincidence though, as I actually assigned them to attack the Officer by using the command function. Commanding AI in Strikeforce is convenient, fast, and it works. By holding down L2, a command window appears with a face button bound to one of four categories including infantry, Officers, and weaponry. By pressing the corresponding face button, your AI will attack the category of enemy that you instruct them to. Or, you can just press R3 and have them fight along side you.
With so many enemies on screen at once, it’s nice to be able to use targeting. It can help you identify enemy Officer whereabouts on screen and the targeting icon will change colors to indicate how effective your currently equipped weapon is against the targeted foe. That’s nice and all, but the target lock system causes a lot of camera headaches, so I ultimately didn’t use it much. The camera has enough problems on its own without the targeting system creating more of them.
In addition to target lock, there is a renewed focus on aerial combat in Strikeforce. Players can jump high and execute a lot of attacks while in air. Chi Abilities further increase jumping and dashing abilities that help players navigate large mountains and wide gaps, in addition to increasing combat options.
Also new with Strikeforce is Fury. Fury actually replaces the Musou feature from previous Dynasty Warriors games. A meter situated in the lower left of the HUD below your health meter fills up as you give and receive damage. Once full, players can simply tap Circle and enter Fury mode, which changes the appearance of their character and makes them faster and gives them the ability to fly. Pressing Circle again while in Fury unleashes a powerful attack that’s great against Officers. Players can further upgrade Fury abilities with items and goodies from the City.
Enemy Officers can enter Fury as well but also have an ability known as a Hyperbreak. When in Hyperbreak, enemy Officers are more dangerous but will also drop an item after their Hyperness settles down. To get them out of Hyper mode, each character must perform some attacks on the Officer. So, you will see up to four colored meters next to the Officers health meter, with each color representing one of your four Officers. The meter is small, but it promotes teamwork and I think it’s a sensible addition to the gameplay.
Online Play, Presentation
I’ve spent a while in online play to this point, and overall I’ve enjoyed the experience. Online play includes both cooperative and versus modes. Cooperative is by far the more satisfying and I’ve found to be the more common of the two. In it, up to four players can take on a mission. The variety of customized characters you’ll encounter is really cool. Once the mission begins, things get rather chaotic and it’s easy for team members to just separate and go their own way, but whenever a group works together the effect is something pretty special. Not only is it more fun to work together but as players defeat Officers, orbs are released to nearby players, so everyone benefits (orbs are used at the Workshop). Additionally, certain Chi Abilities are meant to benefit the whole team (like area healing) so again it’s best to stick together. Tackling some of the game’s bigger bosses and missions is a lot easier, as you might expect, with online play. Whenever you complete a mission online, it’s completed in your campaign as well.
Versus mode has two teams going against one another. The goal is to deplete the opponent’s Team Gauge. The Gauge depletes whenever a team member dies, which can happen in battle and through PvP. Certain marked enemies can be defeated to earn back some of the Team Gauge meter. While more compelling than just a simple deathmatch setup, I prefer Cooperative mode to Versus, although both are pretty enjoyable.
Overall, my experiences thus far with online play have been positive. I have encountered a particular glitch a couple of times though, whereby a mission was completed, the Victory notification pops up on screen, but nothing happens after that. Normally, the mission ends and everyone is returned to the City. But when this glitch occurred, all players were still locked in the game, unable to exit or do anything but quit out to the XMB and relaunch the game. Certainly weird, but probably something that will be patched soon. Unfortunately, whatever XP and items you might have gotten during that glitched mission are lost.
Finally, in terms of presentation, Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce fails to impress. The graphics are only average, and outside of a few bosses, never impress. Framerates do okay, but wonky camera and lackluster and repetitive textures and clone enemies wear on you. Not to mention there’s a good amount of clipping, too. As for the audio, I found the hyper techno soundtrack to be really grating. The mellow tune that plays in the City is nice, but I can’t get into the rest of the soundtrack. Voice overs and effects are alright, but far from outstanding.
To the summary…