[Gamers' Day 2007] Hackin' and Slashin' in our Domon
Dynasty Warriors: Gundam is coming, and we just had to get our button mash on. Impressions follow.
Published: May 17, 2007
For some reason, few people in the gaming press seem to like the Dynasty Warriors games. It might be that they've had to play 50 billion of them over the last few years, but we started out loving the games, got tired of 'em and have wrapped all the way back around to loving yet again. Which is why we were only marginally surprised that not only was the singular Dynasty Warriors: Gundam kiosk almost eternally unmanned (not even Namco reps were around to give us the spiel, which is why our impressions are so weak).
Still, we dig the concept of merging endless seas of enemies with the mecha of the Gundam universe, so we grabbed the SIXAXIS and started hammering on the buttons. The first thing that hit us was that the game -- finally -- was running silky smooth on a PlayStation platform, even with scads of laser sword fodder on the screen. It's not that the PS2 iterations of the series were total slouches, but seeing the game in HD with some surprisingly decent detail in textures and modeling got us all happy.
Then the buttons began their intended role of mash fodder.
The same branching combo system is in place here, allowing for basic Square, Square, Square, Triangle combos (the finish was a nice little leaping swirl slash), and as we slogged through the crowds of look-alike robots (and no, sorry, we're too lame to know any of the Gundam names; we probably screwed up the title of the preview too), we noticed that the Musou (or whatever they end up calling it in the final localized version) gauge was filling quite a bit faster than we remembered with the human version. The down side, of course, was that the super crowd control attack wasn't a full-on 360 wave of ass kicking goodness, but a more constrained, controllable series of beams.
To be quite honest, we wanted to know more about the game, and, thanks to a basic fact sheet, we can barf up statistics like the game spanning both the Universal Century and Future Century ages, a interwoven storyline with multiple path, a Versus Mode and characters from all six major TV shows, though we have no clue what most of that actually means. Because we're dumb like that. Hopefully we can give you a proper update here very soon. Sorry Gundam fans, we just ain't that down.
Still, we dig the concept of merging endless seas of enemies with the mecha of the Gundam universe, so we grabbed the SIXAXIS and started hammering on the buttons. The first thing that hit us was that the game -- finally -- was running silky smooth on a PlayStation platform, even with scads of laser sword fodder on the screen. It's not that the PS2 iterations of the series were total slouches, but seeing the game in HD with some surprisingly decent detail in textures and modeling got us all happy.
Then the buttons began their intended role of mash fodder.
The same branching combo system is in place here, allowing for basic Square, Square, Square, Triangle combos (the finish was a nice little leaping swirl slash), and as we slogged through the crowds of look-alike robots (and no, sorry, we're too lame to know any of the Gundam names; we probably screwed up the title of the preview too), we noticed that the Musou (or whatever they end up calling it in the final localized version) gauge was filling quite a bit faster than we remembered with the human version. The down side, of course, was that the super crowd control attack wasn't a full-on 360 wave of ass kicking goodness, but a more constrained, controllable series of beams.
To be quite honest, we wanted to know more about the game, and, thanks to a basic fact sheet, we can barf up statistics like the game spanning both the Universal Century and Future Century ages, a interwoven storyline with multiple path, a Versus Mode and characters from all six major TV shows, though we have no clue what most of that actually means. Because we're dumb like that. Hopefully we can give you a proper update here very soon. Sorry Gundam fans, we just ain't that down.