Introduction

KOEI keeps on refining and changing the Dynasty Warriors series of games and the latest one that hit the stores is the Xbox 360 Dynasty Warriors 5 – Empires. This takes its cues from earlier titles and builds on the ‘Risk’ strategy aspect to offer more than just a quick game of hack and slash.

Story

The story is based on the Romance of the 3 Kingdoms era in Chinese history and is full of magic and mythical legendary characters, such as the mighty Lu Bu, a mercenary warrior who rode a horse known as Red Hare and wielded an impressive spear, his combat prowess was said to have no equal and he was capable of turning on his employers in the blink of an eye.

In this game you will shape the story of one of the Three Kingdoms, Wu, Shu and Wei as you forge alliances and attempt to conquer the kingdom map. As one of the central characters from the story or your own custom edit character.

Gameplay

For those of you familiar with the previous titles in the series not much has changed when it comes down to the battles, there are only two modes of play in this iteration and the sub-games have been removed. The first mode of play is the Empires mode where you can take your kingdom to glory in a ‘Risk’ style map fighting for dominance against the other kingdoms in play.

The second mode of play allows you to play the battle maps and upgrade your character without worrying about story mode, attacks or events. Essentially it’s just the old Free Mousou mode from the previous titles but it’s nice to see that it’s still in the game.

It is here that you can pick a scenario (with more to unlock as the game progresses) as well as choosing one of the established characters to build up, or making one of your own in the fairly refined edit officer mode. An open scenario exists for you to set up your own style of game and if you want you can pick a variety of kingdoms to act as enemies (or later on allies through diplomacy) and place them where you want.

When upon the strategic map screen you can choose from a variety of options, move your fledgling army around the map and use command points (very limited at the start) to perform various actions, these can range from buying special battle cards to consulting with one of your officers to purchase a pair of battle cards for a lower price.

These cards have a variety of effects and either activate immediately or can be saved during the battle setup screen, where they can be triggered to cause problems to the enemy forces or increase the amount of in-game time to complete a map. It is also on the strategic screen where you can buy new levels of blacksmithing to increase your weapon’s power, when you reach 100 in a level of weapon type, say, blade you are granted the next powerful weapon in that category.