Warrior Allstars Review

Warriors All Stars Review

A distant fantasyland dying, a desperate call for help, a cast of characters so large they could form a church choir. This kingdom relies on a spring to bring life to its world, but a once locked away enemy is now coming back to life and draining the spring of it’s water, and therefore putting this world in danger. The inhabitants of this world, make a last desperate call to help them rid their world of this ever growing evil, and use the last of the springs power to call “hero’s” to their world to help them.

To clear their section, there are many battles to choose from, in an open world style, in the order the player chooses. Some missions will be story based, others for mainly XP, but to start a story mission you will need to do a few side missions ( of which there are gazillions ) to rank up enough to attempt the story missions.

Each mission, side or otherwise does actually have a good variety to. Some will entail clearing a battle, others have specific in game requirements like save the villager, or find treasure. There are also team deathmatch missions like mini boss levels, where you have to defeat 10 enemies in a row but they get harder and harder the more you defeat.

There is also a central hub world away from the battle areas for you to upgrade, socialize with your characters, customize weapons and abilities and then carry on back to the missions.

You start the game with a choice of 12 characters to play,  but in total 30 will be available. 27 of those are spread over Koei tecmo games, with the final 3 being new characters from this game.

Battles and missions are typical Warrior style of hack and slash your way through hordes of enemies, in different environments, to then finally defeat a boss, or other objectives to win. The mechanics of fighting vary from character to character and offer a true depth of variation in gameplay techniques. Added to this are new gameplay features that include power ups to bring your teammates to your side and fight as a double, triple or quartet together by you the player. Other gameplay features are normal player power moves when a certain amount of enemies have been defeated. However mix the different player buffs you can create with player cards you can collect throughout the world, and it can make battles easier.

Graphics are very average for the PS4 but standard for a PS4/PS Vita game ( more of this in a minute ) so nothing particularly to shout about unless bland is your thing. Character movements are silky smooth however and the engine running the game is superb, unlike the previous game Spirit of Sanada.

Audio is superb though, again as expected with these game with superb in game battle effects, fantastic and sometimes dramatic Japanese music, great voice acting and an overall audio greatness and polish.

As a veteran of these game i know what to expect with difficulty, and for review purposes i put the game on easy ( there is an easier mode still ) to try and whizz through of much of the game as i could in the time i had.

What i wasn’t expecting thought was my level 12 characters and team, to have to struggle and fail, level 1 or 2 missions! The reason for failing wasn’t anything to do with my skill level either but the mission structure. For example you have 5 minutes to defeat a certain enemy who is on the other side of the map. It took me 4 minutes of running to get there, passing all the loot and enemies on the map on the way, not touching them, to defeat the boss with seconds to spare.  No chance to explore, or rank up. Team Deathmatch missions were the same. As a Level 12 team i couldn’t get passed the 5th of 10 waves of enemies of a level 2 mission on Easy!! These missions also have time limits so it’s either pile in or run out of time.

Then just to confuse me even more, the next couple of level 1,2, or 3 missions I tried I passed them with ease!

Part of my struggles may lie in the vastly over complicated player buff cards you can collect and upgrade. The system does all it can to NOT tell you whats good or bad to do, or how to do it, so my player buffs may or may not be any good.

Be that as it may, these are gameplay issues that can and will be overcome with time, and if you like the grind you will love this game. It’s almost Destiny like in it’s gameplay hub, different missions to select and the team you take with you.

Finally back to the Vita aspect. Although i would say the PS4 version of the game has obviously suffered to accommodate the Vita version, it’s done for a reason. The Vita is still alive and strong in the East. The first week sales of the game in Japan had 40,368 copies sold on the PS4, with another 17,866 on the Vita. Vita owners of this game will love it.

SUMMARY

It’s hard to be different in a sea of many games out there like this on the market and fans of this series will appreciate the effort here, especially in the variety of gameplay, but ( you know there was a but coming didn’t you ) there is one basic thing they have got oh so wrong, the difficulty. Apart from that it’s pretty formulaic Warriors stuff, ie more of the same.

It’s a tough, challenging, fun game, but just lacks in a few design choices to make it one of the better Warrior games.