Given the full thing's not out for a few more weeks I wondered what anyone thought of this. I wasn't even aware it was going multiplatform, I thought it was one of the PS3's exclusives...
Didn't see another thread. Hope I didn't miss one after typing out all this crap.
While Koei are still pumping out the Dynasty/Samurai Warriors games, they do seem to have been listening to some of the people clamoring for a next-gen update to the franchise - Bladestorm is a... slightly more serious Japanese-pop-culture take on the Hundred Years' War (long-running hostilities between England and France from the mid-fourteenth to -fifteenth centuries, go Wiki it). You play a prospective mercenary looking to win fame and phat lewtz by participating in the conflict (for either side). Take command of various different types of unit, run around the battlefield, assault key strategic points on the map, fight enemy generals, collect bonuses, level up your stats as you go.
So far, so Dynasty Warriors: Empires; only... Bladestorm's juuust a little stranger, at least going by the demo. It's a game where there's a fair bit going on but you don't seem to actively participate in quite the way you'd expect and I'm not sure exactly how I feel about it. You run up to a squad you've learnt how to command, press a button and they follow you everywhere. Hold another button to make them attack and... that's pretty much the basics; your character fights automatically in exactly the same way as your men do. Every type of squad gets a variety of special moves/maneuvers assigned to the face buttons - fire them off, wait for them to recharge, so on - but there's no more of the square square square triangle square square square triangle etc. that DW is so notorious for.
On the other hand, you quickly start to notice the depth there is to the combat all the same. It's basically a rock-paper-scissors setup you've seen God knows how many times before in countless RTS' but it's surprisingly well implemented. Command a unit of archers and get hit from the side by a cavaly charge and you'll be decimated. Catch a much larger force in the rear and fire off a special move or two and you can go through them like a wheat field. Wander around without a squad and you're dead - this is still very much an arcade experience, combo meters and everything, but Superman you're not.
Then there's the bigger picture - while the capture points are obviously just an evolution of DW/SW:Empires' "bases", the war is something of a persistent world here - battlefields are much, much larger (think several DW maps stuck together), the fights take place over several rounds ("days", with the time limit running out signalling nightfall) and the frontline can ebb and flow a fair amount independent of anything you're doing. And that's not even mentioning the character development - or raising your squad stats - during the course of the war as a whole.
Visually the demo looks... okay.It's no next-gen showcase, but it's a significant advance on any DW or SW game so far. Draw distance extends a way, character models are pleasing enough, animations are serviceable and when you've got Dead Rising numbers all pushing and shoving and hacking the crap out of each other the atmosphere of battlefield chaos is quite something, even with all the flashing lights and numbers racking up and so on. Aurally the score is predictably epic with a touch of the medieval, though it's very competently done - spot FX are nice and solid, too, though Koei's trademarked hysterically inappropriate English voices still seem to be all present and correct.
It's an odd experience. The demo lets you play through two battles from either side, both of which can be spun out a little by purposefully not taking your objective straight away (the second lets you start on completely the wrong side of the map if you feel so inclined). This doesn't really give you a whole lot of opportunity to sample the longer-term aspects of the gameplay, but it does hint at what they might be like if they work well. You can try a variety of different squads, level up some, do a little trading for new equipment, experiment with the odd bit of strategy... it's no Crackdown demo but it could last you a while if you liked it.
Me, I think I like it. For a game where as I mentioned, you often feel as though you're not really doing anything it still manages to be infinitely more entertaining than the utter tedium of N3. It looks good enough, hints at some possibly surprising complexity for a genre hybrid and manages to be pretty damned atmospheric. Whether the full game lives up to this I haven't a clue, but fingers crossed.
Any thoughts?
Didn't see another thread. Hope I didn't miss one after typing out all this crap.
While Koei are still pumping out the Dynasty/Samurai Warriors games, they do seem to have been listening to some of the people clamoring for a next-gen update to the franchise - Bladestorm is a... slightly more serious Japanese-pop-culture take on the Hundred Years' War (long-running hostilities between England and France from the mid-fourteenth to -fifteenth centuries, go Wiki it). You play a prospective mercenary looking to win fame and phat lewtz by participating in the conflict (for either side). Take command of various different types of unit, run around the battlefield, assault key strategic points on the map, fight enemy generals, collect bonuses, level up your stats as you go.
So far, so Dynasty Warriors: Empires; only... Bladestorm's juuust a little stranger, at least going by the demo. It's a game where there's a fair bit going on but you don't seem to actively participate in quite the way you'd expect and I'm not sure exactly how I feel about it. You run up to a squad you've learnt how to command, press a button and they follow you everywhere. Hold another button to make them attack and... that's pretty much the basics; your character fights automatically in exactly the same way as your men do. Every type of squad gets a variety of special moves/maneuvers assigned to the face buttons - fire them off, wait for them to recharge, so on - but there's no more of the square square square triangle square square square triangle etc. that DW is so notorious for.
On the other hand, you quickly start to notice the depth there is to the combat all the same. It's basically a rock-paper-scissors setup you've seen God knows how many times before in countless RTS' but it's surprisingly well implemented. Command a unit of archers and get hit from the side by a cavaly charge and you'll be decimated. Catch a much larger force in the rear and fire off a special move or two and you can go through them like a wheat field. Wander around without a squad and you're dead - this is still very much an arcade experience, combo meters and everything, but Superman you're not.
Then there's the bigger picture - while the capture points are obviously just an evolution of DW/SW:Empires' "bases", the war is something of a persistent world here - battlefields are much, much larger (think several DW maps stuck together), the fights take place over several rounds ("days", with the time limit running out signalling nightfall) and the frontline can ebb and flow a fair amount independent of anything you're doing. And that's not even mentioning the character development - or raising your squad stats - during the course of the war as a whole.
Visually the demo looks... okay.It's no next-gen showcase, but it's a significant advance on any DW or SW game so far. Draw distance extends a way, character models are pleasing enough, animations are serviceable and when you've got Dead Rising numbers all pushing and shoving and hacking the crap out of each other the atmosphere of battlefield chaos is quite something, even with all the flashing lights and numbers racking up and so on. Aurally the score is predictably epic with a touch of the medieval, though it's very competently done - spot FX are nice and solid, too, though Koei's trademarked hysterically inappropriate English voices still seem to be all present and correct.
It's an odd experience. The demo lets you play through two battles from either side, both of which can be spun out a little by purposefully not taking your objective straight away (the second lets you start on completely the wrong side of the map if you feel so inclined). This doesn't really give you a whole lot of opportunity to sample the longer-term aspects of the gameplay, but it does hint at what they might be like if they work well. You can try a variety of different squads, level up some, do a little trading for new equipment, experiment with the odd bit of strategy... it's no Crackdown demo but it could last you a while if you liked it.
Me, I think I like it. For a game where as I mentioned, you often feel as though you're not really doing anything it still manages to be infinitely more entertaining than the utter tedium of N3. It looks good enough, hints at some possibly surprising complexity for a genre hybrid and manages to be pretty damned atmospheric. Whether the full game lives up to this I haven't a clue, but fingers crossed.
Any thoughts?
One of the worst examples of tech-demo-masquerading-as-a-game I've ever seen, totally unsatisfying, and I've played countless DW games so it's not as if I don't like square, square, triangle, square, square, triangle etc. Bladestorm's combat is very odd and potentially a failure, I agree, but if nothing else it certainly seemed well presented enough it actually invalidated that distinction for me on some levels.
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