Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3
Jul. 11th, 2016 09:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroWe love the Warriors series of games, so when we realized that we’d never tried the version that lets you play a giant robot, we added it to the queue. It wasn’t all we hoped for.
I’ve watched virtually none of the Gundam anime; and unlike some other media properties, I’m not familiar with the characters via cultural osmosis. Jethrien and I were pretty much going in blind. And that meant that even after playing half a dozen battles, we had no idea what was going on or why we should care about it. Who’s on what side? Who is from which world? Do any of them have specific talents or superpowers? What can or can’t the technology do? If you walk into this without the backstory, the game gives you nothing.
If the gameplay was fabulous, the story issues would be tolerable. Unfortunately, it’s not. The battles are divided up into “zones” which you need to kill a certain number of mooks in to take control of; and controlling the battlefield is roughly equivalent to morale in other games. Once you have full control, the boss enemy shows up and you can kill him/her to win. This makes every battlefield (and every battle) very similar to the last, and with relatively limited strategy. There are half a dozen types of missions, but the gameplay for pretty much all of them is identical, just with different characters shouting nonsense and a different skin on the field. Not everything needs a Samurai Warriors-style mission system, but the series can definitely do better than “kill everything in this box, then move to the next one”.
And while there are a million customization options—you can pilot different mechs with different pilots, co-pilots, or partners; and everything can be upgraded—that doesn’t actually change the gameplay much. Every mech has a melee moveset that’s basically the same, and a gun that fires only as part of that attack sequence. Heck, it feels like the DW characters have significantly more variety despite their usual lack of ranged weapons.
Overall: I suspect that this is better if you’re actually familiar with the source material; but as it stands, the rest of the Warriors franchise is better suited to us. We were unenthused here.
I’ve watched virtually none of the Gundam anime; and unlike some other media properties, I’m not familiar with the characters via cultural osmosis. Jethrien and I were pretty much going in blind. And that meant that even after playing half a dozen battles, we had no idea what was going on or why we should care about it. Who’s on what side? Who is from which world? Do any of them have specific talents or superpowers? What can or can’t the technology do? If you walk into this without the backstory, the game gives you nothing.
If the gameplay was fabulous, the story issues would be tolerable. Unfortunately, it’s not. The battles are divided up into “zones” which you need to kill a certain number of mooks in to take control of; and controlling the battlefield is roughly equivalent to morale in other games. Once you have full control, the boss enemy shows up and you can kill him/her to win. This makes every battlefield (and every battle) very similar to the last, and with relatively limited strategy. There are half a dozen types of missions, but the gameplay for pretty much all of them is identical, just with different characters shouting nonsense and a different skin on the field. Not everything needs a Samurai Warriors-style mission system, but the series can definitely do better than “kill everything in this box, then move to the next one”.
And while there are a million customization options—you can pilot different mechs with different pilots, co-pilots, or partners; and everything can be upgraded—that doesn’t actually change the gameplay much. Every mech has a melee moveset that’s basically the same, and a gun that fires only as part of that attack sequence. Heck, it feels like the DW characters have significantly more variety despite their usual lack of ranged weapons.
Overall: I suspect that this is better if you’re actually familiar with the source material; but as it stands, the rest of the Warriors franchise is better suited to us. We were unenthused here.
