Step into the shoes of an army. This is the broad idea at work here. An army is at your control, but at the same time, you are only one man, who needs to fight his own battles in the fields of death. Samurai Warriors 2: Empires is an action-strategy game, with a comfortable niche of gameplay not really explored in many areas beyond feudal Japan and China. Gameplay consists of a strategy/civilization maintenance phase, and the superseding battle phase (if you so desire to take part). Both are radically different, the former being menu scrolling and number-crunching, and the latter involves good old fashioned running, jumping and fighting.
SW2:E takes a progressive approach to gameplay. During turns (each of which consists of one season), you can undertake a number of tasks to help advance your chosen group of samurai warriors. Consult with your officers, delegate power or decree tasks in order to build a solid army a respectable civilization. Your primary goals will involve making gold from various mining and business ventures, while simultaneously ensuring your troops and higher-ranking combat officers have decent morale and remain in tip-top physical shape. All of the commands at your disposal during the strategy phase are designed to help you tweak the forthcoming battle in your favour, and it is satisfying to see the options at work. Your controlled areas in battle are known as fiefs, and the end goal is absolute control of a total area consisting of many smaller fiefs. This is what sets SW2:E apart from the original SW2; beyond picking determined characters, you play through numerous battle scenarios (ranked for difficulty) in a Empire mode.
Full of horsely goodness.
At any time during the strategy phase, you can view information regarding your own troops, as well as enemy forces and allied status. This in turn leads you to making correct decisions. For example, a neighbouring fief may have a very strong army, and you plan to invade. You’ll need to execute tasks to build soldier numbers, as well as make enough gold to fund an invasion and pay officers. It’s a neat system, but becomes very repetitive when ten, twenty, thirty fiefs require a separate invasion. After issuing a limited number of orders, you can choose to invade, or simply proceed to the next season to continue improving your men. An enemy may choose to invade your own land, and this will require a defensive battle to ward off would-be fascist dictators. Must….crush….capitalism!
And so, the battle begins. Assemble your chosen roster of officers, and hit the bloodbath. Most stages are quite large, but usually flat and rather bland. Strategy in the hands-on section of the game involves issuing orders to defend or attack mid-battle. Maps are segmented into smaller bases, and the more bases under your control, the higher the troop morale will be. This ensures subsequent combat situations will easily fall to your advantage. Any events occurring during battle will be displayed on screen, letting you know who is attacking who, who has been defeated, and which bases are under siege. Play your cards right, and the bases will be overrun in no time. The battle is eventually won by either capturing the enemy main base, or defeating the enemy commander.
The problem with SW2:E, along with many other games of the same ilk, is that the combat engine simply isn’t up to scratch. Button-mashing is the name of the game, and literally thousands of enemies will fall with the power of the X button. A Musou gauge is filled to execute power attacks, and mounted forces are available to plow through large groups, but this doesn’t cover up the repetitive hack-n-slash gameplay. Before entering battle you can choose which officer to control, each being varied in weapon type and special abilities. Again, this is all good stuff, but there isn’t much of an incentive to really master the different characters and build up an impressive mounted force when the combat always resorts back to endless slicing.
It sure is.
A few different gameplay modes are available, but the longest and most important is Empire mode – which pretty much consists of everything mentioned up until this point. A Free Mode is available for those after some quick action, and a friend can jump in on either Empire or Free Mode to control a second officer. This results in split-screen gameplay which, coupled with the bland environments, awkward camera and cloned enemies, doesn't make for much fun at all. A bunch of Achievements have been worked into the main game, and they are seemingly easy to obtain at first, but the hours pass by slowly when trying to conquer every last fief to nab those points. The life of a feudal warlord is difficult indeed - fighting and killing wasn't in the brochure!
This is a PlayStation 2 port, and it shows. SW2:E ranks among the very worst of Xbox 360 games in the visual department, and it’s rather inexcusable. There is no indication (beyond impressive CG cutscenes at the beginning – but then again, we were seeing this quality in Final Fantasy VIII over half a decade ago) of next-gen graphical ability, and the menu presentation and design looks extremely dated. There isn’t really much else to say in this regard – suffice to say, these graphics will not impress anybody. The real limitations of this series don’t even lie solely in the technical obsolescence, but as a complete package.
The concept of a full-fledged, deep, epic, engrossing action-strategy experience covering thousands of years of Japanese history – or indeed any history – just doesn’t seem possible on a console like the PS2. Now the PS3 and 360 are around, we can truly expect entirely fresh re-imaginings of genres, backed up by robust hardware. For this kind of game to work nowadays, developers need to scrap the same engine they’ve been using for many, many years and build a new game from the ground up. Completely reinvent the series, because if someone holds on to just a little piece of what made OK-but-not-great games for so long, it will drag down the new project. Or, at least, it will cause someone to think back to an earlier build of these games and try to squeeze the same concept in once more – and that is not allowed! Maybe this is a little overzealous to expect so soon, but we keep seeing new installments to these games, and nothing introduced has shown us that there is a radical, inventive future for the action-strategy genre. This is an average game, and is scored accordingly. If you can handle average, go ahead and fork out the bones, but most folks can move along – there’s nothing to see here.
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