Sengoku Musô 2 (Samurai Warriors 2 (PS2))

Member Name: Goldensummit

Product:	Samurai Warriors 2 (PS2)
Date:	05/07/07 (126 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: More characters | Each officer has atleast one unique battle

Disadvantages: Poor graphics | Lack of improvements | No "Create a Warrior" mode

Samurai Warriors 2, the next instalment to the Samurai Warriors series, though it only has minor improvements from the previous Samurai Warriors, this is still a worthy purchase if you enjoy a good hack n slash game.

This game offers you to play through Sengoku history as famous warriors from that period. The main goal of the game as usual, is to kill the enemy ruler to win the battles, but to do so; you have to fight through numerous officers and hundreds of soldiers, while you also have to defend your own ruler. Power-up items can be found in mid-battle to give you advantage, such as attack power up, defence power up, speed power up and all that, this do increase you enough for a great advantage, yet they only last for 30 seconds.

There are a total of 26 playable characters in this game, and 24 of them have a story. You play the stories of each officer to unlock new officers, unlock new items and gain experience for your officers. At the end of battles, your total experience gained is calculated; you get experience from killing soldiers, officers, and all that. You can get to a max level of 50, unlike the max being 20 from the original Samurai Warriors.

There is some good news about this game though, they got rid of those hideous castle battles, where it was just you facing numerous soldiers in a maze-like castle. Now castles are actually involved into one big battle, where you can go into a castle at will, without doing any of that infiltration rubbish, which is one of the best additions to this game.

Though this game still inherits the same basic button mashing game play, KOEI have tried to add in new ways to kill enemies, with this simple, yet effective add on. Each character possesses two special abilities, which you can perform on your enemies. By pushing R1 and square, or R1 and triangle, and your character will perform a special attack, which can be from deploying mines to performing a devastating strike on your enemies.

The game also features Free Mode, which is where you can play any battle that you’ve unlocked with any officer you want, you will use this to go through your favourite battles with your favourite officer, and try and take the levels on with higher difficulties to unlock their fourth weapons and deal ultimate destruction to your enemy. There is also survival mode, where you have to go through a series of challenges, and try to survive as long as you can, and who knows, if you survive long enough, you may get rewarded for it.

Though there is one new game mode this game has, that is the first to hit a hack n slash game, and its’ called Sugoroku. Its’ a board game styled game, where you will want to control as much territory as you can. You choose an officer, and depending on whom you choose is depending on where you start. Once you have done that, you role the dice and see how many steps you move. When you land on a territory, you can purchase it with gold. The more territories you have, the more gold you earn, and you earn gold by collecting three of your flags scattered across Japan. If you land on a territory controlled by an enemy, you either choose to pay a small sum of gold, or challenge them to a fight. If you challenge them to a fight, you will go into a mini game, which is random each time; you may have to kill as many troops as you can, destroy statues, collect as much gold as possible etc. If you win, you get ownership over that territory, but be warned, you can only do this so many times. When you collect your three flags, you will want to return to your home square, when you do, you collect all your gold. The main ambition is to acquire a certain amount of set gold, and when you reach that target, you win. Its’ quite fun playing this, but rather hard to get the hang of, the instructions are rather poor, and mainly you have to work it out by yourself, but when you finally do, or have the patience to do so, you’ll have a blast.

The game is rather enjoyable at the start, but you will tire of doing the same thing over and over again, there not much variant from attacks and combo’s, officers are restricted to around five or six combos, some of them being rather mediocre. The game is very addictive at the start, as your still checking out the officers, the battles and wanting to see everything, and have fun on the new features that are offered. The game isn’t really that original, there is nothing on this game that will impress you if you’ve played the previous Samurai Warriors, they even took out the “Create a Warrior” mode, which was very disappointing.

The graphics, as usual with KOEI, are very poor, there’s nothing there that is eye pleasing, and just a bunch of pixels, as you see going back through KOEI hack n slash games, such as the original Samurai Warriors, Dynasty Warriors 5, Dynasty Warriors 4 etc, there is little to no change in graphics at all. The soundtrack is god awful, I truly hated the soundtrack this game had to offer, nothing appealing at all, was such a disappointment, but that’s not the worst of it, the voices were dreadful also. Completely new voice actors from the prior Samurai Warriors, which destroys the reputation that these characters achieved in the previous Samurai Warriors, for that reason, this game seems to be going backwards instead of forwards.

The game isn’t difficult at all, all you do is push square and triangle, the jump button is of no real use, nor is the block button, as the A.I is too stupid to even try and attack you, all you need to be is quick at hitting the buttons and performing combos, this goes for all hack n slash games in general, there’s no talent or skill needed at all to master these games. You can probably find this game for around £10 - £20 nowadays, as its’ been out for almost a year now, but honestly, I don’t think the game is worth that much, especially if you’ve never been too pleased with hack n slash games.

I personally found this game rather enjoyable, I’m a fan of KOEI games, and support all their efforts, but this game just has too many flaws and lack of improvements to warrant purchase. I just recommend waiting for future instalments, when they may actually add something new and unique to make the game different from their prior instalments.

Overall Rating: 4.5/10

Summary: Not much improvements from its' prior instalment, but hack n slash is still good.