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Review

Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce

3.0

Format Xbox 360

Developer KOEI

Publisher KOEI

Genre Action, Beat 'em Up, Sim / Strategy

23-Feb-2010 Less Crouching Tiger, more Police Academy 7

Where next for the creatively bankrupt Dynasty Warriors series? Having completely run out of ideas, Strikeforce has the heroes of ancient China transforming into Dragon Ball Z-style characters and flying round like maniacs.

If you're hoping for a great brawl of China, you may be disappointed - it's another unnecessary sequel that brings little new to the table aside from four-player co-op over Xbox Live.

In an utterly shamless act of barrel-scraping, Koei has ported this over from the PSP release - itself a low-fi version of Dynasty Warriors 6. The handheld 's limitations have been carried over, too - tiny maps, blurry textures and an absurd number of loading screens.

Large-scale battles were the series' trademark, but Strikeforce cuts the number of enemies down from hundreds to double figures. The drama is gone, and instead we're subjected to the sight of Lu Bu turning into a Power Ranger. Mousou attacks now come in two tiers. The first activates your 'awakened' form, which allows you to fly around and do more powerful attacks. But if you prefer, you can keep it old-skool and spend your energy on a devastating Mousou combo.

It might rob the characters of any dignity they had left, but the one cool thing about flying is being able to combo an enemy in mid-air. It's a little like the air-juggle attacks in previous games, only it lasts much longer. You can also switch to a secondary weapon mid-combo to mix things up a bit.

With everyone zipping around the sky, the camera struggles to keep up. It swings around uncontrollably whenever it comes into contact with solid objects. Which is very often, in such cramped levels.

Strikeforce's battlegrounds are a big disappointment. While the levels didn't look that great in previous games, at least there was the ability to roam around. We're now presented with a series of branching corridors with loading screens in between each one. They're the kind of maps that would have appeared as mere side-quests in the far superior Warriors Orochi.

There's an RPG-style village that lets you build weapons and augments, but it isn't nearly as deep as the strategic options in the Dynasty Warriors: Empires spin-off series. Only the new boss battles create any kind of excitement. The siege weapons and gigantic fantasy creatures do at least look vaguely impressive.

If you needed any proof that the series is just drip-feeding new features into each new game, Strikeforce is it. And to present a cheap PSP port as a full-price game is frankly insulting.

Ben Talbot