Warriors Orochi 4 – PS4 | Review

By John Hay
| 16th October 2018
| PS4, Review
| 0

Warriors Orochi 4 Is Developer Koei’s mash-up of their popular franchises, Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors, that takes the characters known to fans of the series and transports them to an alternate reality to do the things they already do in their current reality, hack and slash.

The aim of the story is to find your way back to your own space and time, and along the way, a barrage of characters will join you with that same goal in mind. For me, the story was a bit nonsensical and before long I was skipping cutscenes to get back into the action.

Gameplay is hack and slash to its core, you take control of one of a huge number of badass characters that can single-handedly take out thousands of enemy forces all by themselves. You control 1 character at a time, but you actually have a party of 3 that you can switch between on the fly any time you feel like. When you are not hacking down the enemies with your melee weapon you also have access to a range of magic spells that are simple to use and cause massive destruction on the battlefield, and, before you know it you will be racking up combos well into the thousands.

The battles can actually be pretty hilarious if you overthink them as some of the characters actually don’t use weapons they are martial arts specialists and they still have no problem mowing down thousands of sword-wielding enemies without taking a scratch, that’s one of the things about this game, it’s easy. You basically mash the attack button and throw out the odd magic spell from time to time, but it is fun. You can also summon a horse that seems to make you even more overpowered as you mow through enemies like they are nothing, but it is fun to send the enemies flying.

Each level basically consists of you having to mow down enough fodder characters for one of the generals to enter the field, beat that general, mow down some more fodder, rinse and repeat until you complete the objective of the level. You hack, you slash, and that’s pretty much it, so it can get a bit repetitive after a while. After each level you will get a grade, which goes up to S, if you are a completionist you will find yourself having to replay levels a few times to make the highest grade.

The game uses a sort of RPG style levelling system, as you level up your character gains access to skill points that you can spend to unlock perks and upgrades on your characters skill tree. You also gain experience points that you can manually spend to level up characters outside of stages, this comes in handy as you are constantly unlocking new characters that will join your party and it would be a bit of a pain if you were having to drag underpowered characters onto the field with you.

Speaking of characters there is a massive amount, as I touched on before. There are 175 playable characters in the game and they all have their own fighting style and variation on the magic attacks that they use, so, if you are getting bored with one character just stick another one into your party and enjoy discovering the styles and attacks on offer.

The graphics of the game are really nice, the battlefields look a lot better than the last Dynasty Warriors game that I played, and the character models are really detailed and varied.

One of my favourite parts of the game was the soundtrack, it’s really uptempo and quite techno sounding, and it goes perfectly with the frantic pace of the battles.

There is also a multiplayer option where you can drop into other players campaigns, or allow them to drop into yours. Along with this there is also a PVP “capture the flag” style multiplayer where you will have to get to and capture a base before one of the other players can. I could not find a match during review so was only able to play the online tutorial for this element of the game, but it does look like a fun addition.

Final Impressions

Overall, I really enjoyed the game. It was mindless fun, albeit not all that challenging and the gameplay is a bit repetitive, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

*Code kindly provided by the publisher for review*

Developer: Koei Tecmo / Publisher: Koei Tecmo
Release date: 19/10/2018
Platforms: PS4
Platform Reviewed on: PS4 Pro