Samurai Warriors 2

This was a basic war of attrition to complete but first, the origins of purchase. In the wide world of the gaming community, I ended up playing with someone who lives pretty much down the road from me. We gave each other’s collection a once over and organised a game exchange – ones he wanted for ones he wanted to get rid of that I didn’t have. Samurai Warriors 2 was one of the games I acquired during the exchange and I must say it was totally... not worth it.

Samurai Warriors 2 sees you take control of several characters in Japan during the Sengoku period. Several is a bit of an understatement – there are a lot and all but two have their own story modes.

The game is a hack and slash extravaganza where your playable character basically has the power to singlehandedly end armies at a whim no matter who you play as. I have to say that after you’ve done three or four story modes, the gameplay becomes super repetitive and difficult to stay awake for. During the missions, there is a little more than just surviving and killing. You get given objectives to complete but it basically boils down to getting to the end and killing the leader. There are a few missions that were a pain though as they require you to keep all of your characters alive and relying on AI to show survival instinct is like relying on butter not to melt in an oven.

The story modes themselves are not drastically different and they see you doing the same things over and over and over again to get to the end of missions. It’s probably one of the most repetitive bland games I’ve played in a while.

Aside from story modes, there is a survival mode which sees you climb an infinite tower with differing floors which, again, aren’t that different.  There is also a Japanese version of monopoly called Sugoroku that you can play but this seemed very biased towards the AI opponents and relied almost solely on luck to actually win.

Achievements – 1,250 Points – 29 Achievements

The time needed to unlock all of the achievements is excessive, especially if you make the DLC cock up as I did but I’ll get on to that later.

From the main game, you have to complete 16 individual story modes to unlock 17 achievements if you haven’t downloaded the DLC. As I’ve insinuated above, completing four story modes is trying and 16 made me want to cry by the end.

For another achievement, you have to complete Survival mode is a certain way and get to the 35^th floor. It’s a slight change of pace so will probably feel a lot quicker than completing all of the story modes mentioned above.

There is another achievement for winning the game of Sugoroku I mentioned about and this was almost as bad as the story mode repetitions. The game is so unbelievably biased towards the AI that you will hardly ever land where you need to. If you are reading this looking for advice, collect all the flags and buy all the land, cross your fingers and pray that the AI fuck each other over.

Downloadable Content

The Xtreme Legends DLC takes the prize for being one of the most consistently overpriced pieces of game expansion ever. It doesn’t offer a lot of extra material either. It gives you another five story modes to complete – woopie. And it also gives you another mode called Mercenary Mode which is basically another protracted story mode and you have to complete 100 smaller missions to get a further two achievements... but only if you use strategic saves.

The worst part of the DLC however is the fact that two of the main game achievements are made effortless by downloading it. However, what isn’t mentioned is that doing so will double the amount of time required to complete the story missions as you then have to do ALL of them rather than just the 16 related to the achievements. There are 32 characters in the main game so you can imagine my anger levels.

Samurai Warriors 2 is a very, very repetitive game if you are going for a completion and on top of that, it’s not very rewarding. I’m definitely done with the hack and slash genre as I’m not sure what was worse; this or Ninety Nine Nights.