Stick the game on Normal difficulty and you blaze through equally matched enemy armies with ease up the difficulty and you'll get one-shotted by opposing generals in the most unfair and unavoidable ways possible. No matter what plans you've made in the build up to battle, it turns out your armies haven't a clue how to organise themselves during a ruckus. Getting stuck into the action here reveals a game that expects you, as a solo soldier, to do all of the heavy-lifting. No amount of unlocking trinkets to buff your weapons, or being rewarded with new secret plans to enact on the battlefield, or positioning your forces around the world map, or careful consideration of your relations with other rulers can paper over the fact that most of the strategy here counts for very little when you're marching into action against such utterly dumb enemy AI - and with an army of similarly braindead allies in tow. None of this is particularly in-depth at the best of times, but it suffers hugely in this latest Empires entry because the action that it's attached to is so absolutely naff. Fans of the franchise will know what to expect, with your time divided between the usual running battles against hundreds of foes and extended periods of menu navigation where you'll choose how to spend your months before the next war council training up your armies, raising funds, doing a spot of farming, ensuring you've got enough rations to go around and so on. It doesn't feel great to play and, when combined with visuals that have been rendered utterly bland, devoid of any texture detail and plagued by a ton of very noticeable pop-in, you're left with a premium-priced product that looks and feels like real bargain bin material.Ĭaptured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)Īnd all of this is before we even start on the actual gameplay itself. However that's not the case here, with a frame rate that consistently hovers around the 20fps mark and often dips lower during intense action sequences. It sucks a lot of the fun out of playing when it looks this rough but, we guess, it could be a trade-off worth making if the game held a solid 30fps. In an attempt to avoid these issues, the developer has really gone to town with downgrading all graphical aspects of Dynasty Warriors 9: Empires on Switch, resulting in a game that looks hugely underwhelming in action. It's not ideal but it is, to some extent, understandable given the hardware that developers are attempting to squeeze these ludicrously large battles onto. Get a big scrap going, start firing off some fancy special moves and you're in for a bit of a stutterfest. However, one problem that all of these games share on Nintendo's hybrid console is a tendency to struggle with frame rate issues during the genre's signature mass brawls. There are already quite a few excellent Musou titles floating around on the Switch eShop these days, with the likes of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, Fire Emblem Warriors and good old One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 providing plenty of satisfying hack-and-slash action for players to dig into. However, what's been served up here - and there's really no beating about the bush to be done we're afraid - is a bit of a dog's dinner, a poor entry in the franchise regardless of what platform you're playing on that's seriously lacking in content and modes, and which arrives on Switch with a shoddy port that looks bad and performs disappointingly. We've been excited to get our hands on this one, then, eager to jump into some all-conquering action, cutting swathes through screenfuls of enemies whilst expanding our empire across the length and breadth of China. It's nothing particularly complex, for sure, but as fans of this genre we always look forward to the arrival of a new Empires variant as it gives these hack-and-slash action-fests a little more in the way of depth and replayability.ĭynasty Warriors 9: Empires is the very first Empires game to hit Switch, and only the second Dynasty Warriors proper to arrive on Nintendo's console, following on from 2018's thoroughly decent Dynasty Warriors 8: Xtreme Legends. Koei Tecmo's Dynasty Warriors series has followed much the same rhythm of releases since way back in the early noughties, with each mainline entry in the franchise since 2003's Dynasty Warriors 4 followed by both an Xtreme and Empires spin-off, the latter of which adds a little bit of strategic tinkering to the usual Musou mix.
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