There seems to be an inherit flaw when it comes to KOEI's Dynasty Warriors and (in this case) Samurai Warriors series, and that is that though it may be cool to be one single soldier, staring down an entire army, knowing that you united the land of Japan all by yourself with the power and righteousness of your blade, at the end of the day you are thinking to yourself, "Okay, don't make me do all the work. Hey, you there with the spear! Quit standing around! Poke someone with it why don't you. Oh yeah, ten on one seems fair! Just stand there and I'll take care of it."

THE STORY SO FAR
When it comes to story, Samurai Warriors 2: Empires (SW2 from here on) doesn't offer a whole lot, as the game really plays out more like a hack and slash strategic board game than anything else. You'll occasionally get some in-game cutscenes, telling a few bits of info going on like one leader being in love with one of his generals and giving her flowers, or the occasional moment where someone talks about an alliance, but other than that and the few CG cutscenes out there that depict major events like important wars, story simply isn't much to concern yourself with in SW2. The game box lists a few special events like "The Honnoji Incident" and "The Battle of Kawanakajima" but if you don't have any sense of history or know those are real or why they are important, you wont really get much from them or know that is a story to begin with.

GAMEPLAY
To start it off, the game features two-player co-op play, so that is a plus, but yet you can only play co-op on one system with still no ability to play with a friend online. Hence, since co-op involves the same stuff as the single player, we are lumping it all here.

First up, before starting a game (Empire Mode is the main one as it is the bulk of the game, though you can have Free Mode skirmishes), you'll start off by picking a scenario, which usually dictates how many clans and how many pieces of land you'll be fighting over, and then selecting which of the leaders on the board you want to be. You can also create your own leader and input them into the game, but the character creation system isn't that deep or special, so you'll probably want to go with picking one of the pre-defined characters on the game board. Speaking of characters, there are 400 to choose from (you won't use them all or even realize there is that many, but hey, big number).

Once you've got your leader and land, now comes the first steps to building your army to advance through Japan and unite it under one ruler. The gameplay of SW2 is split almost equally in importance between the Strategy phase and the Battle phase of combat. Though you'll spend more time actually battling on the maps with your character, the real winning is done in the strategy portion of the game. When in the Strategy phase, you'll have to make decisions, such as listening to your people so they don't revolt against you; hiring troops to fill out the gaps in your forces you might have lost after the last battle; train generals to improve things like defense; charge taxes to get more gold; form alliances with other clans so they won't attack you during battle; hiring officers; placing officers in fiefs so they can attack a neighboring land; and many, many more things as well. The system can be quite daunting and frustrating at first while you are still learning the ropes, but after a while you start to see what works, what doesn't, and what you need to do to be successful.

There is also a randomness to the Strategy phase of the game, which is both annoying and yet cool at the same time. For starters, you can have peasants revolt, which you can either squash with your mighty hand by going to war with your own people, or you can pay some gold to shut them up; on one hand it is random because you never know when it might happen, but on the other hand if you had been listening to their needs they wouldn't have risen up against you. The more random things are the natural disasters, such as blizzards that will freeze the land, making it so the affected ones can't attack or be attacked, and it goes all the way up to plagues that will wipe out a select number of soldiers in all the affected lands.

Once you get done with the Strategy phase, then it comes to battling. Now, battling happens during one of three scenarios: 1) You have to defend one of your pieces of land from an attacking general, 2) You agree to help finance someone else's war and give them a general to fight along side them, or 3) You declare war on another piece of land so you can capture it and spread your dominance.

When you get to the actual battles, you'll have one of several things that will lead to failure or success, ranging from taking out the enemy's main general to taking their main base to not having your main base fall to you not losing in combat to outlasting a certain time limit if you are helping another clan attack or defend their land.

While actually in battle, you'll fight over a multitude of bases, where one base is only really captured once you have taken out all the main officers of that base and it is connected to a base you already have under your control. You have many options here during the planning and successful operation of a mission, where you can play different attack patterns, which will have negative or positive gains depending on what formation the enemy troop is using, and the main way you'll win is by delegating your officers to either attack specific officers, bases, or defend specific officers or bases. Typically, I found the most success leaving one general behind to guard my main base, and then sending out groups of two to various enemy controlled bases, having them take those out one by one, slowly marching towards the main base while I went it alone somewhere else. As you're playing in the battles, things like generals quitting and heading to the other side, generals being captured or retreating, and other such plays will happen as well.

Combat is pretty much the same as other past hack and slashers from KOEI with the X and Y buttons being your main attacks, where you can perform different combos by combining them into different presses, like X,X,X,Y or X,X,Y,Y. Combat works pretty well, though a lot of time I spent slashing out at nothing but air because either I wasn't squarely focused enough on the enemy, had taken them out mid-combo and had to watch the full canned animation, or I pushed the wrong thing. The good thing is that though the characters share the same button combos, their moves behave differently, as one character might attack with a lance, one with a sword, and another with a fan. The fighting boils down to the same thing in the end, but at least the characters make combat with different generals feel different.

And though the combat works, it is also the ultimate problem. You just attack and attack, using mostly the same moves and tactics from beginning to end, and nothing really changes. You'll issue the same commands, attack the same way, and after battle you'll make the same strategy plans such as repairing your depleted troops, getting gold, and more. Really, after you've completed one round of strategy and battle, you've seen essentially the whole game. Now, it is still fun to move through the game, trying to unite a whole country under your rule, but if you aren't in the mood for hack and slash you'll find yourself bored rather quickly.

GRAPHICS
Characters look pretty good for the most part, and the scattering of CG cutscenes are nice, but the environments and static screens of the Strategy phase of the game are really drab and dull. I mean, this is the Xbox 360 we are talking about, and the environments couldn't have been done any better than this, the same wide open, extremely flat and basic environments that have been around for seemingly every iteration for the last however many years?

SOUND
When I'm playing a game set in feudal Japan, I expect the music of feudal Japan. While playing the game, you'll get a few helpings of the beautiful music of that time, but otherwise it is hard rocking guitar riffs and strums that sound as if they were ripped from the hair band metal days of the 80s. However, the music is the least of the game's sound problems, because the voiceovers are atrocious and ridiculously bad; it sounds like KOEI walked into a local community college and said, "Hey, anyone want to do a voice." Not a single delivered line comes off sounding serious or even :gasp: good at all; every line is laugh out loud bad. The sound effects are pretty good, but you hear one sword clash or grunt you've heard them all by the end of the first battle.

IN CONCLUSION
KOEI fans are a diehard bunch, as they just love their hack and slash good times, but for everyone else out there it might be a hard pill to swallow and a game that you really have to be in that particular mindset to enjoy. Now, that isn't to say the game is completely without merit, because it isn't and there is fun to be had, but for the masses out there it won't be a game they'll be running out to snatch up and purchase right away.

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