Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra :: Dynasty Warriors 4 rawks! It won't convert non-believers. Voicework sucks. Etc.

[quote name="curst"]Good things about it: - The improved AI is great. Allied and enemy scrubs alike will now put up a sort of decent fight. This proves HUGELY annoying when you're trying to take out an enemy general and didn't do a good job of removing his/her backup first. The game is much more challenging even on Easy difficulty. - The new characters are really cool. Cao Ren is a goddamn tank, tough as a motherfucker. Zhou Tai has this strange barbarian samurai gimmick going for him - he sounds almost as neanderthalish as Wei Yan, he wields what is essentially a katana (an "Eastern Sword", as the game puts it), and he slaughters suckers nicely. Yue Ying is easily the most powerful hottie in the game, and damn if she isn't comparable to Lu Bu, honestly. She sure carved my ass up wit da quicknez. - The new level design is great. 50 goddamn levels, most of them of the 60-minute variety (meaning they larger than DW3's brief battles, smaller than DW3's huge ones). Essentially this already large game just became FUCKING HUGE. - Most of the siege weapons are pretty bland (the ramps) or nothing new at all (the catapults), but in the intro movie there are these strange devices that look like the Wooden Ox of DW3, almost, except they're on wheels and they spew fire. People on GameFAQs said they're called Tiger Tanks. I can't wait to use them. - The combo system is reworked somewhat. Now just pressing Triangle does something unique for almost everyone. i.e. Huang Zhong will fire five arrows in rapid succession, Lu Bu will strangle someone while stabbing them before throwing them damn near into orbit, Zhen Ji will play her flute and this bubble will appear near her, and it explodes if you get too close to it, and to add to the explosions, Huang Gai fucking throws bombs around, which are nicely destructive. Also, I don't think it's possible to do infinite combos anymore - in DW3, you'd find yourself always doing Charge 5-Charge 5-Charge 5 attacks since you could keep it up forever. In DW4, at least with Sun Shang Xiang, you can't get more than two of those in a row before you knock the enemy just out of range. Now there's a reason to use all of a character's attacks instead of just one or two. At least that's how it seems so far. - The graphics are improved. The draw-in problem (where soldiers would disappear/reappear haphazardly when there's too much action going on) has been reduced enormously. The downside to this is that while slowdown doesn't happen very much, when it does it hits you HARD. I'm almost certain the framerate dipped below 10FPS at one point. Still, I'd rather have slowdown than draw-in, since disappearing enemies meant they could 'escape' your attacks in mid-combo. - The new movies are pretty damn cool. There's some harsh stuff, like Lu Xun setting a crowd of guys on fire with flaming arrows, and while the voicework mostly sucks, the guys who did the frantic screaming for this particular movie deserve a raise. - Horses are now a viable alternative to walking. I lasted a lot longer on horseback than I ever did in DW3, and I wasn't even using a good horseback character to my knowledge, nor was I using one of the unique horses. This meant I wasted a lot less time running around in empty plains trying to get to the next battle. Bad things about it: - The voicework is just about unlistenable. No Japanese voices. Maybe it's because I don't speak Japanese, but I really liked the Japanese work in DW3 and wish Koei had kept it instead of making an English-only version. Some of the guys are okay, but some are awful. Sun Ce sounds like a combination of surfer/stoner/lee+hax0r, not only in his dialogue but just his goddamn awful voice. - The music, at times, is extremely cool, but overall it lacks the energy of DW3. Boo. Okay, even the songs I don't like aren't really *BAD*, but they just don't work for this kind of game. - Some of the more powerful DW3 warriors were weakened. In the case of Zhen Ji and Guan Yu, ARRRRRRRGH THE NERFING TOTALLY COCKFUCKYSUCKING SUCKS! At least the pathetic chumps like Zhuge Liang and Pang Tong were improved, but still, there's no explaining why Guan Yu isn't a top-tier fighter in a Romance Of The Three Kingdoms game. - In the special encounter at Hu Lao Gate, Lu Bu is a motherfucking MONSTER. It's patently unfair. I think he killed me in a duel by just tapping me on the shoulder, or maybe breathing heavily, or something. But I guess it's good to see that Koei didn't completely forget how the RoTK book reads and didn't decide to nerf his ass the way they did Guan Yu. Overall, I don't think DW4 will turn non-fans into fans, aside maybe from the improved AI, but those who already liked the series should dig the changes a lot. The game is fundamentally unchanged, really.[/quote]