Impressions – three for the Price of One (Dynasty Warriors:  Strikeforce, X-men Origins:  Wolverine, Hannah Montana)

Clawing someone has never been so satisfying.

  

No, I’m not talking about the latest Wolverine game, I’m talking about Dynasty Warriors:  StrikeForce.  If you’ve played one Dynasty Warriors game, you’ve played them all.  Loosely based on the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history, you choose your hero and plow through hundreds of nameless warriors. 

     Strikeforce breaks that trend.  The game sticks to the same heroes and same time period and there are still lots of nameless drones to get through but its much more complex than the previous incarnations.  Throwing in a bit of RPG flair, your character starts off in a town.  Here you can purchase upgrades for your character, weapons, miscellaneous items, combine materials for your upgrades, and store your loot.

As you go through the game, officers will show up at your town to give you their card.  These cards are used to upgrade the shops in town so they carry better items.  Another nice addition is secondary weapons.  For example, my favorite character uses a Bo staff.  His secondary weapon is a sword but I can purchase and equip my second favorite character’s claws.  Happy day for me!

As far as the weapons go, one the biggest complaints about the previous Dynasty Warriors game was that a lot of characters lost their unique weapons and styles ending up as re-skinned clones of a small pool of characters.  Strikeforce corrected a lot of this by giving these characters back their original weapons, plus, as mentioned, the ability to have a secondary weapon of your choosing.  This more than makes up for the clones in the previous incarnation of Dynasty Warriors.

Another new addition is the fury mode where your character glows, changes color, gets much bigger hair, and deals a lot more damage.  The game play itself is much more goal oriented and also has a bit of a steep learning curve.  Like the previous games, you have a story mode and a free mode.  Each scenario will give you a specific objective that must be achieved to clear the stage, a secondary objective for a bonus, and a time period in which to complete it.  You also get three lives per stage before it’s game over and believe me you will die.

I think that’s my biggest gripe, though I love the ramped up difficulty and the creative new additions to a franchise that while lots of fun is incredibly repetitive, some of the deaths are incredibly cheap.  Some maps can be difficult to understand, leaving you wondering where to go next and will lead to your very messy demise until you figure it all out.  There are also enemies that fly/float which are hard to kill and throw a mean energy curveball.

The game offers multiplayer and though I haven’t had a chance to try it yet, I do think that having some friends play with you would probably make it more fun and less frustrating.  In conclusion, expect an amped up Dynasty Warriors experience, keeping a lot of the old but plenty of new to make the game fresh, fun & exciting.  The graphics are sharp, beautiful, and about PS2 quality.  Now if only they would find a cure for “enemy pop up”.

Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce is a PSP game by Koei.

X-Men Origins:  Wolverine

I was looking forward to this game, I really was…I was expecting a claw slashing frenzy of Wolverine being the best at what he does.  What I got was the equivalent of the kid who got a box of rocks instead of a DS for his birthday.

For the record, I played the PSP version and have yet to try the “uncaged’ console version which many claim is very good and superior to the handheld version (It wouldn’t take much to surpass the PSP version though, so that isn’t much of an endorsement).  Now I get that it’s a brawler and I love brawlers and beat’em ups as much as the next person but that doesn’t excuse this game for its lackluster presentation and dull combat.  If I had to summarize this game in one sentence I would say this game is the equivalent of taking God of War:  Chains of Olympus and Ninja Gaiden:  Dragon Sword, shaking vigorously and X-Men Origins:  Wolverine would be the defective, rejected offspring.

The graphics while nice are a real step down from games like God of War, Crisis Core, and other recent PSP games.  This game seems to have dug an even deeper hole in the Uncanny Valley.  If Wolverine really looked like that I’d recommend some sort of facial reconstructive surgery.  I won’t lie, I didn’t get too far into the story, wait, what story?  Story seems to be an alien concept to this game.

Wolverine spends his time strapped to an electric chair.  Stryker give you a bit of expository dialogue and then proceeds to zap Wolverine. A cutscene/ flashback ensues, and then you claw and beat your way through the stage.   As we know, Wolverine can regenerate any time he is injured.  Well that’s not entirely true in this game.  You’ll run into spots where poison, fire, and other status aliments will prevent Wolverine from regenerating for a while.

Boss fights are a study in frustration and twitchy reflexes.  Boss characters deal Wolverine plenty of damage while he pretty much tickles them unless you mash the circle button at just the right second.  They also can regenerate about ten times faster than Wolverine can.  These fights can drag on and get incredibly tedious.  There is a mechanic called “rage mode” where Wolverine races around doing major damage for a few seconds.  It’s a nice mechanic but it doesn’t last very long making it almost useless against the tons of faceless characters that appear.

In conclusion, skip this snore fest unless you are a huge Wolverine fan, only own a PSP, and need to waste some time, or have money to burn (in which case can I have a loan?).

If you really want to play a PSP game with Wolverine  in it that’s a lot of fun and a brawler, pick up Marvel Ultimate Alliance (which by the way has better graphics, an actual story, and includes Deadpool – being Deadpool).

X-Men Origins:  Wolverine is a PSP game released by Activision.

Hannah Montana the Movie:  The Game

Though this game is classified action, it’s more of a music/ rhythm game.

In the DS version, the top screen shows the action and the bottom screen is used to access Hannah’s cell phone, clothes, accessories, etc.  Controls are split with the touch screen being used for menu selections and the buttons being used to move around.  There really isn’t much to say about this game.  Clocking in at about three hours, there really isn’t much there.  The graphics are sub par even by DS standards and if the game didn’t actually say Hannah Montana, you’d never know who the characters are based on their in game looks.

There are no mode options and once you complete the short story, you can go back and play mini-games to justify your purchase.  What there is of the game is fun to play but it could have been better.  Rent it, buy it used at a discount, retail is too much for too little.

Hannah Montana the Movie:  the Game is a DS game by Disney Interactive.