KOEI seems to be stuck in time when it comes to its Dynasty Warriors action strategy series, and to delight of fans worldwide, that's a good thing. Case in point - Dynasty Warriors 5 Empires for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox 360. Once again players are thrown into the tumultuous timeline of ancient China's Three Kingdoms era, where all hell was breaking loose and warlords and wisemen were attempting to reunite the great land and create a new age of honor and prosperity.

Dynasty Warriors 5 Empires does what it's supposed to this time out, offering tactical planning, a tiny bit of micro-management of your kingdom and officers, and good old fashioned hack and slash action with some magical Musou-* attacks against hundreds of soldiers on the map vying for bases. Players will have to conquer all 25 regions of China in 100 turns or less to get the job done - and once they've done that they can play five additional scenarios in Empire Mode as well as taking on battles in the game's Free Mode. There's also a co-op two player mode so your friends can join in on the fun in Empire Mode and Free Mode - very handy for those huge battles.

In Empire Mode players will have 4 historical campaigns they can play and two fictional campaigns. In the previous game players only had access to one historical and one fictional. The historical scenarios (you start out with the usual the Yellow Turban revolution scenario) offers the distribution of military power as it actually was laid out in that time period of the Three Kingdoms era. The fictional scenarios offers a more freeform approach to gameplay. Either way there are lots of choices, but in order to play all of them you'll have to do some work in the early scenarios to unlock the rest.

The way that DW5E uses officers is pretty straightforward - you have Generals and Lieutenants. Generals tend to come in two flavors - warriors that you can physically take onto the battlefield (you can control them or the AI can handle them) and policy makers. Lieutenants are you basic officers that control troops and avoid the whole "bodyguard" element of gameplay that Generals do. In DW5E players can bring three generals and three Lieutenants into combat, but they can also add additional officers of each type as relief forces. Relief forces are handy for those battles where you don't plan properly or there are massive amounts of soldiers on the field and the battle isn't going your way.

Unlike DW4E, players can now issue four different types of commands using the cross: "down" will tell your soldiers to defend territory or bases that you already control, "Up" will order them to aggressively attack points on the map in contention, "Left" will force all officers to gather at your current location and "Right" will relinquish control of officers back to the AI. Finally players can also issue even more select commands to offers in the Unit Info screen after hitting the Start button. This is quite a vast improvement over the previous game, which only let you control the character you are using.

DW5E also offers a lot more policies than the previous game - there are now a total of 75 policies, ten of which the player can control the timing of. Policies are used in a myriad of ways to help govern, affect battle, form alliances etc. Fans of the series will obviously find these extra policies a vast improvement over the previous title because it offers you a lot more neat options to toy around with.

The Edit Mode also makes a return, allowing generals to be built using a limited number of faces, models and combat types. While this feature is still fairly limited, it's still very handy when you want to create a leader with a specific look or specific attacks. There are a total of 20,000 edit combinations at your disposal and 6 lieutenants models to choose from, so there is a lot of tinkering you can do to make something unique. Of course those folks who want to jump right in will see 48 main playable characters during the course of the game, so there's plenty of variety for everyone. The most interesting element of this is the ability to store specific battle tactics that can be used in the preparation stage of a battle. For example, you might use Demoralize to lower the morale of your target army or you might use a tactic that allows you to slow them down. There are a number of these that just give players an edge in battle that can turn the tide of a battle that almost seems impossible.

Finally there's the usual assortment of extras in DW5E that are available from the beginning and unlockable. The most important are the Encyclopedia and Archives. While the Encyclopedia offers you a great deal of history on the Three Kingdoms era, it is the Archives that provides the most game related detail. In it you'll find art, movies that you can unlock and a plethora of information on the officers in the game, unit types, Policies details, weapons info and item details. It's a very useful tome of information that can help you get the jump on the game if you're a novice to the world of Dynasty Warriors.

While the gameplay in the Xbox 360 version and the PlayStation 2 are virtually identical, the Xbox 360 version does offer support for enhanced widescreen graphics presented in full 720p, Dolby Digital 5.1 sound support. From a gameplay standpoint there's are more save slots in the Xbox 360 game (10 total) and some unlockable achievements. Players that own an Xbox 360 can't really go wrong by picking it up for the system but if you own a PlayStation 2 and have been playing the DW series on it comfortably for a long time, there's nothing wrong with sticking with that platform. Personally I enjoyed the PS2 version better because the familiarity with the controls.. Mileage may very on that front.

At first glance, Dynasty Warriors 5 Empires looks like a pretty solid gameplay experience that fans of the series will almost immediately enjoy. Does the game bring enough new innovation to satisfy fans looking for a little bit more than the usual Empires gameplay? The jury's still out but we'll let you know shortly in our review. But the real interesting question is can this release bring new gamers to the table - specifically Xbox 360 owners that have never had the Dynasty Warriors experience? That's a question that a review can't really answer but we'll do our best to hash it all out. Dynasty Warriors 5 Empires will be widely available for the PS2 and Xbox 360 on March 28th.