KOEI is at it again on the PSP with Dynasty Warriors Volume 2, the third such tactical action game for the system since its launch. While there's lots of new features to discuss, fans of both Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors on the PSP will feel right at home with what KOEI has put together for the next release. The game is a nice blend of familiar gameplay and visuals with some nice new touches and lots of additional content to sink your teeth into. But before we talk about what's new, let's go over this PSP focused Dynasty Warriors title has to offer that you may or may not already be familiar with..

The meat and potatoes of the PSP line of games is Musou mode, a single-player only mode where you choose one hero from the familiar armies (WEI, WU, SHU) and take on several historical scenarios. Unlike its console counterparts, Dynasty Warriors Volume 2 (and its predecessors) is played out on a map filled with connected squares much like a board game. Beyond the main camps for each side, a square might contain special structures that helps whatever side holds them. For example, a Defense Base square raises allied defense and morale when occupied, a Central Fortress is where defeated officers and allies that have retreated are revived after being defeated and a Depot is for supplies and where you can visit to revive your life.

The goal of the game is to defeat the enemy army but there's more than one way to accomplish that. Some maps have victory conditions where simply cutting off the enemy's supplies is enough to do them in, while other times you might have to actually take their main base of operations over to seal the victory. Either way, taking away squares that affect morale is always a smart idea because morale is a major factor on every map square.

Besides defeating the fabled generals of China's most powerful armies, players can chip away at morale on every map square. Each map square has a morale value for each army. The first army to have its morale reduced to 0 loses the battle and retreats. So that's the thrust of the gameplay in Dynasty Warriors Volume 2 and the gameplay is pretty decent because it combines bite sized action (battles don't take all that long on each square due to the whole morale gameplay element and your officers) and the map-based movement is very strategic much like a board game. You can see that KOEI has at the very least refined the gameplay that they created for Samurai Warriors on the PSP and brought over the good stuff from that game to this one.

One other thing worth mentioning is officers. You can have four officers on the map at a time and depending on how many command points you have, you can have some pretty strong fighters helping you go through each area. It's pretty nice having this massive amount of backup and makes going through some of the areas a little easier than it should be, given the bite sized nature of the action.

So that's Dynasty Warriors Volume 2 in a nutshell; it's virtually the same game as it predecessors with a few refinements that fans will appreciate. And what are those refinements? Well. for starters there's just more content. In the first game there were only a mere 100 or so officers you could find or unlock. Sure 100 is a lot of officers in the first place, but more is always better and DWV2 doesn't disappoint. This time out there's around 300 hundred to choose from and now officers have the benefit of being able to pull off Double Musou attacks. And let's say you don't find the officer you want and you don't feel like finding out how to unlock him or her.. well there's even a remedy for that with Ad Hoc officer swapping. If you have a friend that has some officers you want, simply hook up with them and trade to your heart's content.

DWV2 features a lot of other extras as well like 48 playable main characters - which means about 6 new characters to toy around with. The game just offers more of everything - 50 new stages, 31 new maps and one thing that the original failed to deliver: multiplayer. That's right, DWV2 features several multiplayer modes including Bombs Away, Battle Royal, Time Attack, and Sudden Death. Each has its own set of objectives and time limits, so fans can decide which ones will best suit their play styles. Briefly, Bombs away is a game of hot potato where defeating another player reduces their KO count and gives them a time bomb. The one with the highest KO count at the end wins; Battle Royal has players knock units of varying strength for points ala "king of the hill." Knocking units off structures will earn you points and getting knocked down will make you lose points. The player with the most points at the end wins; Time Attack is a race to a goal within a certain amount of time -the first player to make it to the goal in the shortest amount of time wins; In Sudden Death players earn points by defeating enemies. As you succeed the risks become greater because the more enemies you defeat the more dramatic the penalty when you die. The player with the most points at the end wins. In all of these modes an item will appear randomly after defeating an enemy that can be used against other players for some added spice.

There are of course some more subtle changes in the game that will be immediately familiar to Dynasty Warriors fans. The most notable is the way weapons are handled in the game. In the previous game, weapons changes didn't carry over into stages that followed. Now these weapons carry over and your hard work is not in vain. There's also the usual suspects in Camp (where you can view an exhaustive list of information on officers and other important aspect of the game and trade them with friends as we mentioned earlier), and the much loved Free mode. Finally and maybe most important of all for PSP users, is better support of the system's wide screen.

Of course, there's still a one or two problems with the game that are the result of using the same engine as Samurai Warriors for the PSP like not being able to see what is directly behind you. So far, this hasn't been too much of a problem in impacting your survival, but it's something that should be addressed at some point by the developers of this series..

After playing this latest release in the long running Dynasty Warriors series, I have to say I'm digging what KOEI is doing with its PSP leg of the franchise. Sure, Dynasty warriors Volume 2 is an incremental release (a lot like an expansion) but real fans of this series are comfortable with the way KOEI steers its ship. This particular ship is set to sail on October 24th. Look for a full blown review shortly thereafter. – James Fudge