I have to admit, I've done a terrible thing. All because of me, there are thousands of fatherless children. I've sliced, diced, clubbed, and bashed. I've taken the lives of countless men. All of this, in an effort to simply get a higher gamerscore.

But I digress. Before anyone alerts the authorities, I can explain. I've been playing the latest in the series of games from Koei that many fan' know as the Warrior series. True to the series, its hardcore hack and slash, and in high volume. Warriors Orochi is a combination of the characters from the Dynasty Warriors and the Samurai Warriors series. In this very first installment, an evil demon erpent king appropriately named Orochi comes to rein hell on earth. By manipulating space and time, Orochi brings the greatest warriors from China's Romance of the Three Kingdoms era, and some of Japan's greatest samurai and ninja together all for the purpose of finding a worthy adversary. Compared to the other games, the story is pretty far fetched with no basis on history, but it gets the job done, and explains why all these different characters are in one game.

Warriors Orochi really outdoes the other games on which it is based, offering 79 playable characters. Most are from Dynasty Warriors or Samurai Warriors, although there are two new characters, original to the title. Unlike the other games, Orochi uses a new system for choosing your character. Instead of simply picking one character and sticking with him the whole time, you pick three different characters, which you can quickly swap with a pull of either trigger. Transition between characters is fairly seamless as it is instantaneous - the only time you can't swap them out is when you're actually being beat on. This comes in handy at the higher difficulty levels when the enemy bosses can easily take a chunk out of even your maxed out characters. Also, there are now three types of warriors, Power, Speed, and Technique. Respectively, they are the slow and powerful, quick and a bit weaker, and middle of the road. Each type has its own set of special abilities.

The story mode is split up into four sections. There is a story line for each of the three families in Dynasty warriors (Shu, Wei, and Wu) and another for the Samurai Warriors characters. While the stories are separated this way, characters are unlocked by the story and not the family. For instance, you may unlock a few samurai characters while playing the Wu story line. As the story is completely made up, the characters don't follow the same rules as previous titles, and therefore offers a lot of freedom in where it goes. Unfortunately, this freedom isn't used to its fullest, and ends up being an all too average tale that is just as well skipped.

Anybody who has played the last Dynasty or Samurai Warriors will feel right at home hoping into this title. Aside from the three character system, gameplay is pretty much the same. In fact, a lot is recycled from previous games. The music is taken from both of the games, with maybe one or two remixed tracks. There is only one new map, the rest are just reskinned with a few lava spots (which don't hurt when stepped on,) and some variations on pretty much the same castle. For me, this really created the feeling that I was playing a modded version of the last game, not a whole new experience, and went stale far faster than it should of. Probably the biggest changes aside from the character system are the loss of bodyguards, and the ability that any character can now summon a horse, at any time.

The characters themselves are well designed and have many different move sets from each other - a feat in itself due to the fact that there are so many of them. They are easily distinguishable, and each has a spare model set, in case you like to play a bit of dress up. Allied troops and enemy troops are fairly indistinguishable, aside from using different colored clothing.

There is one thing about this game that people love to hate it for: repetition. That's right, you're mashing the same few buttons over and over again. In fact, you'll probably find a button sequence for each character that you'll stick with, neglecting most of the other move combinations. It seems that some people just cannot stomach the repetition, while others will get mindlessly addicted to the gameplay, and will unlock and max out every character.