Review by: Brandon "My hands hurt" Cackowski-Schnell

Writing a review of a ‘Warriors’ game is the ultimate wasted effort. The games don't change that much, so any of the reviews out there for previous outings usually still apply to the current game and most fans don't want it any other way meaning that they don't give a flying chakra about reviews. Heck, I could spend 800 words talking about chicken pot pie and no one would notice. Strange thing, the chicken pot pie. Was someone eating an apple pie and decided, this is great, but what it really needs is some chicken? See? Warriors Orochi fans don’t care!

Anyway…Warriors Orochi 2. Well, it's pretty much the same as Warriors Orochi. Orochi is dead at the hands of various heroes from Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors and Orochi's followers are back at it, trying to raise him/it again to wreak havoc. Not sure why they'd spend so much time trying to raise the dude who couldn't seal the deal in the first game. I can only assume it's so you get a chance to play as bad guys and see just how much fun it is to be evil.

The game boils down to the same thing as all of the other Warriors games. You and your other two heroes start off in a bland looking area. You then run to some blinking point on your map slaughtering anyone who stands in your way. Once you get to the blinking area, maybe there's a captain or a boss, maybe not. Sometimes you'll get a message that grain stores are raising morale of the enemy, even though it doesn't seem to do anything to raise their combat effectiveness. I guess they just die happy with thoughts of grain in their recently split skulls.

Meanwhile you keep on mashing buttons, occasionally swapping your current hero with a new one, or not, maybe using special attacks, or not. Eventually you move on to the next area and when the final boss comes you kill them, cut to a unintelligible cut scene to tell a story that makes no sense and it's back to the battle with you provided your hands aren't throbbing from twenty minutes of continual button pounding.

In between fights you can use earned points to raise up your skills, or get new powers or forge new weapons but the various screens used to do this make about as much sense as the story and realistically, as long as you stick with one hero through that triad's particular story branch, you'll quickly become so overpowered that you could be fighting with a cotton swab and still kill legions of enemy soldiers.