Review by: Michael Barnes

I went through an unusual arc of critical appraisal with Tecmo Koei’s new game Warriors: Legends of Troy, a title that transports Koei’s typically Asian recipe for faux-historical button-mashing to Ancient Greece. At first, I thought the Trojan War setting might convince me that this Westernized Dynasty Warriors would at least hold my interest. I thought that the sword-and-sandal makeover might convince the part of me that loves The Iliad that the unfortunate shallowness that pervades the developer’s games was at least in the service of a cool Classical setting. After a few minutes of gameplay, I was declaring “this is absolute garbage, there’s no way I can play this enough to review.”

The animation is crap, the voice acting a nightmare. Who pronounces “Zeus” as “Zaius” anyway? The cut-scenes- complete with rousing speeches and oodles of portent look and feel cheap. What’s worse, like other Dynasty Warriors titles, there really isn’t much to the game other than wandering around a field and killing tons of enemies while pulling off simple combos and the occasional finishing move. Keep the kill train a-rolling and you earn Kreos to spend in an inter-level shop that sells a variety of items that either slightly increase stats or unlock another boring combo.

There is a simple mission structure, but like all of the game’s mechanics it’s so perfunctory as to almost not even be present. Each level is a map, and if you happen across a group of citizens that need help or soldiers that need reinforcements, then you’ve found a secondary mission. Every level also has a couple of man-to-man duels where the troops form a circle and you clobber a guy to death. It requires slightly more strategy than fighting the hordes—sometimes you have to press the block button or roll to evade an attack.

But about an hour into the game, as I waded with Achilles into a mob of AI-less, imbecilic adversaries and cut them to pieces more or less while they stood and stared at my Brad Pitt-like awesomeness (yes, the developers have clearly seen Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy), I found that I was actually sort of enjoying it. I was getting into rushing toward a line of enemy troops, spotting their commander, and then running up and doing a one-hit flying kill on him. I loved picking up a spear off the ground and throwing it at the guy with broken morale running away. I also liked that each level puts you in the sandals of a different character. Achilles was cool, Ulysses and Paris just rocked. I was kind of getting into it, and I thought we might be cruising toward a B- or C+ review score.

Let’s shuttle forward to the point where I’m about five hours into the game. I’m playing the game, killing yet another mob and fighting yet another tough guy. I start realizing that it’s actually kind of hard for me to get killed since the enemy soldiers may as well be zombies incapable of using weapons. There are multiple difficulty levels, but I was playing on hard and cutting through the game almost literally by using one good combo and an area effect attack. All of the levels start to look the same, apart from a couple of metropolitan areas. Even the introduction of an Amazonian warrior does little to ignite the spark. I’m halfway into her level, and I start dozing off. I wake with a start, and I realize that I’m just flat bored with the game. The next day, I boot it up and the thought of playing it actually kind of turns my stomach.

So where I stand today as I write this review is just short of the “this is absolute garbage” stage I was at early in the game. There simply isn’t enough depth or dynamism in the game to earn all but the most diehard Koei fan’s money. Holding Legends of Troy in comparison to other brawlers on the market, the game feels paltry, cheap, and empty. Koei games are often criticized for their repetition and wafer-thin gameplay, and this game absolutely represents the worst traits of its modus operandi.