Koei begins milking yet another franchise with the release of Warriors Orochi 2, a game that smashes together characters from the Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors games even though historically each group is centuries and countries apart. Once again the tried and true gameplay of hacking and slashing through a map with a time limit is carted out in front of us. The number of available characters has increased from over 70 to over 90 and there are some tag team and triple team moves that can be pulled off with certain combinations of warriors. Outside of that not much new is brought to the table in either gameplay or graphics.

The original game ended with the combined might of the Three Kingdoms of China and the Warring States of Japan taking out the evil Serpent King, Orochi. This new game starts right from that ending with the same groups - with some new members - facing off against the surviving armies and lieutenants of Orochi as well as other groups that feel the absence of a powerful evil and their leaders want to fill that hole.

Once again there are the basic four stories to go through—one story each for the Wu, Shu and Wei kingdoms of China. The other story revolves around the Samurais of the Warring States kingdom. New to the sequel is a fifth story based around the Orochi army that tells the prequel story of how Orochi gained the power he did. For the first time you are able to take control of the Serpent King, although he isn’t as powerful as he was at the end of the last game. All the stories are told with horrid voiceovers by voice actors that are basically phoning it in. For a series that has had so many versions you would think they’d work a bit harder on the voice side of things.

The game itself has a number of things that keep it from working. First off are the graphics: they aren’t bad, but there is a lot of slowdown when faced off against a lot of enemy groups at one time. The one thing that you can really fault the graphics on is that the regular grunt enemies all look the same, almost as if they discovered cloning centuries ago and started mass producing a clone army that simply keeps coming in waves.

The fighting controls are easy to get the hang of, but for some reason there is not an option to reverse the camera options. Instead you are stuck with what could be the total mirror image of what you’re used to when looking left and right since the camera turns opposite of the way pressed. It can be very discombobulating, although maybe those that play these games are now used to this. The lack of the option to invert the access is crazy – especially if you are trying to bring in new players to these games.