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Ancient China, impressive graphics, and action-packed gameplay | Review - Dynasty Warriors M

3K View2023-10-26

Dynasty Warriors M

6.8

ActionStrategy

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✨Overview

Dynasty Warriors M is now in a soft-launch capacity for SEA regions, for both the iOS and Android. As a free-to-play title with item-based microtransactions, dive into the epic battles of the Three Kingdoms era on your mobile devices. A worldwide release is anticipated later towards the end of the year.

I used to play a lot of Dynasty Warriors and Romance: of the Three Kingdoms on my PS2 backthen in my childhood days, so it’s a delight to see that the franchise is still alive and kicking. Now, we are getting a full-on Dynasty Warriors experience on mobile, and it features console-level of visuals and gameplay.

Dynasty Warriors is an action-packed video game series known for its hack-and-slash gameplay. Players take on the role of legendary warriors from ancient China's Three Kingdoms era. The core of the gameplay involves battling hordes of enemies on vast, open battlefields.

📖Story

Dynasty Warriors M transports players to the turbulent period of the Three Kingdoms, where they embody legendary figures from China's rich history. The game's narrative is woven around significant historical events, including the Yellow Turban Rebellion.

🎨Graphics and Art Style

Dynasty Warriors M recreates famous battles and events from Chinese history. Players participate in these large-scale conflicts, with allies and enemies engaged in warfare all around them. These battles are both challenging and visually spectacular. The graphics fidelity is remarkable and feature console levels of fidelity, and featuring highly detailed 3D models for the characters especially for the character view screen, which allows for some pretty eye candy. The game’s fidelity levels is on par with the mainline’s latest game: Dynasty Warriors 9, and even features the same artwork in some images used in the mobile game.

🎮Gameplay Overview

⚔️Combat

Players can collect characters from a diverse roster of historical figures, each with their own unique weapons and abilities. They engage in combat with countless enemy soldiers, officers, and formidable generals. Combos and special attacks are crucial for taking down immensely large groups of foes. Basically. As a superhero-like being battling hundreds of onscreen soldiers and taking them down all at the same time, the gameplay is immensely satisfying.

🏯Kingdom building

While the core gameplay is action-oriented, there are strategic kingdom building elements as well. Players need to upgrade their castle and infrastructure of their city, such as the Main Castle itself, Sawmills, Forge, and Quarry for resource production, and Training Sites, Academy, and Workshop for more improvements to your progression. Upgrades are done over real-time, as well as accumulating resources, so you’d have to wait literal minutes, hours, or days for to be able to upgrade your castle and structures.

⏫Progression

As players progress through the game, they can upgrade their characters, unlock new weapons and abilities, and customize their warriors to suit their preferred playstyle. Each character — called officers — also have their own elemental affinities that play in a rock-paper-scissors type of system, where elemental advantages are possible which will result into bonus damage. The main source of progression is the conquest system where you roam around the land in an overworld style, retaking territory one by one. Progressing this mode will unlock other modes. Including the chapterized story mode which has its own set of missions to complete. For both the conquest and story modes, all your character roster are available to use, which can sometimes result in some identical fighters on both sides.

💵Gacha

Through gacha mechanics, you can pull new Officers to your roster, or upgrade your existing ones with duplicates. You can also outright spend real money to gain more pulls, boost your resources, or hasten your construction upgrades. And there is a pressure for players to do so: around two hours in, I’ve already hit a gacha wall. Although free-to-play progress is still possible by just waiting for resources to complete, aiming for mission rewards, and doing kingdom and character upgrades that way. As a gacha game, it includes familiar features like login bonuses, weekly events, daily and weekly farming game modes, premium currency, and I found no stamina or energy feature in play, so you’re mainly gated in progression by your team’s total combat power.

📊Technical Performance

Although it can suffer from framerate drops especially during large crowds, I still found the performance serviceable for the visuals and amount of on-screen units presented. Still, the game offers three visual settings. For me, I played on the highest settings with my Snapdragon 888 device, which gave me the best visuals and decent performance.

Unfortunately, the game only supports 16:9 aspect ratio, which results in black bars in both sides. Seeing there’s almost ZERO mobile phones using that aspect ratio, it is something that needs to be worked on. Additionally, as of this soft launch state, menu navigation can be sluggish and laggy, often displaying "connecting" messages that may be indicative of server-related issues.

⚖️Conclusion

With Dynasty Warriors M, Nexon has succeeded in bringing the epic Dynasty Warriors experience to mobile platform with its ancient china experience, impressive graphics, and action-packed gameplay. It is now in a free-to-play gacha form, so it may prove to be contentious for some players, especially those looking for the exact same progression experience as they would get on consoles and PC.

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Comments

Ρяιи¢єѕѕ ∂σℓℓу

I will never understand why some people criticised this game to have bad graphics, even though it's not? Not sure if the people complaining about it own cheap phone devices. Sure, it's not next-gen graphics but it's not mediocre either. I play the game at max settings using Black Shark device and visually it looks way better than it's original Dynasty Warriors Unleashed. But in terms of gameplay and immersion, it does lack than the original one due to having fewer contents and monotonous combat. They give tons of freebies, gacha currencies and SSR officers to all users which is a positive thing. The game somewhat gives users the nostalgia of good mobile games that existed years ago. All-in-all, the game may not be impressive but it's not bad either. Majority of people complaining about this game are probably either homestuck MiHoYo fan boys or inexperienced rookies finding excuses to defame a game whose developer company does not look discriminate on it's community with trash rewards ~

2023-12-24