Dynasty Warriors: Unleashed Mobile Game Review — Way Better than I expected!
I love Dynasty Warriors. It’s probably my favorite game franchise at the moment. And I love the spin-offs, too, and the licensed games. Omega Force/Koei brings it each and every time, and they’re the last developers making brawlers in a world that has largely forgotten the genre.
The first mobile DW game, Dynasty Warriors Slash, never came out in the US. Which was a huge bummer.
Well now there’s a new one called Dynasty Warriors: Unleashed. It wasn’t developed by Omega Force. Instead, Nexon published the game and hired a couple of smaller teams to make it, using assets borrowed from Dynasty Warriors 8.
It’s basically a blend of a free-to-play Diablo clone, a bunch of menu-based minigame and upgrading stuff, and graphics from Dynasty Warriors. It doesn’t really play like the other games in the franchise…
But I’ve still played it every day for the last two weeks.
Unleashed more or less follows the story of the main franchise games…but the writing is a little bit lame. It seems like it’s badly translated out of its original language, and it has more swearing than the average Dynasty Warriors game. It’s particularly odd/funny to see historical figures associated with nobility and honor randomly swearing at each other.
The gameplay is basic. You use a virtual analog stick to move around, and buttons on the right side of the screen to attack. You can hold down a basic attack button, or fire off special moves that operate on cooldowns. If you don’t actually want to play the game, there’s also an auto mode you can turn on if you just want to watch the computer control your character.
That auto mode is great for grinding for stuff…which you’ll have to do. The difficulty of the story mode ramps up gradually, but it forces you to either grind out your characters and gear, or pay for better equipment…pretty standard for this sort of mobile game. There’s also an energy meter represented by pork buns but it’s actually quite lenient and you can play for really long sessions without running out of energy.
Levels are quick. There’s a star award for completing them in under 3 minutes, and most are over in about half that time. Aside from the main story mode there are a billion other modes. Some of them are daily challenges that use the framework of the main game to pit you against different timed obstacles and rank you on a leaderboard.
Others are menu-based affairs that seem like they’re based directly on other popular mobile games.
In fact, if you download this…be prepared for lots of menu-ing. You’ll use menus to upgrade characters, open daily reward chests and character summons, upgrade items, and play all the side minigames. The menus are a little slower than I’d like, but the character assets used in the menus are much higher quality than those in the game.
Even after all my time playing, I still haven’t unlocked the conquest mode there, which is apparently based on the conquest mode from the main franchise. So, it’s some kind of open-ended RPG thing.
This game has a hilarious amount of content for its low price of free. It doesn’t feature any ads for outside products, though it will frequently bug you to spend money on its own microtransactions. Some of the base packs are pretty expensive too, costing $30. So be careful before you click!
Dynasty Warriors: Unleashed has just enough Dynasty Warriors in it to keep me playing for a while…at least until I can’t take the grind anymore. I think it provides enough fun before the difficulty ramps up to still be worth a download even if you don’t love grinding.
However, if you’re looking for classic Dynasty Warriors-style brawler action…you won’t really find that here. It’s a different sort of game, even though it uses the same graphics and animations.
Far better than it has any right to be since it’s just a Diablo-esque game mashed up with Dynasty Warriors graphics and a bunch of menus, Unleashed is still a solid download. It might not be your new favorite, but I’ll bet you get a fun week out of it.
And if you like what you see here, PLEASE try one of the main franchise games over on consoles/PC. I promise you’ll probably like it if you like fun good things that are good.
Please click the heart if you liked this review! Are you playing this game? Leave your username in the replies below so I can send you a friend request! Now here are some more screens I took!
