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GamesRelay Score
Below Average
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Name: Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 2
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Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 2 has a hard goal to achieve, not because of any competitors in its genre but simply because the majority of other games in Koei's Warrior series haven't been that overly impressive to date. As with any new game one should always keep an open mind, playing through at a moderate pace to see and experience as much as possible. Like the earlier Gundam game, Gundam 2 brings a huge amount of content to the table, while this sounds like a strong point, unfortunately it's not since the majority involves button bashing your way through the game like a raving lunatic gone insane with a controller.
Anyone that plays the game should have no trouble in picking the controls up since they are extremely simple, however, what is daunting, is the amount of knowledge related to the Gundam universe and story associated with it that is required to understand what is going on. The Gundam games themselves originate from both the Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors games, both borrowed content from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms novel, but Gundam borrows its content from the Mobile Suit Gundam anime series. While this may sound minor, knowing about the two will greatly benefit your understanding of the game as a whole. That's not to say the game doesn't explain it to you because it does, but it tells it in such a way that you often find yourself confused with the scraps of information presented before you.
Each of the main characters you play with have their own story associated with them, this however can be daunting on the outset since the numerous amount of characters you can play can take an enormous amount of hours to play through and complete. You would expect each characters story to be more like a book or an anime style comic with a wealth of information given, but the dribs and drabs of what you do see and hear as you play through make playing all the characters individually pretty negligible story wise. The dialogue and voice acting simply doesn't help matters either, with such success behind its name it's disappointing that it can come across so amateurish, the actors try to distill a sense of meaning in their words but fail in trying to deliver anything other than witty lines which try to impress but ultimately fail.
Unfortunately, whichever character you choose to spend your time with, the experience is the same. Put simply, you enter a battlefield and take on thousands of enemies over and over (dare I say it?) and over again, dexterous masochists will be in their prime here and you'll no doubt be able to tell apart who has and who hasn't played the Gundam games simply by looking at their oversized fingers pulsating with muscle from bashing the attack buttons none stop all the way through. The various Gundam suits you choose to employ do have their own types of attacks but the repetitive nature of the gameplay and battles doesn't change or vary. Battlefield victory conditions do adjust during the course of the battle by throwing AI-controlled commanders into the war zone, these can be allies or enemies and thus either help or attack, these do however lead to mission losses if the allied ones die, usually not by any fault of your own you'll find but simply their inability to protect themselves to any varying degree. It's, I am afraid to say, the same with the majority, if not all of the time you fight your way through the hordes of robots on the battlefield, they tend to stand around wondering what to do even when your carving up their brethren in a crazed state of mental fury. You will find the odd one or two seem to be interested in your fighting abilities and fancy a piece of the action themselves, but offering themselves to the mercy of your weapons seems to come first and foremost before trying to defend themselves.
The game does come with multiplayer, this is in the form of "War Mode" which allows yourself and a friend to play together through various mission requirements, this does alleviate some of the negatives to the game and it can become quite enjoyable until the novelty wears off and you and your friend realize you have other games you would rather be playing. Alternatively, online Deathmatch is available for four players as well.
Graphically the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 editions aren't terribly bad looking, though they do seem like a high definition version of the PlayStation 2 version. The PS2 version however suffers from limited draw distance which makes the battlefield feel cramped even with robots staring into sky littered all over the place. The Gundam suits themselves are fairly believable, that's not to say they could have been better since Gundams are supposed to be enormous mobile robot suits towering above most other life, it just doesn't come across that way. Some of the attacks are fairly well animated with nice effects, but do become tiring since you'll end up finding the attack which does the most damage and repeating it... Yes, over and over again.
So, overall Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 2 is unfortunately a game which is lacking in a lot of areas. It's a game that should appeal to hardcore fans of the Gundam games and its previous reiterations, but with the amount of gameplay at hand, it's more boring than anything else. For those that do sit through one of its many characters, you'll find the sparse story to be lackluster and uninviting making you question whether it's even worth playing through the rest of it or taking it back for a refund or exchange. Is it worth buying? If you're anything other than a crazed button bashing masochist or a die-hard Gundam fan then simply put, no.