With its Musou saga, Koei Tecmo basically inaugurated a new subgenre of hack’n’slash that took the “me against the neighborhood” ethos to absurd levels where individual fighters faced giant armies of humble baddies. Dynasty Warriors Unleashed is the latest installment of the saga and brings it to Android devices for the first time, and though its preliminary version has been available for a few months already, only now has a public beta come out where your progress won’t be reset once the final comes out.
The famous Chinese novel The Legend of the Three Kingdoms is the basis of the series, with the battles between the states of Wu, Shu, and Wei at the end of the Han dynasty. The idea in the game is to beat levels full of enemies by directly controlling a character and using his attacks that can wipe them out with one blow. In the Android adaptation most facets of the gameplay from the original titles have been retained, with the controls adapted to virtual buttons onscreen.
Fans of the Dynasty Warriors saga should be thrilled as this is a “Dream Match” featuring the presence of most of the characters from the eight main titles, though it should be fun for anyone who’s enjoyed one of the Musou games or any of its spinoffs. Zelda, One Piece, Hokuto No Ken, and Gundam are just some of the licenses adapted to this formula.
The game is completely free and follows the inevitable standards of the Freemium model, that is, a story mode where you have to beat a series of scenes one after another, peppered with daily events, PvP faceoffs, interactions with guilds, and other resources to draw you into the game every day and progress constantly. Still, it’s not even remotely the only title in this genre for Android – indeed, some Kingdom Warriors clones out there copy all the gameplays from Dynasty Warriors point by point.
