The Musou (or Warriors in the West) are a saga of console games developed by Tecmo Koei whose main trademark involves facing off against armies with a single character, complete with all the standard features of a hack ‘n’ slash. This approach has spawned a subgenre that in turn has led to spinoffs of sagas like The Legend of Zelda (Hyrule Warriors) or manga adaptations like One Piece or Berserk. There are several Android titles that embrace this concept, but few are as complete and close to the original idea as Kingdom Warriors.
For starters, you gotta love the setting in Three Kingdoms China and the mythology surrounding that historical period, with its powerful spear-armed warriors who launch fire attacks against Wei troops. All this fits like a glove with the field battles as presented in this title.
In the game you basically go around beating short missions where you have to clear the scenarios and control your character with a virtual crosspad. As you advance you unlock resources to upgrade your character’s skills, hire extra troops to give you a hand, or find other main characters with different skills to use as needed.
Of course, things eventually get more and more complicated, to the point that you’ll have several bosses on the screen while taking catapult fire and warding off more enemies on your flanks. And then comes even more craziness when you discover that there are also direct faceoff missions and troop respawn à la MOBA. If you embrace the gameplay and get properly stuck in, though, the game is a real pleasure.
What’s inevitable, given that it’s a free-to-play MMO, are all the game modes that orbit the main menu and take their cues from popular, longer-length titles: PvP combats, coop mode, clans, daily events, farming of stones to trade in for more objects, and all the various other stick-and-carrot gimmicks that we alway irredeemably fall into with games like this.
Kingdom Warriors is available on Uptodown and its APK can be downloaded for free here.
