Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce
Koei
Omega Force
PSP
US Release: March 24
UK Release: MArch 24
Origin: Japan

With the phenomenal popularity of the Monster Hunter Portable games, PSP’s prospects in Japan have seen a much-reported boost.

Naturally, developers have been looking to emulate the success of Capcom’s local multiplayer RPG, with recent entrants such as Phantasy Star Portable bringing heavyweight licences to bear on the formula. Koei is now looking to do the same with Dynasty Warriors, transporting a suitably trimmed, reshaped version of the Chinese epic-inspired franchise to the handheld.

While Dynasty Warriors has typically been about ploughing through vast hordes of hapless foot soldiers, Strikeforce offers something more scaled-down, supposedly enhancing the need for tactical co-operation in local multiplayer.

For the move to PSP, the game has ditched the sprawling non-linear battlefields in favour of tighter environments, linked in linear sequence, culminating in horizon-stomping boss-battles. Koei representatives who show the game to us draw comparisons with the kind of pacing and difficulty progression seen in shooters, although there is also a demonstrable strategic element: the stages we see require players to destroy spawn points and artillery to ensure they don’t get overwhelmed when moving on to the larger challenges.
 
Aside from these kind of dispersed multiple objectives, the game provides other compelling reasons to play with friends, not least by being ruthlessly hard in singleplayer. While Koei says that the final version’s difficulty will scale depending on the number of players, the game is geared towards a degree of MMOG-style specialisation that will inevitably make playing as a group the smarter move.

Players can select upgrades as they progress to benefit their entire team, such as a proximity buff to the recharge speed of the spectacular Musou attacks, and biases toward ground and aerial combat.

With an eye on instant action over RPG grind, Strikeforce makes all 36 characters available from the start, and permits players to mix and match any character with any weapon. Although the basic appearance of each character is restricted to one of four traditional costumes in some kind of token deference to the original, the customisation options as you level up will inevitably differentiate them, both visually and in their abilities. Even the town square, which acts as the game’s mission-dispensing hub, will vary depending on whose game you join.

Though bringing a popular franchise to the revived handheld seems like a no-brainer, Strikeforce actually represents something of an experiment for Koei. In the hopes of appealing to the unusually broad demographic so enamoured with Monster Hunter, some of Dynasty Warriors’ hallmarks have been rejected – the most obvious of these being the scale of the armies which you face.

If the Monster Hunter crowd fails to embrace the game, Koei will have to hope that the changes made to the formula don’t alienate Dynasty Warriors’ notoriously dogmatic fans.