By Sam Coles:
As well as Platinum Games the developers behind the Dynasty
Warriors games have been making spin off titles based on video game series or
in this case a popular Manga. Berserk and The Band of the Hawk is a good game,
however it suffers due to its repetitive nature as the campaign lasts for about
20 hours and it out stays its welcome. Is it terrible? As I said no, but it
could of been shorter.
Berserk’s story is based on the titular Manga where you play
as the bad ass mercenary Guts who has the world’s most impractical sword
alongside with Cloud’s buster sword. The game’s story takes place during the
golden age trilogy of films as it uses animated scenes from the film trilogy
and I must say these animated scenes are beautiful with excellent voice acting
from the Japanese cast. Guts is your standard mercenary wandering from
battlefield to battlefield fighting for whoever pays him the most gold. It’s
not until he encounters a new group of mercs known as The Band of the Hawk he
then settles down into a routine reluctantly as he fights the leader who then
proceeds to incapacitate him. Guts then joins the group where they end up
working for an army so they have a stable income. The game’s story is
interesting to keep you playing with great voice acting and great animations
from the anime cutscenes.
The gameplay is instantly familiar if you have played Hyrule
Warriors or Dragon Quest Heroes where you have a huge map filled with enemies
and objectives where the body count can rise to ludicrous levels. You have
individual objectives which range from destroying catapults or killing high
ranking officers, but it is mostly killing officers which can start to weight
on you by the 10th hour. The game does offer some fun horseback
combat which is hilarious when you run enemies over as they topple over like
bowling pins I was excepting to hear the noise of bowling pins as the animation
was so comedic.
Before each battle you can choose what character you can be,
however in the main story you can only pick Guts and there is not much point to
pick any other characters in the story as Guts gets the job done. The other
characters are great if you want to play in free mode where you can pick any
mission you want with any character you have unlocked where you can experiment
with their move set.
Visually the game looks great as it blends a cell shaded
look with realistic visuals as the character models are cell shaded to fit in
with the Manga inspired look where the environments look great with good
looking foliage and castles. However the locations do get very samey because
once you’ve seen one castle and field you have seen them all.
The game tries to runs at 60 frames per second but it really
struggles most of the time especially when there are lots of enemies on the
screen and when you pull off special moves it starts to chug.
Berserk and The Band of Hawk is great if you’re a fan of the
series but if you’re not it gets stale really fast, it has its moments but
there is not much strategy besides press square to win.
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