Warriors All Stars Review - All your favourite Koei Tecmo characters in a Warriors game.

By Sam Coles:

Omega Force seem to be a well-oiled machine pumping out their Warriors franchise at an unbelievable rate, as we have had several this year already with an open world debut with Dynasty Warriors 9 coming out soon. Warriors All Stars is what would happen if you take all the characters from Koei Tecmo and put them in a Warriors game, think of it as Omega Forces Smash Bros but with Koei Tecmo characters.

The story is rather weird as some unknown evil force is corrupting everyone in the world that this game is set in, where friends are fighting each other. It’s almost similar to Smash Bros Bawl’s story where you have this vague force corrupting everyone. The story is uninspired and it’s just there to set up the context for you to slaughter the legions of enemies. Voice acting is somewhat decent with a mixture of English and mostly Japanese. However some pieces of dialogue are delivered during battles and this can be annoying with the characters speaking Japanese as the text is in the bottom left of the screen where your eyes are not focused on.

The gameplay is mostly unchanged from other Warriors games, where you’re thrown into a massive and open environment, where legions of enemies try and yet fail to kill you. The combat is still satisfying as you cut down hordes of goons as you see about 30 of them fly into the air team rocket style. What is new is that you can choose a party of Warriors from different games in Koei Tecmo’s library; I went with Ryu Hayabusa, which gave me characters from Team Ninja games such as the new character William from Nioh. You can freely swap each character during battle if one is low on health or you want to pull a specific special move.

However the formula is largely the same from the Berserk game and Samurai Warriors, where you get into massive battles and return to a hub area after. This style of gameplay is fine, but it starting to get a tad samey, as we have had 3 soon to be 4 Warriors style games within 6 months and I’m starting to feel the weight of the repetitive nature.

Visually the game looks really good, with a cartoon aesthetic with bright and vibrant colours throughout. Character models look detailed with great animations, however some of the environments look a bit bland and fall flat in some areas, this looks as if it was on the PS3 and they just ported it to the PS4. The biggest issue is that the game runs at 30 frames per second or tries to run at that targeted frame rate, as it seems to struggle in some sections when it gets busy in the more intense fights. I don’t understand why it doesn’t run at 60 because honestly it’s not the most demanding game in the graphical department, as there are games on the PS4 with high graphical fidelity and run at a high frame rate.

Overall Warriors All Stars is yet another Warriors game; it’s not inherently bad it just lacks any innovation. It is good fun for about five minutes, but there are only so many times I can use light attack and heavy attack to kill hordes of enemies. Let’s hope Dynasty Warriors 9 shakes up the formula when it releases in about a month.