I did wish you had more control over all of your units rather than just units that are under your immediate command, because when you switch from your cavalry unit to your infantry, you have no direct control over what the cavalry unit will run off and do. The A.I. here is not so hot; in fact it is downright frustrating at times. I have experienced countless situations where my units just walked into a slaughter and made no effort to retreat. Therefore, you need to be quite diligent with your units and use them properly; otherwise you will be out of luck and quickly find yourself between a rock and a hard place. Koei should definitely look into implementing some sort of co-op mode, as this type of game would benefit greatly from its inclusion. Each player could command their own legions of units and coordinate their attacks with precision, which could definitely add longevity to the game-play.

It is good to see Koei switching up the battle system here and making the honest effort to try something relatively different from their previous games, but like I said before there are some issues with it. You will have to put time into the game, because initially the battles are not very inspired and are somewhat boring to say the least. It will pretty much go like this: choose your group of units, enter battle with an enemy group, choose an attack, wait for your battle gauge to refill and repeat until they fall. Because the battle gauge does take relatively long to refill, it is strange to see a huge skirmish taking place but nobody actually doing anything.  Then at the same time all of your units will perform the action you selected, before going back to waiting for their gauges to fill up.

Graphics and Sound

I will be honest from the get go: the graphics in Bladestorm are very underwhelming. The large numbers of units on the screen and a few simple graphical effects, such as blur and bloom lighting are the highlights. There is no reason this could not have been done on the PS2, especially with all the jaggies and aliasing present. The frame rate generally keeps up with the action. After playing a few Dynasty Warriors game on various systems its pretty clear Koei does not put a ton of effort into the visuals. The intro video is very well done; clearly a lot of time was spent in planning and it was pulled off with flying colors. Unfortunately, when you first get into the tavern, it is pretty clear the opening movie was not using in game assets.

There is a good amount of detail on your character and the various units you command, but generally the action is hectic and constantly moving, so it is hard to point out the details. You can only appreciate them during the cut scenes and close ups. The unit animation is alright; you can see the archers pull out arrows from their quivers and pull back on the bow. The problem is that they all fire at the same time; same applies with your swordsman and all the other units. As soon as they execute the command you have chosen, all the units go into the same canned animation simultaneously. So you will get tired of seeing the same animation cycle over and over.