I've had this on my to-do list for some time now, i remember this coming out and being sort of fascinated by it. I was heavily into Koei's warrior series stuff, and to see them branch out as many companies did in the 6th gen, and do something different was exciting, and a Sci-Fi warriors type game seemed like such a interesting route to take.

Here I am, years later finally having played probably over half of it, and i have to say, it's a disappointment.

I'll start with the positives however, it looks very good for a game from this era, and aesthetically it's pretty interesting to look at most of the time. The music is decent, it's a mix of grand orchestral stuff, with some nice Sci Fi techno ambience, the main hub ship you select missions etc from has some nice vibes.

Now for the less good.

Gameplay wise, the premise is distinct enough from a warriors title, while it does have masses of enemies, and has a graphical look and feel most koei players will know immediately, it attempts to separate itself out, with varied objectives and missions. However, while trying to do a bit of koei warrior stuff, and a bit of sci-fi mission stuff, it ends up messing up both.
The koei warrior stuff, doesn't have enough depth, your melee attacks only hit up to 4 times, and there's no heavy/weak combos or anything, you have one string of hits to use, over and over. And with this being a sci fi, you have guns to use also. However in practice it turns into you standing still, holding the shoot button down, spraying bullets for about 10 minutes at 300 tiny bugs without any real variation. It's extremely monotonous.
The mission based elements take a weird control scheme (more on that later) that's designed for killing 100s of bugs, and try to have you complete very specific tasks that it's simply not designed for. Namely; physically running into the backside of a NPC to push them around through obstacles and platforming bits, and picking out hidden enemies disguised as NPCs among crowds of other NPCs. The second example being funniest, as can you imagine playing dynasty warriors and trying to kill one specific troop out of a crowd of like 40, without hurting anyone else?

Control wise, this game decides to screw with a control layout that koei very much had pinned down at this point, i can't believe i'm actually saying this, as i personally hate this line of criticism, but this has terrible tank controls.
Even once you've got used to them, which really doesn't take too long, you immediately start seeing issues, the game throws piles upon piles of enemies on you, that all move way too fast, and vary in importance when deciding who or what to kill. Unfortunately you can't really target specific enemies, or lock on, the game just sort of does it for you, and at times you want to shoot some giant boss thing, and instead end up shooting pointless filler enemies you don't care about. You can manually aim, but the little enemies interrupt it simply by touching you. There's no block button, and everything feels stiff, you have to finish specific animations before you can begin a new one, there's a dash button, and a jump button, and in most games, you would use the two together for fast jumps, etc. Here that's not allowed, you do one, or the other.

The story shows some promise, there's an attempt at building a world, there's databases, and fluff to read. But it's held back by a terrible script or at least a terrible translation (which was common back then.). Characters say some extremely laughable weird stuff, voices and animations often just don't really match the general design of the characters themselves. It's very funny having the main character with his pretty-j-rock hair-do loudly asking if he's a monster in his goofy baggy pants, all with a voice that just really doesn't sound right for him. Ultimately, what promise the story has just crumbles over how it's delivered, turns out you can't have the cast of DW3 deliver space opera dialogue effectively.

Overall, do i recommend this? I don't know. I found myself oddly drawn to stick with it for some time, even after most of these issues rose. There's a charm here, and it does move pretty fast and respects your time. However, the little things that annoy you early on, become much bigger things later.

Have a look if you want to see koei do Sci Fi, or don't, if you don't want to shoot 375 million tiny bugs for 7 hours.

Reviewing again for Sengoku Basara, the original japanese version.

Holy smokes (and not the cigarette smell that follows my devil kings copy) this is actually good! For some reason the western version removed 4 playable characters and downgraded them to NPCs??? I can't really make sense of it at all, why they'd choose to do it at all.

The four you miss out on are actually pretty fun to play as (bar matsu who is a clone of Kenshin). Especially Shimazu who sports a comically oversized sword that is very satisfying to use.

The other big change is aesthetics, most obvious is the change of character names and settings to blander more stupid ones in devil kings (Toshihiro Shimazu to 'Zaan' urgh), and a confusing mish-mash of troop redesigns and locations, where you fight demon knight dudes, and Egyptian temple looking stuff, and also POUNDING DARK TECHNO.
Basara is a more consistent whole. The whole thing is styled after it's source material; namely the Sengoku period, you have japanese art-print style character potraits, music that feels more correct to the setting, and troops and places are more variations on different japanese locations with a exaggerated anime spin on them.

I think one of the characters in particular that comes off better in Basara is Francis Xavier, or 'Xavi' (Q-ball for devil kings, fuck knows) who in Basara is portrayed as a crazed cult fanatic preaching love and peace at the end of a gun barrel, surrounded by japanese converts in poofy pants and frilly neck collars. The satire actually works really well, there's a cutscene where you see Xavi's vision of Japan, and it's just a series of stereotypes and half-understood japanese stuff.

Eitherway, if you can import (i got a nice collectors edition very cheap) or emulate this version, i highly reccomend.

One of games me and my brother got with our PS1. Made by the same guys as Ride To Hell Retribution.

Somewhat passable little racing game on the surface, but it's let down by various things.

It looks sort of ugly, especially compared the micro machines games that were it's contemporaries.

It plays weird, it's hard to explain, cars are very slippy and the AI ranges from perfect, to getting stuck on terrain. There's hazards that are very luck based too which doesn't help.

The main menu is a war crime, it made no sense to me as a kid, the way you pick what type of race, or what car was extremely unintuitive.

The soundtrack on the flipside, is pretty good.

Don't hate it, full of nostalgia, but it aint good.

IT'S QUIET IT'S QUIET NO ACTIVITY

Take the most bland FPS from the late 90s, and then wrap it in a 40K skin, and you get this.

I'm glad it wasn't space marine/imperium focused, the idea of going with the Tau is a good idea, as they are the closest 40K has to 'good guys'. And honestly i think they should give this another go.

But other than that, i don't have too much good to say. 40K is a grim dark world, but it doesn't have to be boring visually. Here it very much is. The first two levels are long dull stretches of brown trench with the same square metal window things every two metres, following this is a series of metallic corridors, and really quite lame looking imperial propaganda posters.

Gameplay is where it flounders worst. Exploding barrels all over the place, first enemy in the game takes too long to kill, despite being a Tau game, the Tau guns themselves are useless, and you end up finding out the imperial guns are much better, despite much of 40K's internal setting telling you otherwise.

The game doesn't really provide much in the way of intuitive hints or help. Early on you face a twin jet plane thing, and you're just told to 'make the landing zone safe' essentially. So i empty all my piddly tau guns into the thing, and then all my inexplicably better shitty imperial lasguns and bullet-based weapons into it, and yet it still keeps on truckin'.

Turns out, you're supposed to shoot it's turbines, and these aren't highlighted in any sort of way ( not that i want big giant arrows or glowing effects ), and they don't give any real visual or audio clue when you hit them as if to say 'yes, shoot here please'. And even on the easiest setting, it's really quite difficult. I ended up cheesing it, hiding behind a pipe which i don't think was intended to make you un-hittable.

Overall, i can't really recommend. Even if you love 40K and want a neat gen6 Warhammer game, it's just incredibly dull and tedious.

I'm sure i'll get attacked for saying it, but i actually enjoyed this less than Blood Omen 2.

The combat is very repetitive, as is the story, which basically sees raziel and kain visiting the same repeated shrine/temple thing with very samey layouts. Neither of them meet too often, which removes opportunities for the two to interact which is where most of the series' strongest scenes come from. instead they just monolgue about art on walls.

The new combat system feels out of place, i go back to the other games and find i just enjoy the more simple realistic quality to this combo based, clunky one.

It does look nice, and any time spent in Nosgoth is a good time. And the story twists when they do eventually hit are very good.

Easily the worst game I've ever played. No hyperbole, no exaggeration. Often people throw around the term 'broken' at games all the time, but here it's the perfect fit.

The game feels like a busted up old car, and all the time you're playing you're wondering if the wheels are about to come off.

It's honestly just flooring how unfinished it feels, i play ps2 stuff all the time, no emulation or anything, and most games from this era work pretty much fine with minimal glitches and errors out of the box. It's more common to see glitches now, as games are huger, and generally more complex.

This game is a notable exception. Massive lag and slowdown, visual errors, sound errors, crashes, glitches galore, i don't know where to even start honestly.

Even if you put all this aside in it's own box ( and it's a big box ), the game is just massively inferior to what came before it. It looks worse, it plays worse, it's derivative, the story just reuses Ripto for no reason, who just sort of shows up? It's got a fraction of the amount of levels as the others.

I don't really hate this thing, i was too shocked by how busted it was, but i can't really justify putting any other game lower than this.

Over in Europe it's just 'Micro Maniacs' rather than the weird and un-necessary foxkids.com bit. Plus the box art looks better.

ANYWAY

This thing is great, played it a bunch growing up, and i wish they'd went back to this concept.

Shrunk down super-heroes running around bedrooms and backyards in a foot race.

It's really quite creative, every level is memorable and unique, the retro one in particular where you get sucked into a 8-bit space-frogger type game mid-race is a stand out. But all are really cool and worth seeing.

The characters are distinct, each with their own style and ability types. And the music is fantastic.

I understand that the nostalgia here is strong for me, but i genuinely think this is a hidden gem for the PS1.

This is about as close to realism as koei's warriors series gets. Because of the fairly basic nature, the lack of extra combos and weapons, this game is by far one of the hardest they've made. Your abilities and combos are basically no better or worse than every basic soldier you fight. All you have are better stats. Even crazier, the AI seems more dangerous in this, i swear i've seen them steal my horse.

All in all, it's a pretty interesting experience to go back to this, if you want a really challenging look at how Dynasty Warriors started.

Part of my attempt at testing/listing all ps2 midas games (at least the ones i own, i'm not a masochist).

I kinda liked this honestly, the graphics aren't great for the time, but it is a 2000 release. I have a soft spot for these 3rd person action fantasy rpg type games, there were a few in this era, deathtrap dungeon being another.

It has one of those systems where armor/weapons actually get displayed on your character which i like.

It's a touch too difficult, you really seem to burn through health, and the jumping is pretty awkward, mind you there isn't much jumping to do.