- Total Score - 8/108/10
Summary
Fans of the genre will enjoy the updated visuals, and how focused the empire building is Dynasty Warriors 9 Empires
Warriors 9: Empires is the newest entry, focusing on the spin-off, empire-building, and character creation fans love.
In the past, Empires has typically focused on sandbox gameplay more than telling a story. From the perspective of many different characters while never delving too deeply into anyone’s account in particular. You would see a few battles from various characters such as Guan Yu, Lu Bu, and countless others.

The overall gameplay of DW9 is the same as the past. You are given a roster of characters to choose two officers from for each battle – some rosters are more limited than others depending on the fight. As you play those characters, they gain experience and mastery of their equipped weapons and horses. During the battles, you will collect new weapons and skill points and gems to use to customize your characters even further.
Each character has a skill tree which allows you to unlock better stats or new moves to use as the character grows in strength. For instance, you can unlock the passive ability to have a “second wind” when your character’s health reaches zero – they are automatically revived one time during the fight. Another example of upgrades are unlocking multiple special attack gauges that allow you to use the ability multiple times in a row. These aspects are pretty familiar to fans of the genre.

In combat, you are able to select four abilities to call upon in battle. These can be buffs which allow you to deal more damage or bolster your defense. They can also be attacking abilities such as sprinting full speed into a group of enemies or performing huge attacks that sweep across the screen. These abilities are usable multiple times but have a short cooldown between uses. This separates older entries that may have relied purely on pressing combinations of light attacks and heavy attacks to perform a variation or special attack.
Weapons are still customizable as in previous Warriors games. Weapons are given ranks, attack stats, and modifiers dictated by the gems you add to a weapon. For instance, you may find a weapon with eight gem slots, and you can pick and choose which modifiers you want to add to a weapon. You may want your glaive to have a more extended range of attack, with a wind element, and when you kill an officer, you gain a buff to your speed for 30 seconds. This is achievable and up to the player to choose how they want to customize their weapons. These gems can also be upgraded to produce more significant effects.

The most significant update in empires is the visuals. The characters are beautifully rendered with a cell shading ink that gives new life to the officers we have seen in many entries. The attack animations, combined with the sheer number of enemies on the screen simultaneously, are quite a sight. I had to see at least 100 enemies on the field at a given time, mostly flying through the air as I performed giant attacks to knock them off their feet.
Overall, I think there is much to like here with Dynasty Warriors 9 Empires. Fans of the genre will enjoy the updated visuals, and how focused the empire building is compared to the last few games.
