Welcome to the world of Samurai Warriors: Chronicle 3. It is the next in the Samurai Warriors: Chronicle series and adds a bit to the previous games, while being very different as well.

The ‘SAMURAI WARRIORS Chronicles’ series makes its long-awaited debut on the PlayStation®Vita system!
Switch between up to four playable characters in real time, and use the ‘Hyper Attacks’ introduced in ‘SAMURAI WARRIORS 4’ to make this the most strategically rich title in the series to date!
The new ‘Challenge Mode’ allows you to tackle a series of objectives, one after the other, with a time limit, and reach your final goal! You can even check your rankings against other warriors online!
Weapon upgrades, custom parts and more make this a truly immersive title.

Samurai Warriors Chronicles 3 Announcement Trailer

Samurai Warriors Chronicle 3 drops you right into the game by having you create a character. I have played a few different entries in the Warriors series over the past year, and this was the first that started off right into creating your own character. It’s a decent character creator, and it allows you to customize the character just the way you want it. You also answer a bunch of personality questions, and this will give your character a special ability.

It quickly gets going, introducing you to the main characters and the conflicts that are taking place. It wouldn’t be a Warriors game without some central conflict. As usual, the story hits all the beats of the Warriors game, including Loyalty, Betrayal and Huge Battles which help keep it interesting as you proceed.

Let’s talk about the meat of any Warriors game, which is the battles. I really enjoyed them as I worked my way’s through the huge enemy fortresses. If you haven’t played a Warriors game before, basically you need to work your way through hundreds and sometimes thousands of enemy soldiers to win the battle. You get a map of the battlefield and you have to attack certain points at different times to proceed further. You control the heroes in the battle and can switch between them. It comes off as a bit of a mindless hack and slash as you mow through enemies – in the first battle my four heroes killed over 1000 enemies.

You attack by using normal attacks, Hyper Attacks, and Musou Attacks. You can use normal attacks for most of the battle, but if you are overrun by too many enemies, then the hyper attacks make quick work of them, often knocking back 10-20 at a time. The Musou attacks are specialized for each character, giving one huge attack with some sweet animation sequences. I often saved those for fighting bigger enemies (if the enemy has a name, then they are tougher than the rest).

The bases are huge. The map is ever present while playing on the Vita screen but during battle it can sometimes be hard to read and see what is going on. You can pause the action, and the map gets slightly bigger, but it’s still hard to see what’s going on. One thing I did like was that it showed the morale of your opponent’s troops on the map by highlighting the section where each group is attacking As you conquer each area it will go from dark red to white, giving you a reading on how the battle was going.

One of the reasons I liked the Vita version was the touchscreen support. You can switch characters just by touching their portraits taking you to different points in the battle. There are also special commands that you can use to help turn the tide of battle. The touchscreen is used just enough to make it good. The game finds that sweet spot of not overusing the touchscreen or requiring that it be used for no real reason.

The game looks good on the Vita, having usually played them on the console in the past including the PS4 and knowing the amount of action going on the screen, I honestly didn’t expect it to look that good. They found a way to keep the game looking good while having tons of moving enemies on the screen and the frame rate didn’t take a hit. The sound was cool too, it kept the original Japanese voice acting was kept in giving it a sense of authenticity which is great.

Final Thoughts

SAMURAI WARRIORS: Chronicles 3 is as good as any Warriors game. If you are looking for something fun, this is a good entry point. It starts off as more of a mindless hack and slash game, but you get to see the depth as you strategically invade the bases and customize weapons along the way.

[review
pros=”Excellent Graphics
Large amount of action without slowdown.
Cool characters” cons=”Figuring out objectives can be a bit confusing.
The map is dense and can be hard to read” score=80]

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Cost: $39.99

PSN Game size: 2.0 GB

You can purchase SAMURAI WARRIORS: Chronicles 3 from the PSN store

Disclaimer

This review is based on a PS3 copy of SAMURAI WARRIORS: Chronicles 3 provided by Tecmo KOEI America.

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