Crack out the rock guitars and unsheathe those ten foot-long swords! That bombastic battler series is back but now with added, erm, battley bits in Dynasty Warriors 7: Empires for PlayStation 3.
An epic series that began life in 1997 in the form of a Tekken-esque fighting game, Dynasty Warriors has morphed into a third-person hack-and-slash whose key selling point has been its massive battles with huge amounts of onscreen foe to pile into, the action set within the era of ancient China at the end of the Han Dynasty period. For the non-David Starkey-liking, Horrible Histories-loving fans among us, it's an era that saw lots of angry factions wanting to batter each other silly with swords and other assorted weaponry. In other words, awesome.
Dynasty Warriors 7 continues tapping into this rich vein with the Empires edition that brings even more enemy-bothering options to the battle field. As is the de rigour for most RPGs (even 'lite' versions like this), you can now tweak your character's looks from hair to facial fur, personality and even weapon animations.
Veteran players will also appreciate the new character, Xu Shu, who apparently was an adviser to Liu Bei (you know, Liu Bei... erm, anyone?), and this latest addition brings the roster of playable characters up to a whopping 66. A critical new gameplay element has also been 'mudslided' in; 'Strategems' allow you to call upon battle-changing special attacks that sweep across the play area - from floods to rockslides, you've now got the kind of deity-like powers that would make Peter Molyneux proud.
Combine all this with the two meaty game modes, Story and Campaign as featured in the original and you have a title with enough gameplay to last an entire dynasty. Now, while some harsher critics might bemoan that the series is simply all about button-mashing, those of a more objective persuasion will disagree. They'll rightly argue that trying to pull off massive combos before juggling an enemy Officer in the air and unleashing a special Musou Attack on them takes a tad more skill than simply hitting two buttons repeatedly as if you're playing Daley Thompson's Decathlon on the ZX Spectrum.
And for us Dynasty Warriors aficionados, it's such combo-weaving antics that made us fall in love with the series in the first place and with its host of new features, Empires can expect to be greeted with open arms (and raised swords) as it sweeps across the battle field once again towards its legions of fans.