Dynasty Warriors 3 is a 3d action/fighter loosely based on the book "Romance of Three Kingdoms" which is the most popular novel in Asia. Written 600 years ago, it tells the epic of the Han Dynasty in China during the 2nd and 3rd century.

When you start the game the main options are Musou, Free, VS, and Challenge mode, which consist of some rather cool Endurance and Time Attack modes. Musou is the main mode where you can choose from one of nine characters that represent each of the three kingdoms.

Musou mode presents you with missions where the main goal ends up with you having to kill the enemy leader. During the course of the missions though the game throws literally hundreds of enemies at you which you must wade through to reach your ultimate goal. Each of the games characters have stats based on life, Musou, attack, and defence, and these can be upgraded by defeating Officers during the missions who will drop items once beaten. This was a cool feature and gives you more to do than simply rush the enemy General to finish the mission as fast as possible. At the start of each mission you select your weapon and can also arm your bodyguards. You are also presented with a briefing screen that shows the battle conditions and what sort of troops you can expect to face.

The controls in the game are pretty straightforward consisting of A for jump, X attack, Y does a rush attack, and B performs your cool looking Musou move. The right trigger switches to a first person mode where you can look around and shoot arrows and the left trigger serves two purposes, firstly to centre the camera and also to block attacks. During a fight if you are thrown into the air by enemy blows, hit the left trigger as you hit the ground and you will regain your footing quicker than normal. Once you build up your Musou meter you can perform a Musou attack which differs depending on your character and is really helpful for clearing out dozens of enemies at once.

In the Endurance and Time Attack modes you can see how quickly you can kill 100 enemies, or if you can kill 100 enemies without dying. Which is a nice feature if you come home stressed from work and just want to annihilate hordes of computer generated baddies!

The graphics in DW3 are pretty good but nothing seems to have been done to enhance the game for Xbox. There’s no real fancy lighting effects or bump mapping to be seen anywhere. One area where the game shows its PS2 heritage is the view distance, its only about 200-300 in game meters from your character and after that its just fog. It would have been good to see Koei bump up the view distance for the Xbox version… The limited view distance is very annoying.

The characters look pretty good and are nicely detailed. The animations are very smooth and everything moves nice and fast. The Musou moves look great with some flashy graphics and a ‘matrix style’ camera pan-a-round as you charge up. It was a shame to see some slowdown though, especially seeing as the PS2 version was released over a year ago. More time definitely could have been spent souping the game up by adding more detailed landscapes and clearing out some of the graphical glitches.

The sound in DW3 is pretty average really. The music consists of some lame guitar based asian rock that gets real annoying pretty quickly, it also feels out of place as I don’t think they had electric guitars or rock music in ancient china. The fighting sounds are ok but some of them sound eerily familiar. Also I recommend switching the voices in the game from English as the dubbing is pretty horrendous and the English voice actors generally sound pretty unconvincing.

Heres were the replay value kicks in for DW3 as it sports a nice co-operative mode and some versus modes as well. The only down side I could see to the Musou co-op mode was if one player dies, its game over for both player 1 and 2. The versus modes are entertaining and let you choose from a varied set of locations but the co-op mode is easily the best multiplayer mode in DW3.