BERSERK and the Band of the Hawk

My honest take on this game splits cleanly down franchise loyalty lines, and I think that is actually useful information. As someone who came into it curious about both Berserk and the Warriors formula, I found a title that earns its place for a specific audience while being pretty transparent about its limits for everyone else. The core loop is classic Omega Force musou: you drop into large battlefields, thin out hundreds of low-level soldiers with light-and-heavy combo strings, stagger officer-class enemies, and build a Ferocity meter that can charge up to five stages - unleashing Guts in the Berserker Armor at full power is genuinely satisfying. Playable characters expand beyond Guts as the story progresses, each with distinct sub-weapons and movesets. Griffith fights with a lethal, flowing grace that contrasts sharply with Guts' raw cleaving and smashing. Casca plays fast and slippery. Zodd can shift into his apostle form mid-combat. The variety in the roster is real, even if the mission structure underneath them stays narrow - most of the nearly fifty story chapters ask you to destroy, rescue, or kill to a quota, and many wrap up in under ten minutes before a cutscene longer than the mission itself. The story coverage is where the game does its best work. It runs from the Golden Age Arc all the way through the Hawk of the Millennium Empire Arc, and the first third is bolstered by roughly 120 minutes of footage from the Golden Age film trilogy, supplemented by newly animated cutscenes. The transition to CGI once the anime footage runs out is jarring, and the pacing in the back half accelerates noticeably - story beats that deserve breathing room get compressed. For Berserk newcomers the narrative is still followable and hits its major emotional notes. For franchise veterans, the faithfulness of the first half is a real treat, while the shortcuts in the second will sting. Boss encounters are a legitimate gear shift. Normal enemies are there to be swatted; bosses resist Death Blow attacks, use Frenzy mode, and in some cases transform mid-fight into larger versions of themselves. The hitboxes on a few of them are arguable, and some encounters tip into wars of attrition that feel designed around grinding your Vitality and accessory stats up rather than learning elegant counters. Four difficulty tiers - Easy through Berserk - let you tune the experience, and the gear fusion system means accessories can be fused and upgraded until the game softens considerably on higher settings. Beyond Story Mode, Endless Eclipse is a tower-style survival gauntlet where you can cycle through any unlocked character; it is functionally endless, escalating in challenge until you exit, and offers a decent post-campaign reason to keep playing. The honest caveat is musou fatigue. Critics and players both flagged it consistently, and they are not wrong. Sessions over two hours start to blur. The mission objective variety is thin by the standards of what Omega Force has managed in stronger entries like Hyrule Warriors. And while the cel-shaded art style suits Miura's world well, PC performance has attracted some complaints about long load screens on modern hardware. Bottom line: if Berserk as a property means anything to you, this is the only English-language game adaptation the franchise has ever received, and it does right by the source material more often than it stumbles. If you are here purely as a musou fan, it is a competent but safe entry that plays it closer to base Dynasty Warriors than the more inventive licensed spin-offs. Go in with eyes open on the repetition curve and you will get solid value out of it.

Alex · Scout Team

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