WARRIORS OROCHI 4

My bar for Warriors games reset hard after Dynasty Warriors 9 shipped in a state that would embarrass a 2012 early access title, so coming to Warriors Orochi 4 with managed expectations probably helped. What I found was a musou crossover that actually runs on PC - stable 60fps at 1080p on mid-range hardware, no catastrophic frame drops when the screen fills with a thousand goons - and a combat system with more ceiling than the genre usually offers. That alone puts it ahead of its recent predecessors. The core loop is classic musou: you field a three-character team, each slotted into Power, Speed, or Technique classes, and cycle through them mid-battle using a tag mechanic. The big addition over earlier entries is the Sacred Treasures system, where every character gets a set of magic-based moves keyed to the right shoulder button. These consume a separate magic gauge and range from crowd-clearers to targeted burst abilities, and they layer on top of normal charge combos, Musou attacks, and the Awakening/Rage mode that kicks in from a battlefield pickup. The Ultimate version adds the Musou Switch Combo, which lets you chain consecutive Musou attacks across your whole party in sequence - it is absolutely brainless and completely satisfying. Infinity Mode, also exclusive to the Ultimate build, is the real endgame: a Zodiac tower gauntlet that locks your roster and forces you to unlock characters through battle, dragging the total playtime well past 60 hours if you want everything. Here is where I have to be straight with shooter-brain about adjusting to this genre. There is no netcode to worry about, no time-to-kill tuning, no weapon meta in a competitive sense. The PVP mode - a control-point format that a few reviews have charitably called "Battlefield-inspired" - exists on paper but draws no real community. Online co-op is the reason to have friends in this game, not ranked play. The bond system, which grows when specific characters spend missions together and unlocks character-pair dialogue, is the kind of thing that keeps long-session players invested between the action beats. Weapon crafting and the promotion system add RPG loop depth that the base game sorely lacked at launch. The honest criticisms hold up: the stage assets are recycled heavily from older titles, soldier pop-in exists even on maxed-out PC settings, and the difficulty on standard settings rarely demands anything beyond finding the right direction to face while mashing. Pandemonium difficulty and the higher Infinity Mode floors do start to test your team composition, but you have to earn your way there. The roster of 170-plus characters is a Guinness record and also a double-edged sword - the breadth is impressive, the depth per character is not always equal. If you lived through Warriors Orochi 3 and found that game richer, those feelings will resurface here. For musou veterans or anyone who bounced off Dynasty Warriors 9 and wants a palette cleanser that actually works, Warriors Orochi 4 with the Ultimate content included is the version to get. The PC port is solid, co-op holds up, and the combat has enough stacked systems to keep you theorycrafting team compositions long after the story wraps. Newcomers to the genre should know upfront: this will not convert skeptics, and the story is nonsense delivered with complete sincerity. Treat it as 60-plus hours of cathartic crowd deletion with a friend and you will get your money's worth.

Fred · Scout Team

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