Well, I’ll say one thing for Warriors Orochi, today’s target of choice–it’s not a first person shooter. So I’m prepared to cut this game a great whopping lot of slack.  And it’s a good thing, too, because this game is going to NEED a whole lot of slack.

Now available for the Playstation 2 and Xbox 360, and with a sequel that I’ll be tackling later, Warriors Orochi posits the combining of two different time periods, the Three Kingdoms era of China, and the Warring States period of Japan.  These two are separated by about fourteen hundred years, so this is actually quite an achievement.  Anyway, this massive time rift was brought about thanks to the demonic efforts of Orochi, the Serpent King, who decided that life was entirely too boring what with wars going on and all, and instead decided to bring a couple totally different wars together and then get personally involved.  When you actually answer to the name “Serpent King”, you shouldn’t expect a whole lot in the way of sanity, so I’m sure on some basic level this whole thing really must make sense to Orochi.  Anyway, you’ve got a whole lot of disparate warriors taking on the various armies, including Orochi’s own demon-fuelled army where most of the lieutenants seem to be named after snakes, in an attempt to get back to their proper space and time.

On the one hand, this is a pretty sweet story.  This actually puts Eric Flint’s 1632 novel, and resulting Grantville Saga, to shame in terms of sheer epic.  The problem, of course, is that you’re going to have almost NOTHING to do with this epic aside from running around and hammering the quick attack button until your thumbs begin to ache sullenly, as though every throb is saying “Why are we even bothering with this ridiculous tripe?”  Seriously—in the first level alone I killed over five hundred men.  The fact that I had to take on a LIGHT BATTALION (seriously—a battalion is comprised of between five and fifteen hundred troops) armed with a giant pointy stick (a spear, really) alternately excites and horrifies me by turns.  But sadly, I’m not sufficiently excited to go on nor am I sufficiently excited to recommend it.  Maybe if I’d had a laser cannon instead…no.  No, it really doesn’t matter because all I did was run around a field swinging my big pointy stick and prematurely ending the lives of an entire light battalion’s worth of men in just one stage.  At the rate I was going I probably would’ve exterminated an entire brigade of men by the time I got to Orochi, and all I ever did was pound that light attack button fully two thousand times.  Possibly more.

Not that’s the only problem with this—just the biggest.  The graphics and sound are strictly mediocre and, while you can upgrade your weapons throughout the game, it really doesn’t seem to make a fat lot of difference to the gameplay.

And worst of all, they’ve got a plotline here on par with the greatest of alternate history science fiction, but your involvement with it comes down to pound a button several thousand times.  If you’re into repetitive action and racking up a kill count that would make Freddy Krueger hang his burn-scarred head in shame and admitting that he is a TOTAL pussy compared to you, then Warriors Orochi will give you that sweet bloodlust taste you’ve been craving.  Otherwise, I’m sad to say, give this one a pass.