Berserk and the Band of the Hawk review – A love letter to fans of the dark fantasy anime
It is, though, still Dynasty Warriors. Like every other Dynasty Warriors game before it, it’s repetitive, and combat is shallow. The graphics are good enough, but the devs seem more concerned with how many enemies they can fit on the screen than anything else. Navigating a map becomes difficult when the game can barely draw screen detail faster than your horse can run it.
The missions, too, are still Dynasty Warriors. Most missions amount to, “Kill this guy who has more hit points than the other guys.†Some of the secondary goals are confusing and inscrutable. A mission like “get to the destination before the time limit†isn’t accompanied by information about what the time limit is or where the destination is. If you want to complete that particular goal, you might have to play a few times while crossing your fingers.
The other available characters from the Berserk cast, while okay in their own right, aren’t nearly as fun to play as Guts in my experience. Dynasty Warriors games are typically casts of characters and receive more or less equal amounts of attention during development. In Berserk, Guts is the main character and has received far more attention than the others. He’s more fleshed out in terms of animation and moveset, and it’s clear the other characters are, by comparison, extras.
Like other Dynasty Warriors games, it’s also clear that budget was a real concern when making the game. As a niche game based on a niche manga, it makes sense. I’m not holding it against Omega Force or Koei Tecmo. The first part of the game’s story matches up with the recently released Berserk films, and throughout the first section of the game, clips from those films provide story context for what’s happening during the battles. It’s still an overview more than a complete plot, but it’s there.
After that, though, the plot is left almost entirely unexplained. We get a few CGI cutscenes and lots of optional talking-head events to listen to, but not much else. If you aren’t familiar with the series, I fear the events transpiring before you will make little sense.
But I had an absolute blast playing it
Even with all that, though, I had a blast playing it. I had a great time playing an anthologized version of one of my favorite stories and controlling my one of my very favorite characters.
Whether I was wading through the battlefield in the war between the kingdoms of Midland and Chuder, fighting off a horde of Apostles, or defending a village from trolls, I was fully engrossed in it. Later in the game, Guts acquires a new set of armor that gives him enhanced speed and power along with a new set of moves, and that made re-playing a few of the missions fun again.
There’s also an Endless Eclipse mode where you continue fighting through hordes of enemies for various contrived reasons, and while I wouldn’t want to play it, er, endlessly, it’s a fun way to stretch out the game a bit more without worrying about the missions. It’s also, if you want, a good way to grind for more loot and money for leveling up other characters.
Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/reviews/berserk-and-the-band-of-the-hawk-review-a-love-letter-to-fans-of-the-dark-fantasy-anime/