It’ll take more than two hands to count all the spin-offs of the Romance of the Three-Kingdoms saga. Koei is also planning to add more to the series for the PS3 and Xbox360, but in the meantime, gamers can get a smidgen of a change with Koei’s RTS war game, Bladestorm. The ‘smidgen of a change’ comes in with the shift of scenery; no longer will players do battle on the war-torn fields of Asia during the Dynasty era, this time it all takes place in Europe, with battles being fought across Britain and the French borders. Bladestorm: The Hundreds’ Year War offers players massive, absolutely gigantic war scenarios between the French and the British that’ll have RTS fans screaming for joy. Also, there will be an extensive campaign set across Europe for players to engage in, as well as upgrades for troops and reinforcing of garrisons with supplies, armor, and stat-boosters.
The CG for Bladestorm showcased rows and columns of countless soldiers poised to do battle against an innumerable foe. More so, the CG showboated some decent looking visuals and a grand scale army on both sides. The fighting, while difficult to distinguish, looked to be composed of some fancy hack-n-slashing and tons of soldiers dropping dead to the ground. The game is still a ways off from being released and right now not all the visuals and gameplay elements are intact.
But there is one really cool feature about Bladestorm that stands out: the game mixes the very core gameplay elements of an RTS, with a bit of the fast-and-furious sword action of Dynasty Warriors. The biggest difference between the games, so far, appears to be the lack of individual control of a single soldier. Instead, players will control a group of soldiers at a time by selecting whom they want to control…in classic RTS fashion. And like its distant cousin, Dynasty Warriors, Bladestorm allows for players to rack up massive KO’s using the group of soldiers they currently control. There’s a couple of buttons for players to use during the actual battles, most importantly the ‘defend’ and ‘attack’ tabs. From what looked to be an in-game battle sequence (it was difficult to tell sometimes the CG from the gameplay in some of the visual scenes), it appeared players could defend and attack as fast as they pressed the buttons. Although, being that the game was in such an early stage of its development, it was very difficult to tell exactly how much control players had over the massive battles.
The game will also let players control a variety of different units, each with specific stats and special abilities that can be exploited on the battlefield. For instance, there are archers, standard infantryman, and cavalry that can be controlled. But there are also some original units that players can take command of, including exotic animals such as elephants that can trample over enemies, or siege weapons that can lay waste to a vast majority of the enemies’ flanks. Koei has kept other information regarding units and playability a close guarded secret.
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