It Was the Best of Warriors, It Was the Worst of Warriors

When I first started playing Attack on Titan: Wings of Freedom I thought it might be Omega Force’s best interpretation of their Dynasty Warriors style of games, but the problem is that as I played the game the more I saw that it also embodied the worst of the series.

Beor I get ahead of myself I should explain the oft misunderstood Warriors series. You play as some overpowered character wo obliterates hundreds of enemies and this is where the series gets its bad reputation, any individual enemy poses no challenge and you can easily get away with just button mashing to beat them. That’s all you need to make it through at a bare minimum but the real point is to excel and get high grades. The true point of a Warriors game is not just to win any individual battle but to win the battlefield, there are always multiple objectives such as capturing territories and beating bosses pulling you in different directions, you have to be efficient by dashing round all over the place and utilising the most effective combos to dispatch the enemies quickly. The real challenge of these games is to keep all the different plates spinning by playing at peak performance.

So what does Attack on Titan do differently to take advantage of this style? There’s two main differences to the norm; firstly there’s the omni-directional mobility gear which is basically a pair of gas powered grappling hooks that allow you to swing and propel yourself from buildings when combined with your twin swords it essentially makes you a murderous version of Spiderman, the other change is the enemies, their numbers are significantly reduced taking a quality over quantity approach with the titular titans being giant man like monsters. They are deadlier enemies but still quick to dispatch, a slash to the back of the neck at speed will instantly take them down (you can also target other body parts to make it easier to deliver that fatal blow, ie take out their legs to hinder their movement). By upping the speed of movement and the speed of killing the game feels far more frantic which perfectly plays into that challenge of efficiency and having to handle challenges all over the battlefield.

That’s all great so far but I did say it was also the worst. All I’ve described for the core gameplay is fantastic but the problem is there’s nothing surrounding that core. While in a good Warriors game you have a multitude of characters who feel different to play the different characters provide a sense of variety to counteract the repetitiveness the series is criticised for. In Attack on Titan while characters have different stats and some skills none of this particularly changes the way you play, regardless of who you pick how you play never fundamentally changes. The game just exacerbates this problem itself, once beating the story mode there’s additional post game missions that include new boss titans to fight, the kicker is to unlock these you have to complete the majority of side missions which are basically shorter rehashes of the story missions. Wading through literally dozens of these missions to try and experience something new just grows mind numbingly tedious and forced me to drop the game before unlocking all the post game content.

It’s a real shame what happened with the game, at its core it is fantastic but with nothing supporting that core it just collapses. Being burnt out from the game I never picked up the sequel when it came out, maybe enough time has passed now to give that a go and see if they learned from their mistakes.