Samurai Warriors 4 (PlayStation 4) Review

Samurai Warriors 4's main campaign missions follow a literal plethora of characters. Each family is linked to a lord, and each of the lords' stories intersects to some extent, providing a detailed insight into the Warriors world.

Each story has four chapters that begin easy and get progressively more difficult. The battles that take place have many objectives, ranging from taking a base to defending specific enemies as they escape the battlefield. While Samurai Warriors 4 isn't the most challenging game, no one should be able to complete it 100% without a couple of failures.

There is also the Free mode, where every character is available to use in any cleared campaign level; this is the best playground for playing in split-screen multiplayer and training up characters.

It is possible in Samurai Warriors 4 to create a custom character. The character creation is surprisingly detailed; the user-created characters can have many changes made, including height, eyes, hairstyles, weapon type and the armour they wear. Samurai Chronicle mode makes it possible to use the custom characters to forge a user-dictated samurai story. In Chronicle mode, the player must pick a lord to serve under, after this point there are many types of mission available. The most common is a duel with an enemy captain, at the end of which players gain some popularity, meet new characters and unlock new armours and weapons.

Chronicle mode is probably the best feature of Samurai Warriors 4, as it is basically an open-ended story that gives a tremendous feeling of adventure and glory.

The character designs are a little generic, though; they all come across as endearing and charming. The term most people would look to is the characters are very 'anime.' The dialogue has a tendency to focus on an overly cringey 'everything is okay because we have friends' motif, which is inoffensive, but often can detract from a serious situation the game is trying to portray.

Samurai Warriors 4 has excellent split-screen multiplayer support. Almost every mode supports it and the game deals with the splitting incredibly well, with almost no frame drops. However, there are corners that are being cut. The enemy models are copy-pasted in such a way that they become annoying to slice through, as they are effectively only in existence to slow down any progress. The enemies on the field also have an incredibly short draw distance, meaning they pop in frequently, which can be visually jarring.