Those of you with an intimate knowledge of the history of the Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors franchises will have to forgive me now, because while I have played these titles briefly in the past, I'm by no means an expert in what has come before. Warriors Orochi combines the two to boast an impressive roster of over seventy playable characters from the history of the Warriors sagas.

The main premise behind Warriors Orochi is that the villainous Serpent King has gathered all the heroes together to basically slog it out and see who'll triumph. That's about as deep as it goes and therein lies the game's first issue; it's pretty hard to be motivated to peruse through a game when you have absolutely no real story unfolding. I'll admit that as the game progresses there are a few little revelations here and there that I might have been impressed with had I played through the previous games, but unfortunately it just didn't hold my interest and at times I didn't have the first clue what I was fighting for.

There are four different story types to play through, but I was hard pushed to find much difference between them. Once you've selected your story, you're given three characters to take into battle - one whose focus is on technique, one who is the strongest and one who is the fastest. As you'd expect, they do exactly as you'd imagine; the technique fighter is a good all rounder, the speed characters whilst not so hot in battle are great at finding some space when things get a little hectic and the strong ones lumber around dishing out heavy blows and taking a lot of hits without too much problem.

The gameplay, as with all the Warriors titles, is essentially an updated Double Dragon or Golden Axe affair, where you're pitted against waves after waves of similar enemies with a few bosses chucked in for good measure. You'll want to make sure that your controller is in tiptop condition, because playing this for an hour will age it by a month! Seriously, it's button bash city as you repeatedly smash away to plough through the hoards of enemies that flood the screen with a tidal wave of bloody violence. The sheer number of foes on-screen is immense, but for the most part it's a bit like swatting flies. Bash the X button and three or four of them will be knocked down; once they're up again, bash it again and they're dead. Then there's the B button, a powerful attack that'll take out a good few enemies around you, while the Y button executes a speed attack (once you've held it down long enough). And that's pretty much the entire game.

Once one character is dying or has run out of the energy needed to perform the stronger attacks, a flick of the right trigger brings in your next character. This whole character switching thing could have been made really good if it actually mattered strategically who you use, but for the most part you're simply switching because you're low on energy.

I must admit that after an hour I was bored out of my mind - at the end of each level you defeat someone and they end up joining you, which does make things a little less tiresome as the game progresses because you don't end up being forced to play characters you don't like using. Still, I needed some motivation to continue and so I decided to call on a mate at this point and see if the two-player co-op mode could save Orochi's bacon. Sadly, although this relieved the tedium a little, the gameplay was still too dull to hold our interest for any significant period of time. The game just stays the same - the enemies get harder but you get stronger and level your character up, or level up the weapons to make them stronger, so it's just the same, same, and more of the same. If I were to draw a difficulty curve it would be a straight line, perhaps with the odd slight peak here or there.

The co-op mode is also hampered by an absolutely diabolically poor draw distance; you can only see around twenty steps in front of you, so you're constantly losing each other. I could understand and maybe even forgive a draw distance such as this on a last gen machine when you take into account the sheer number of enemies onscreen at anyone time - but not on a 360, and particularly not when the graphics are so unbelievably poor. The locations, landscapes and interiors are badly drawn and bland, featuring little of the way of detail and crisp textures, while there's not a great deal of variety to the enemies either, who barely look like belong on an Xbox 360. This is odd considering that the cut scenes actually look okay. There's a nice long intro with pretty good graphics (not amazing, but good) and I assumed that the cut scene I was watching was using the in-game engine; but no, all Orochi had done was lull me into a false sense of only slight security. The voice acting is a disaster too; each character has two or three lines they like to shout out in a fight and they just keep repeating them over and over and over, while the music and battle noises are fine, but fail to rise much above acceptable at any given point.

It's not all bad though I suppose - there's definitely something to be said for a game where you can switch off your brain for half an hour and I expect some younger gamers will enjoy the ease and simplicity of the gameplay - but it's simply too shallow for a serious gamer. In fact, it's probably too shallow for a casual gamer! There's the option of playing through the game in free mode once you've unlocked a level, so you can play through it again without any of the storyline and using whatever characters you like, but unfortunately the characters aren't different enough to make this worth bothering with and I'll be amazed if you get through it all once, let alone have the desire to subject yourself to the unending tedium a second time around.

Warriors Orochi completely fails to move the Warriors series into a next-generation dynasty. The ancient concept is still the same, the button-mashing combat is as shallow as ever and all the playable characters, modes and levels in the world can't alter the fact that the gameplay boils down to just hitting the same buttons over and over again to pull off the same moves over and over again to mow down the same enemies - over and over again. Worse still, there's not even any eye or ear candy to enjoy, with a presentation that only sounds okay and looks downright awful for a supposedly next-generation title. I suppose that kids might have some fun playing this with a mate for a short burst, and the real die-hard fans of the series might enjoy yet more of the same, but really there are far too many awesome games available on 360 at the moment to ever justify wasting your money on this.

Reviewed by Mark Hayhurst for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).