Dynasty Warriors Strikeforce, just like its predecessors, is an explosive action game that allows you to command up to three officers from any of the three Chinese kingdoms of Wei, Shu or Wu. In this series, you take on the role of any one of 40 playable characters, teaming up with the three kingdoms to fight the Yellow Turban Rebellion. The game has a weapon based fighting style where you hack and slash - with combos of course - to complete your goals. In the previous Dynasty Warriors games your AI co-op was limited to foot soldiers that followed you around like moths to a flame and provided no help other than to take hits. In Strikeforce KOEI decided to implement the help of other officers, instead of foot soldiers, that actually provide help in defeating gigantic beasts and to siege towering fortresses, or just defeat that small officer that has way too much health.

If you ever get bored of the AI controlled officers, you can hop onto multiplayer mode and play online with other players around the world to conquer that seemingly impossible quest. You can join up with 1 to 4 friends and embark on over 200 missions, using text chat or voice to coordinate attacks on thousand man armies, infiltrate heavily-armed fortress or slay dragons. You can also battle it out competitively against each other. An interesting online feature is the ability to temporarily lend another player one of your officers, increasing their abilities when they return. It’s the online mode that really adds a unique dimension to this version in the Dynasty Warriors series.

KOEI is also offering additional quests as downloadable content, and even better, they will be available free-of-charge. With the extra content, you can battle your way through even more quests with your friends online, as long as they have loaded the content too.

What really puts the cherry on top is the new “Fury” ability now transforms your character into an even stronger one, giving your character out-of-this world abilities to fight those big nasty foes that dare to stand in your way. The Fury gauge takes the place of the "Musou" gauge from the previous series that fills up when you attack or get hit. Once the Fury gauge is filled up you can transform resulting in a dramatic improvement to your characters' various abilities and an amazing change to its appearance.

When you're not out on a campaign or quest, you will want to hang around the cities where you can pick up new items, improve your skills, enlist in new quests, and customize your character using Orbs and Chi. HINT: If you're stuck, speak to the old man wearing white; he'll give you handy advice. It is here that you can also use supplies gathered during battle to build and modify the more than 250 weapons which your character can then equip. You can use Officer Cards for upgrades that you can use before embarking on a mission and with certain combinations you can obtain a special ability to help you out in the battle. Once certain conditions are met fortune tellers will appear in cities at which point you can speak to them and play a mini game of roulette. If you win, your characters' abilities will be increased for a certain period of time. Also, it's only in the cities where you can switch between single and multiplayer games.

Like the previous series, some repetition is present in the enemies and the landscape so there is nothing different there. I would have thought that KOEI could have made some sort of effort to introduce some variety in the enemies and landscape this time around. But, hey, isn't that typical Dynasty Warriors? Anyway, you should be focusing on your combat combination moves and special attacks instead of sightseeing.

Compared to the older series, Dynasty Warriors Strikeforce has more than three times the enemies, even since the release for the PSP. Also included is the ability to lock on which also provides information on whether or not your weapon is effective against the enemy you have targeted. Chi, which allows you to place various abilities to your character, from double jumping to faster attacking or even the ability to hover! Orbs allow you to further customize your weapons to make them stronger and more effective in different ways, such as causing fire damage or water damage.

There's just enough detail to make the game enjoyable without slowing anything down allowing for fluid and smooth graphics allowing fans of the series will take pleasure in the potentially unending hours of gameplay.

With beautiful graphics and a great frame rate, this game can provide more than enough satisfaction to any game player looking for a game to be simple yet complex at the same time.