The Dynasty Warriors series was an atrocious set of games on the PS2, and the mind-boggling continuation of the series almost seemed like punishment for past sins. After chastising ourselves with barbed wire for six years, however, we were hoping that the combination of our personal punishment and mounting development costs would kill this sort of hack-‘n’-slash nonsense, but we were wrong. It’s got around any financial issues, by creating a PS2 game and forcing it into the next gen, while shamelessly attempting to gloss over this shortcoming with big robots. Thematically, it’s a dream come true for most half-witted Japanese gamers, but hopefully UK PS3 owners will see Dynasty Warriors: Gundam for the insipid trash that it really is.

Oddly enough, this is actually inferior to the Dynasty Warriors series. The mechanics are replicated, in that you’ll be battling a startling number of identical machines for a boring period of time, but this game adds several new features to purposely wind you up. The Triangle button, instead of providing a heavy attack, shoots a bar of laser that isn’t aimed at anything. We’re not sure if Koei ever thought about this feature in any depth, but we’re anticipating that it developed Dynasty Warriors: Gundam with the exact amount of apathy that we feel when we play it.

There are no skilful combos, and the game directs you into stupid zones for capture; if anything about Dynasty Warriors appealed, it was the opportunity to pour into war zones, batter 500 enemies and leave your allies to clean up the mess. With this game being the scripted batter-fest of bland that it is, the robots were never going to save the gameplay.

Besides, the awful environments seem to conspire against your own amusement. Since there’s no glory in bashing two buttons, while praying that the game enables your mech to attack before the boss’s does, you should consider this an inessential purchase. The shameless gameplay is no evolution from what has come before. Even Dynasty Warriors fans will struggle to find the appeal of a six-year-old game with a mismatched licence. The franchise barely worked when it was messing with history, but now that it dares to use pathetic physics and dull graphical styling to disgrace the Gundam franchise, only the gentle sound of our own sighs are an appropriate response to garbage like Dynasty Warriors: Gundam.

Samuel Roberts