Hey all. I’m back with a look at a game I’ve reviewed before on the PC, but this time I’ve reviewed it on the PlayStation 5. It’s my Sengoku Dynasty console edition review.
Sengoku Dynasty has been out for the PC through the Steam platform for about six months, although it’s been longer than that if you count the early access period, which was quite long and gave the developers time to work player feedback into the core game.
If you read my review of the Steam version of Sengoku Dynasty, where it earned 4 out of 5 GiN Gems, you will see that there are many elements in this adventure set in feudal Japan, including the ability to build villages, engage in combat, and even build an empire with up to four friends in multiplayer cooperative play. Because I really explain all of the mechanics and gameplay elements of this really interesting title there, this review will mostly focus on the changes and improvements (or limitations) of Sengoku Dynasty as it makes the leap to the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 consoles.
Gameplay: Nothing really changed in terms of the main story. You still wash up on a distant shore with nothing and have to start building your home and kingdom from scratch. Also, the art style and music are unchanged. Everything looks great on the PlayStation 5, same as it did on a PC using higher graphical settings. So, onto the changes, especially being able to play with a controller, which really changes the experience quite a bit compared with a mouse and keyboard.
The absolute first thing I noticed, and which I was hoping would get a day one patch to fix, was that using a joystick to navigate the game’s many menus were not at all very intuitive. The sensitivity settings were atrocious in every menu I encountered. Sadly, there was a day one patch, but that hasn’t fixed this issue. Maybe it’ll get fixed in the future, and I can only hope it does. There is a work around in using the D-pad to navigate menus. But for such a basic functionality, the inability to use the joystick to navigate menus is particularly worrisome.
With that particular issue out of the way, I’ll get into the rest of the changes, which really revolves around the combat. As someone whose main form of gaming has and probably always will be on consoles, the ability to easily control my character in combat in Sengoku Dynasty is much better accomplished with a controller instead of a keyboard and mouse. The combat hasn’t changed overly much. You are still strongly encouraged to play defensively and counter enemy attacks while you try to take them on one at a time, otherwise you’ll end up dying a lot. That’s not a bad thing, and with a controller in hand, playing defensively isn’t at all the slow chore like it was with a keyboard for me.
For me at least, the combat in the console versions of Sengoku Dynasty is much improved, but that’s mostly from getting a controller into my hands that I wasn’t able connect with on the PC version due to technical issues. Will that hold true for others? Very possibly but again I’ll admit for me that due to personal technical issues, I wasn’t able to sync a controller to my PC and Steam. I know that Steam makes controller syncing very easy, but I was not able to do it. So, getting to fight with a controller is a real treat and much more natural. It’s implemented very well.
And some of you might ask about the crafting and town building aspect of Sengoku Dynasty on consoles, since that is a big part of it. It’s possible to concentrate just on this and minimize combat encounters. Those of you who enjoy that side of things will discover that for the most part, it hasn’t changed in any meaningful way from the PC version.
It wasn’t any harder to place buildings or to gather materials and craft items, at least when that process does not involve a menu as opposed to a radial wheel. If it’s in a menu, like when assigning tasks to villagers for them to gather or create items, there’s that issue I mentioned before with the joysticks. But again, there is the workaround of using the d-pad.
Nothing else really changed, at least from my perspective. In terms of graphics, Sengoku Dynasty looks good on the PlayStation 5, although not really approaching what a AAA game might offer. The load times on the console are much better though, and you will certainly notice that, especially if your gaming PC is not using a solid-state drive. The developers did a nice job of optimizing things for the console version.
Overall: Sengoku Dynasty is a great port over to the console, almost like it was made for it, other than the odd menu problems. This is great for folks with lower-performing PCs who either could not support that version of the title or had trouble keeping everything running smoothly. There are no such problems with the PlayStation 5 version. It’s a lot of fun to play, and I know I’ll be attempting to Platinum it over next few months.