I love the Dynasty Warriors franchise. For those of you not familiar with the series, they’re large-scale action games based on the Chinese historical epic “Romance of the Three Kingdoms.” From there, developer Koei Tecmo began to branch the series out, starting with “Samurai Warriors” and then moving on to spin-offs based on anime shows. The most recent of these spin-offs is Berserk and the Band of the Hawk, which is based on the classic horror/dark fantasy manga series Berserk. On the one hand Berserk might not be suited to the gameplay style of the Warriors franchise, but on the other hand I’ve never seen a game in this series that wasn’t a ton of arcade-y fun.

The original Berserk manga is kind of like if Clive Barker had written Game of Thrones. It explores the depths of human depravity and the extremes people will go to in order to obtain power, while also being chock full of gore and grotesque creatures. It follows a wandering swordsman named Guts through a war-ravished medieval setting as he attempts to rid the world of formerly-human monsters called Apostles and their demonic overlords known as the Godhand. Berserk and the Band of the Hawk maintains much of the original story, focusing in on the “Golden Age” arc of the comic, which explores Guts’ life as a young mercenary and how he came to be a monster-hunter. However, some of the incredibly unsavory parts of the comic are more-or-less whitewashed out of the game. This is probably for the best, but sometimes winds up leaving holes in character motivations.

Berserk and the Band of the Hawk is an incredibly colorful game. That’s the part that really throws me. It’s not at all unusual for a Warriors game to be very bright, but it does seem to contrast a bit with the tone of Berserk. Everything in the game looks great, and Koei Tecmo did an amazing job of making three dimensional models out of the original comic characters. Some compromises had to be made with the original stylized drawings to make the game more realistically playable, but that’s alright. There’s no problem with the visuals, per se, it’s just a matter of the presentation feeling a little tonally inconsistent.

The voice-acting for this game is in Japanese, so I’m not sure if it’s good or not. It sounds decent enough to me, but I’m just going off whether or not the tone of the character’s voice matches the tone of what’s being said. The sound-effects and music are both very videogame-y. There’s nothing wrong with that for a Warriors game, but for a Berserk game it’s not very good. It’s hard to build up a good creepy atmosphere when you’ve got over-the-top sound effects going off all the time and the cheesy game music doesn’t help it either.

Berserk and the Band of the Hawk is a lot of fun to play. Much like any other Warriors game, you run around a battlefield taking on legions of disposable enemy soldiers head-on and often single-handed. After a given battle is over, you collect equipment so that you can hack your way through even more cannon fodder in the next battle. This is occasionally interrupted by one-on-one fights with Apostles as a sort of giant boss battle. However, the game kind of fumbles in the Apostle fights because they go against the core gameplay of the series, which is all based around mowing through hundreds of low-power enemies and chaining together 1,000+ hit combos.

Berserk and the Band of the Hawk is a blast. However, despite being based on a horror franchise, it ends up not exactly being a horror game and I’m not sure how I feel about that. It’s much more of a Dynasty Warriors game than it is a Berserk game. I definitely love the game, but I found myself constantly wishing for more of that distinctive Berserk flavor.