I was planning on a savaging review of the game after I first played it. I simply hated it. After playing for a couple days though, I was pretty much addicted and playing at least a couple hours a night until my wife finally made me stop.
You play the part of one of one of 6 different characters who are either the leader or supporting characters for their realm. Your goal is complete conquest of the land. Your opponents aren't sitting idle waiting for you to come to them; they're out attacking their neighbors too. The effect is that you can sometimes luck/choose to avoid a battle and instead fight a different character if they're particularly difficult for you. If you've ever played Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War -- Dark Crusade you'll recognize the style of map. As you conquer the land with each character a new one is unlocked for you to use. You won't ever get to play all the charters in the game, but you'll play the most interesting ones. The only problem is that unlike those first 6 the ones you unlocked don't give you much incentive to play them. I mean they're OK to try out, but the best you can unlock a short movie or two, including their endings. For me the exception was Iron Ox who was just a blast to play. He's gigantic, fairly fast, and devastatingly powerful. Don't get me wrong, the others were still OK, but he was so much fun.
The reason I hated this so much when I first got it is the lack of tutorial. You have no tutorial mission, nothing to guide you through a first mission and no items to help you. Literally the only thing the game gives you any preparation is a short demo video. You start out with no boosting items and no special attacks. You can't play the Free Battle mode or get ANY experience until you first beat a level. The first few times you face a boss, you're going to die since you don't know what to expect. You then lose and have to play the whole level over again. All the experience, all the time you spent, all of it wasted. Playing the same level three times in a row gets old fast. If you're just starting out, I'd suggest attacking Azure Dragon's level because you fight the boss very first thing and he's fairly weak. After you win a few levels things will start to settle down and get easier. The next character you play through with will have access to any general use items you've found. It just makes it really hard to get into the game that first time.
The graphics are somewhat mixed. You have some gorgeous cut scenes for introductions/ending movies for each character. Then you have some other short anime style cartoons that are, I guess, supposed to give some sort of story line. I liked most of the videos, but I thought those just fell short and were not as interesting. The game graphics themselves are quite good for a PS2 game. Everybody looks good and the levels are well designed and detailed. The female characters look nice, especially Lady Butterfly who's a knockout. She's the wife of the game's namesake, the Devil King. She's supportive of her husband's power grab and also one of the best characters in the game. She literally brings a gun to a knife fight and if used properly is nearly unstoppable with distance killing. Strangely, this little Japanese woman seems to have an English accent. Oh well.
The majority of your fights will be against an army of peons. Generally these soldiers will be under the command of one or more commanders, who are more dangerous to you. In fact, if you take out the commander the soldiers will often lose the will to fight, even falling down on their backsides. You have your own commanders, but mostly they're useless. If you are using a charter with allies, then some/all of the commanders will be other characters in the game. Either way they don't seem very interested in helping you out and even when you get warnings they're in trouble and falling, it really has no baring on the game. At most you'll lose an exp bonus which isn't all that big anyway. Your only goal is to kill the general.
The enemy models you fight are surprisingly varied. You'll face different models in different armies, which was a very cool touch. Each model set fits in with the theme of their army and they look great. What isn't great is the draw distance. You'll can literally be looking across to the other side of a room and see nobody there, but as you move forward a bunch of guys appear out of nowhere. It's not that they appear/disappear randomly, the PS2 tracks where they are at all times, it's just that you cannot see them further than a couple yards away. This can lead to some confusing fights as the guy you though you killed suddenly stabs you in the back. Not cool, but I suppose it's the limits of the PS2 hardware. AT least it doesn't happen against bosses. You can always see them.
Another BIG problem with the game is the camera. There is NO way to lock the camera on an enemy. Bosses especially like to dart around to the side or behind you and it becomes very easy to lose sight of them. The best you can often do is turn in the direction you think they might have gone and use a button to center your vision in that direction. It's an awful, clumsy system and nearly ruined the whole game for me. I lost many battles because I wasn't able to turn to fight a boss. Not cool. Just a heads up, if you don't like the control scheme your out of luck. You can't reconfigure the controls.
I know I'm pointing out a lot of the bad stuff, but I find it useful to hear the bad stuff about a game before I buy it. If I can stand that stuff, then the good stuff is icing on the cake. For a first try at a Dynasty Warriors type game, Devil Kings is really pretty good. It's just got a lot of frustrating rough edges I wish they'd have smoothed out. Still, it's tremendous fun to tear through an army of peons and landing 400+ hit combos on swarm after swarm of enemies. I've enjoyed playing it.Get more detail about
Devil Kings.
