Dynasty Warriors 9 Empire’s demo is now available on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and the Nintendo Switch. It includes two quickplay modes, invasive and defense, as well as an edit mode where you can create your own hero.
"Storm the enemy castle, or fight to defend your fortress in this challenging tutorial,” reads Koei Tecmo’s description in digital storefronts. “Virtual warlords can play through each siege scenario repeatedly to discover and develop the best strategies to overpower and outthink opponents."
Invasion battles basically have you attack an enemy fortification using siege weapons to defeat the opposing officer. Defense missions are the same but playing on the opposite side. The Empires subseries of Dynasty Warriors attempts to bring a more tactics-focused approach to its traditional wildly-swinging action where you take down dozens of enemies at once, with secret plans that can be enacted during the battle.
Creating your own character brings a level of replayability to the demo as it lets you explore the various combat options available. Best of all, you can port your created officers over to the final game so long as you purchase it on the same platform that downloaded the demo.
As for the demo itself, that’s a whopping 9.9 GB on PS4 and PS5, with a similar download size on other consoles. That’s a lot to ask of a demo, but if you don’t have Warzone or GTA Online installed, you should be able to find some space on your storage drive.
Dynasty Warriors 9 Empires will hopefully be a reset for Koei Tecmo's disastrous Dynasty Warriors 9, which launched to a nightmare of technical issues on both consoles and PC. The open-world changes also ruined the usual pacing of Dynasty Warriors, which shouldn't have you go more than 10 seconds without destroying an entire army with a few swipes of your halberd.
Dynasty Warriors 9 Empires arrives on consoles and PC via Steam on February 25.