The game may have slightly more content than its predecessor, but overall I was actually disappointed with this game.
Gameplay, 7. The game has many different modes. The Musou Mode is the main mode of the game. You play through each mission as wither an officer of the empires of Wu, Wei, or Shu, or you can play as another faction. For those of you who played some of the other games the gameplay is slightly different. Each character has the same missions as the characters of the same empire for the most part. A new addition to the game are duels. This is when you are confronted by an enemy officer during battle, if you win you take down that officer and morale gets boosted, but if you lose then you lose the game. Speaking of which, morale is basically how good your troops are gonna fight. If they have low morale then they'll fight poorly, if they have high morale, they'll fight well and the same thing for the opposing army. In this game you can make your own character, there are several different fighting styles you can give them and different looks, just don't be surprised if the custom character mode feels kinda shallow. There is a Free Mode where you can play as any character on any mission you've played in Musou Mode on any faction you've played as in that mission during Musou Mode. There is Time Attack where you kill 100 soldiers as fast as you can. Survival is where you just keep figthing until you die. There is a nice encyclipedia that tells about the history of the Three Kingdoms and about all the known officers.
The game plays generally well, however, I don't like the way they changed the Musou Mode from the way it was done in Dynasty Warriors 3. As I said eariler in the review each character of a faction has the same missions of the other characters of that faction, no matter where they historically originated. This doesn't give much incentive to beat the game with every character, in fact, there's really no reason to beat the game with no more than one character from each empire and one character from each of the other, smaller factions. Overall the gameplay is still pretty good aside from the poor change in the Mosou Mode.
Graphics, 7. The graphics are pretty good. They're definitley an improvement over Dynasty Warrior 3's graphics.
Sound, 4. The music for this game sucks. On Dynasty Warriors 3 they had great battle music, now they just have annoying, looping, quiet guitar-like music, and the worst part is there is almost no variety in the music. The voice acting also pales in comparison to Dynasy Warriors 3, the voices just sound cheesy now. The sound effects are decent though so I'll give the sound credit for that.
Value, 7. Like I said before, there is no incentive to beat the game with all the characters and the other factions you can play as have much shorter Musou Modes than the three main ones. I'm not sure how much you'll enjoy Free Mode, Time Attack, and Survival.
Difficulty, Just Right. The game is pretty easy to pick up and there is a difficulty setting so it's up to you on how hard the game is.
Tilt, 6. While I believe Dynasty Warriors to be a decent game it certainly disappointed me. If you are looking to buy a Dynasty Warriors game then I would probably suggest you can one of the newer ones, that or buy one of the Empire Dynasty Warrior games.