More like Dynasty Warriors Lite-N3 has good ideas, but fails to pull them off making it just average.
The story has been done before, it is your ubiquitous "Light Vs Dark, Good Vs Evil, Human Vs Monster" affair. The only saving grace is that in order to truly understand the whole story you must play as each character. This adds replay and depth to an otherwise overly cliched story. The quality of the story itself has its highs and lows-some endings are just pointless, some are touching, but overall it has more of a story than some games and makes a good effort at trying to tell it.
The characters are decent, they aren't unforgettable, but they add to the story. Inphyy is your busty goblin hating knight, her brother Aspharr is the level headed but preachy knight, Myifee is the walking murder machine mercenary, Klarran is the incredibly slow and difficult to use priest, Tyurru is the flying super soaker teenager sorceress, and Vigk Vagck the giant grunting troll has the most personality all of them.
The voice acting is simply terrible, the Troll who only grunts has the best voice acting. The music is formulaic, though one level has a piece by Vivaldi which was a nice touch. The sound effects have been done before-nothing new here.
The graphics are incredibly substandard for Xbox 360-they could easily have been for Xbox or even PS2. The character animations aren't bad and the designs are pretty sharp, but that is about it. The landscapes are completely unimpressive and sometimes very drab and lifeless. One area is a battlefield, you just see trees (occasionally), some towers, a river, and rocks-maybe some weapons and armor strewn about. The worst is that your mini map which is a necessity is BARELY visible-this means you will be getting lost. The other big problem is that there are countless allies and enemies on the battlefield, this is cool because it gives the feel of huge battles, but it severely hinders you in that you CANNOT see the enemies most of the time. You must wade in amongst your own troops and spam area attacks to hit enemies. That or you have to draw out the enemies away from your army to even see what you are fighting. Furthermore, your troops are easy to see, the goblin enemies are almost invisible in a crowd.
Another glaring weakness are the cut scenes, they are rather unnecessary. To make things worse, if a cut scene activates mid-combo, it is broken. If you are collecting orbs from fallen enemies to power your special attacks and a cut scene hits-you do not collect the orbs, if you are in the middle of a special attack, it is stopped by the cut scene. This is incredibly frustrating and it breaks up the gameplay immensely.
All of the areas for each character are repeated, there is little level variety and each battle is pretty much the same. This makes the game get boring rather quickly. The collision detection on the game is great when it comes to crowds and awful when it comes to large enemies. You can swing away like mad on a troll and you will rarely hit a shot...even if you are right next to it. You have bodyguards-but they are useless you can leave them behind and if you don't you won't even know they are around. The worst is your army-you can have literally 30 soldiers fighting one enemy and they will not be able to kill them, but you can rush in, hit them once and they are gone. All the guards and your army do is obscure your vision-they are COMPLETELY useless.
The control is adequate, combos are the name of the game and are pretty easy to pull off. There are a ton of combos that look pretty vicious when you use them, too bad they aren't all that effective. Many times you will be flying about and not hitting many people. Your basic combos are more than enough to get you through. By killing hordes of enemies it fills up your super attack gauge, as you use that super attack it fills up another attack gauge that allows you to use a devastating screen clearing attack. These moves can be pretty effective for each character and the screen clearing attacks are very cool to look at and extremely effective when you learn how to use them.
All in all the game is playable and not broken, it just fails in a lot of areas that turn it into a rather dull game. You get plenty of weapons and items that are useful, the combat can be fun, and each character is different and requires you to use different playing styles-all of these are good things. These advantages are weighed down by bad graphics, a barely passable battle mechanic, and dull backgrounds. It is hard to have fun on a game whenever you cannot see what you are fighting. N3 isn't a bad game, but it isn't good-it's an easy 1K for achievement hunters and would be an entertaining rental.