Dynasty Feud – Review
When we first heard the name Dynasty Feud we thought it was a funny mash-up between Dynasty Warriors and Family Feud, upon closer inspection it was actually pretty accurate. On the one hand you have your One Hit Kill combat style and on the other hand your five member family will fight out a feud with another clan. How the two things flow together will be explained in the review.
Story
In a world with a large cultural diversity there are a handful of clans that want to fight over total domination and show them who the alphas are. Each ‘family’ has its home venue in which they defend or try to take from another one. Sadly this is as much story as there is to discover, because the game is more about a straight start up and play kind of title that focuses itself on quick sessions with friends. It feels like a little let down since some information would have been interesting on the families and why they participate in this war. Does it hinder overall enjoyment? No, but it is a missed chance to add more immersion to the teams and to help you decide your favorite faction.
Graphics
Dynasty Feud is a true sight to behold, for a smaller game that although is not so filled with content it does have a lot of details. You cannot customize characters with accessories or changing colors. The game has mixed graphical styles which give off a very unique charm. Its overall construction and backgrounds are more of a smooth hand drawn art style while the playable characters have a more pixel art variant. Each person has nice animations to make combat run fluidly while many maps come with special variation from movement to little events sculpting the current combat situation.
Sound
In some games it seems that music is pushed back a bit to make room for other elements. It does come immediately to notice that Dynasty Feud has some great background music during battles. This sets the right mood when beating up your friends in local play mode with a nice guitar riff ensuring awesomeness. Each character is also fully voiced with some funny lines and some even helium-like pitched to make them sound extra playful, with the addition of amusing cartoonish like sound effects.
Gameplay
Dynasty feud is a party based side scrolling fighting game in which two to four teams take up arms to fight for who is the strongest. The goal of this game is to defeat the other members and survive as the last man standing. Each person has its own attacking style from melee to range or explosive and one hit means death, but the leader of the pack actually has two lives. When destroying or losing lives the special meter will fill and this will unleash a strong super move to take out many enemies at the same time. Careful planning is important since lives are limited and some skills take time to load. Furthermore there are no pickups available to tip the odds into the favor of a player, so it is purely skill based with the exception of some levels that have random events happening to spice things up.
The game has three main modes: Local, online and training. In the local mode you have a free-for-all, team- and the All Star mode. These will pit two to four players against each other or in teams with each a selected family. In All Star you can freely pick the characters from each unlocked Dynasty. In online it’s the same lineup except for the selection of public or ranked.
Dynasty Feud is advised to be played with controller. Movement is done as normal and combat is an easy two button setup for short and long attacks so it’s easy for everyone to enjoy.
While testing this title, it became clear that the game suffers from having very empty servers, making the online mode not so attractive. What could have made things more interesting is a bot mode for single player because there are already some kind of training dummies present that attack so why this is left out is a complete mystery.
Conclusion
Dynasty Feud is a really fun game to be playing at home with some friends in your couch trough Steam Big Picture on a large TV. It brings back good memories of arcade games and just simple pick up and play gameplay that will allow everyone to enjoy it. However for the moment the online lobbies are quite empty and with the lack of bots the game has no really value besides local fun.
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