Dynasty Warriors 3: Complete Edition Remastered Review - Comfort Food With a New Coat of Paint

Dynasty Warriors 3: Complete Edition Remastered is Koei Tecmo going back to the game that turned Musou into a genre. The 2001 PlayStation 2 original and its Xtreme Legends expansion have been rebuilt in Unreal Engine 5 and released on 1 October 2026 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2 and PC via Steam. The standard edition is 39.99 euro here, the Digital Deluxe 69.99. I played on PS5, with a few hours of Switch 2 handheld on the side.

What it is

If you have never played a Warriors game: you pick one of roughly forty officers from the Three Kingdoms era, drop into a battlefield with a thousand soldiers on it, and send them flying with combos while keeping an eye on the mini-map so your own general does not get ambushed. It is equal parts stress relief and plate spinning. This remaster keeps the original menus, music, maps and the gloriously bad voice acting, and polishes the surface.

How it actually plays

The additions are small but welcome. You can now dodge and counter, whistle for your horse instead of hunting for one, and fuse weapons to carry upgrades forward. Bodyguard units are customisable, Challenge mode is included, and both split-screen co-op and local Versus are present, which in 2026 feels almost radical. Playing this on one couch with a friend is still the best way to experience it.

On PS5 the frame rate holds steady even with the screen full of soldiers. Switch 2 handheld takes a visible hit in detail but stays smooth; what it does not do is load quickly, and waiting on a black screen from menu to battle gets old fast.

Where it shows its age

The honest part. Under the new lighting this is still a 25-year-old design. Combos are short, enemies stand around waiting their turn, and the battlefields often feel empty between objectives. The campaigns are brief - a single officer's Musou mode is done in about two hours - and the story is told in curt text and short cutscenes that have been re-rendered in Unreal Engine 5 but are still written and voiced like it is 2001, so the plot stays thin and the delivery stays wooden. Anyone coming from Dynasty Warriors: Origins will find this stiff and restrictive.

The Digital Deluxe at 69.99 is also hard to swallow for a remaster of this age. Stick with the standard edition.

Who it is for

If you spent 2002 shouting "feel the power of my magic" at a CRT, this is a well-made trip back, and the co-op alone justifies the price. If you want a modern action game, Origins exists and is better in every mechanical way.

Verdict

This is a faithful, good-looking remaster of a game whose bones are showing. It respects the original a little too much to fix its flaws, but at 39.99 with couch co-op it is honest value, and the loop of clearing a map while the pseudo-metal soundtrack kicks in has not stopped working.

Score: 7/10

Image: FN-082 / CC BY-SA 4.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Guan_Yu_Statue,_Chinese_Garden_Singapore_202408.jpg