Black Myth: Wukong

Black Myth Wukong is the Journey to the West adaptation I've always wanted – an ambitious action RPG with stunning visuals, colossal boss designs, and snappy combat. However, sluggish camera tracking, restrictive exploration, and early-game difficulty spikes might be a dealbreaker for some.

As GameScience’s debut action game, Black Myth: Wukong is mostly a great success, despite some major technical black marks and localization issues that are likely to cause some frustrations at launch. Combat is fantastic thanks to a great balance of careful resource management and lightning-fast, twitch-reaction gameplay that tested my skills as much as Elden Ring ever has, despite being a more traditional action game than FromSoftware’s style.

With strong combat and a fascinating world that mostly rewards exploration, Black Myth: Wukong is a fun action RPG that feels like the modern God of War games viewed through the lens of Chinese mythology.

Black Myth: Wukong is a game that shies away from the Soulslike label, yet it is clearly gunning for the Soulslike audience. It is far from the best in the genre, but it's also not the worst game that has followed in Dark Souls' footsteps. If you go into it expecting a mostly standard Soulslike experience with some blood-boiling boss encounters mixed in with basic level design, you will have a better time than if you were going into it expecting it to be like a traditional character action game.

Given that most of its shortcomings lie in performance, diversity, and wasted environmental factors that would have transformed it into something great, these are integral features that, at a fundamental level, all RPGs, especially soulslike ones, should encompass in their content.

Hands down, one of this year's best action games - Black Myth: Wukong is a flurry of sublime combat and expert boss design.

A game with peaks and valleys like this is, as I've stated throughout the review, frustrating. I can see a 10/10 in this game somewhere, but multiple questionable-level design and game design choices combined with a hefty amount of performance issues and bugs unfortunately drag it down. Black Myth: Wukong is a beautiful, somber, fascinating tale to experience — you just have to muddle your way through a forest of problems to enjoy it.