The exploration in particular, by the way, is a key component of how you choose to tackle the challenges thrown your way. Indeed, you'll visit everything from Chinese temples to abandoned ports and snow-capped mountains, and I especially love how a map can begin in a monster-filled prison and then evolves into an infiltration mission inside a grand mansion. Team Ninja has shown before how awesome they can be when it comes to crafting levels in games like Nioh 2, and while it may not reach all the way to those levels in the case of Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, it offers up lovely battlefields that are a joy to explore.
I have no problem with mixing up difficult battles with simpler dusters from time to time, but this was really just a strange battle that was over before it had even started, and unfortunately this wasn't the only one of the worse kind I was subjected to in my journey towards the credits.Īnother positive aspect is the level design and the variety of the different environments. In the enemy's defence, there was indeed a second phase to the battle, but this mostly involved swapping the legs for the stomach as a target for your sword slashes before performing a so-called "Fatal Strike" that eliminated the beast in one fell swoop.
Sure, it would leap into the air and slam to the ground occasionally (with by far the world's stiffest animation, it should be added), but this only required you to duck slightly before it was back to pounding away at its feet. One example of this was a large monster that you could literally stand and beat on its legs until it fell. Speaking of bosses, there are a couple that are really lousy. When these systems sync up, Wo Long is an incredibly rewarding adventure that challenges you and trains your reflexes, but unfortunately not everything it offers is as brilliant.
WO LONG FALLEN DYNASTY GRAPHICS HOW TO
Another example of this was a horse rider who not only forced me to parry forward thrusting spearheads, but he also taught me how to use magic to smother his fire abilities with cooled ice, and when I felled this opponent, the joy was once again monumental. Of course, not all bosses are equally difficult to master, but the ones that are the best are probably the ones that demand more of you as a player. The first boss, for example, was a lesson in parrying incoming attacks, and since this is such a fundamental part of Wo Long's playability, I can see why they chose to place this speed bump right after the starting pits. There are times, however, when Team Ninja will force you to think twice in order to succeed, and these occasions come mostly in the form of bosses where you can't just mash the attack button to stand victorious. For Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty suffers from many blemishes, as I said, but what's inside the rewarding gameplay and eye-catching progression system is still good enough to make you want to come back for more, time and time again. However, when the boss finally fell to my sword, and I felt the sweetness of victory wash over my soul in true Dark Souls spirit, I'll admit that it became much harder to put down the controller. In fact, it didn't help that I got stuck on the game's first real boss, and were it not for the need to play more in order to write this review, I'm not sure I would have continued to pound away at this seemingly bland and intractable granite wall that stood in my way. The graphics were outright ugly, the world felt lifeless and the combat system was most reminiscent of an inferior version of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice where seemingly weird additions had me scratching my head as often as I swore at the initially high difficulty level. The developers behind this Chinese fantasy-drama mix many interesting elements, which bring life to an otherwise overcrowded gaming genre, with extremely poor technique and substandard storytelling, and unfortunately these eminent nuggets sink to the bottom in a frustrating way when they mix with the utterly mediocre whole.Īfter spending around 90 minutes with Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, I was not at all impressed with what I saw and experienced.
The reason I'm telling you this is because Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, the new action adventure from Team Ninja, is similarly very difficult to rate. I remember Spiritfarer from 2020 as such an example where I absolutely loved the concept, the world and the music, but at the same time I had to settle for awarding the game with "only" 8/10 as the prolonged playability ruined the whole of an otherwise masterful adventure. Boiling down your opinions to a measly number isn't always the easiest thing to do, and it doesn't get any easier when the components inside a product can fluctuate so wildly in quality and create an overall to a scattered impression.
There have been a couple of games over the years that have been very difficult for me to review.
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