Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty

There have been a couple of games over the years that have been very difficult for me to review. 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. 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. 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. 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.

After spending around 90 minutes with Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, I was not at all impressed with what I saw and experienced. 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. 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. 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. 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.

In essence, Wo Long could be called a Souls-like adventure, but unlike FromSoftware's masterful creation, it leans far more towards classic action games where speed and agility are most significant, and the form it uses in its recipe is also far more forgiving than the scalding cauldron in which Miyazaki's inhospitable nightmare worlds are cooked up. Yes, I know I'm contradicting myself a bit now that I've already admitted that I found Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty difficult at first, but this challenge is really mostly about learning the different systems and then realising when you can be offensive or when you need to be more calculated in your approach. In fact, the majority of Wo Long's content isn't particularly difficult, and you won't be put to the test in the same way as in the aforementioned Sekiro or Playstation 4 classic Bloodborne.

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. 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. 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. 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.

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. Speaking of bosses, there are a couple that are really lousy. One example of this was a large monster that you could literally stand and beat on its legs until it fell. 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. 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. 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.

Where Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is at its best, however, is in the choices you have as a player. Namely, there are several different weapon classes you can utilize, and these weapons can then have different types of special attacks and attributes. You're not locked into these add-ons, however, and you can, at almost any time, tailor your attachments to either do more damage, provide more life, or offer elemental benefits. The same goes for your armour, and as later in the game you can control many different elements of how you build your character, there are plenty of ways to decide how you want to play. The fact that you can also equip two weapons at the same time (plus a ranged weapon) doesn't make things any worse of course, and the fact that you can additionally take advantage of certain phalanx abilities while changing their aesthetic is a dream come true for those who want to be able to look a certain way without sacrificing stat perks.

Another positive aspect is the level design and the variety of the different environments. 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. 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.

The exploration in particular, by the way, is a key component of how you choose to tackle the challenges thrown your way. Because while your so-called level determines how strong your character is, it's also about strengthening your position in the field. Each level has several different positions to be found and conquered, and these are then used to balance the strength ratios between you and your combatants. This way, you benefit from mapping every nook and cranny instead of charging at the boss as soon as you can. At first, I'll admit that the system felt a bit lumpy for its own sake, but over time I've come to appreciate it a lot as it both encourages you as a player to explore as well as the fact that even in the game's final stages you can feel vulnerable when you're standing in front of a battlefield you haven't yet conquered.

You also don't have to conquer these inhospitable areas on your own, at least not if you don't want to. In fact, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty offers the option to play with a friend, and while we haven't been able to test this out on our own, I appreciate the opportunity to play samurai with a friend. For those who prefer to play solo, you can also summon up to two NPC allies per level, and these allies can increase their confidence in your character by fighting together often, and when you reach a certain bond with each other you're rewarded with their own equipment. It's a clever way of wanting to bring a companion along for the ride, and while they're rarely of much use once the melee hits, they can at least help act as decoys or targets when things get heated.

There's a lot about Wo Long that's worth discovering and learning to love, but unfortunately we've now come to the part of the review where negativity reigns. This Chinese dynasty certainly doesn't look good from a technical perspective, and at times I've wondered if I've come across some old version from years back in time. The graphics are acceptable at best, and downright lousy in their worst moments, and when shoddy lighting effects and glitches are also added to the mix, it's hard to ignore all the mistakes that spice up this action adventure. Many of the textures, for example, look lifted from games made ten years ago, and when similar titles like Mortal Shell (2020), Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (2019), and Dark Souls III (2016) all look significantly better than Team Ninja's latest efforts, it's time to start criticizing in earnest. The biggest competitor FromSoftware might not be the king of graphics either, but they get away with a lot thanks to brilliant design. However, when even Bloodborne from 2015 looks graphically better than Wo Long, the proverbial axe needs to come out and hack the production into pieces

Sure, Wo Long Fallen Dynasty has fairly good design to lean on, but it's by no means enough considering the technical faults it tries to get away with. Incidentally, I've played on Xbox Series X, and it's possible that the game looks better on other formats and that a patch may correct some problems in the future. However, if we look at how it performs here and now, it's far from an acceptable result for a full-price game in 2023.

Aside from the purely visual aspects, there are, as I said, some bugs as well as failing image updates and lag despite the fact that I chose to play in the so-called "performance mode". In fact, every cutscene I've seen has chopped in one way or another, and the same stuttering feeling (micro-stuttering) occasionally intrudes in gameplay where everything freezes for some time before the game code catches up. It's not something that makes the game completely unplayable by any means, but it's clear that the tech isn't optimised to work as it should. Also, once it was so bad that the entire image froze and refused to come back. While I could still hear the boss battle I was engaged in progressing through the speakers, the image had locked up and forced me to shut down and restart the game from the start menu.

It should also be said that the story in Wo Long isn't the best in terms of presentation and storytelling style. While I rarely want to go so far as to say things are laughable, several times during the aforementioned cutscenes I either looked like a scarecrow or laughed at the absurdity unfolding on screen. Indeed, the emotionless voice actors don't help here as they deliver every line with the poise of a newly graduated and exposition-heavy amateur actor, or alternatively they overact scenes to drive home emotions that aren't there. That the script then consists mostly of cryptic one-liners and meaningless talk of honour, friends and evil doesn't make it any easier to take the plot seriously, and when the interactions between the various characters are then as believable as Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal, it would probably have been best to redo the whole story from start to finish. Incidentally, it feels like the developers rarely know how to move the story forward, leading to some extremely odd cutting between the many different sequences. At times it was so bad that it's been hard to shake the feeling that the people directing this haven't had a clue what they've been doing, and it's obvious they don't know how best to let plots unfold to create flow, intrigue and suspense.

Ultimately, though, as I said, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is an incredibly difficult game to review and rate; quality-wise, it mixes heavily between high and low, and the whole can't be described as anything but extremely scattershot from start to finish. In fact, part of me wants to recommend this Ninja Gaiden-esque Dark Souls adventure because I find its concept, playability, and choices interesting enough to take hold whether you're an old genre veteran or a gamer who finds FromSoftware's titles to have been too difficult and rigid. On the other hand, it's extremely difficult to recommend something that suffers from as many flaws as Team Ninja's new action game contains, and when the components vary as much as they do here, I feel there's nothing to do but settle somewhere in the middle between what's good and what's bad.

I think your eventual enjoyment of Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is entirely dependent on how you choose to consume this title. For example, if you're playing via an active Xbox Game Pass subscription, there's plenty of opportunity here to feel the joy of the game while the pitfalls are easier to overlook when you don't have to cough up a bunch of extra cash to join in the fun. However, if you're planning to buy this at full price, I can't in good conscience recommend a purchase, at least not until Team Ninja has fixed the biggest problems (and even then there are fundamental flaws here that are hard to swallow for that price tag). If you like Soulslike games, however, there's an exciting concept here, and if you have the opportunity to try the game for a bargain price, chances are you'll be pleasantly surprised. Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty has a lot of great ideas, but the title is currently hampered by far too many bugs and shoddy execution to move up the ratings ladder.