Review: Black Myth: Wukong
Start of a new mythology? Design and technical issues says no!
Purchased the game on PlayStation 5. Played through the story once, there is no difficulty selection. Completed in 18 hours. Played on Performance Mode.
Third-Person Action Lite
Taking place after the story of Journey to the West, one of the seminal Chinese literary work that is known worldwide, Black Myth: Wukong has you controlling one of Wukong's "descendant", called the Destined One, tasked with the collection of the six senses or relics in a world now filled with evil and demons that are trying to stop you from reattaining your godhood.
The game's story feels like an origin story, mirroring the developer, Game Science's, journey in releasing their first game. Taking inspiration from the original story and the history of China, both metaphorically and literally, creating the first of a trilogy of games that will take place in the mythology of Chinese culture. The game mirrors those themes as an inspiration is slowly given life through a journey that fills the senses.
Those familiar with the source material will find their heroes empty shells of their formers selves and, with the player character, a literal interpretation of this. With little speaking lines and the majority of his voice combat barks and yelps that is a far cry from the animated and cocky Sun Wukong of the literary works. It would have added a bit of levity in a world that has seen our former heroes fall from grace and the world left in disrepair and chaos.
The story (more like character introductions) takes a backseat after the first few chapters. Being relegated to boss introductions or end of chapter bookends. That amazing intro to the game, that doesn’t really happen again until the very end. There are some NPCs scattered throughout the chapters that you can do quests for to acquire additional gear or crafting materials. They also have additional stories associated with them, but it’s more to add flavor to the world.
While traversing the world, there are moments where your jaw just drops at the sight of the dense trees and foliage with the sunlight shining through or the huge pagodas off in the distance. But unfortunately, there's little reason to actually explore these locations. There might be a crafting materials or gear tucked away in some corner but it's more likely that it'll be another spot where you can harvest “Will”, which is this game's currency.
The game is also very front heavy in this regard, the earlier areas are probably where the Unreal Engine 5 shines the most, as well as the ray-tracing implementation with the flowing waters and shadows being cast by overhead tree branches. The later areas are mostly deserts and inside valleys that don't showcase the visuals of the game as much.
Then there are the game's highlights visually when you're dealing with the fantastical when characters are larger than life or have more fantastical designs, those are the scenes that I look forward to the most when playing.
Lastly, I cannot move on to the gameplay section with mentioning the end of chapter cutscenes. The variety of animation style and love put into them from the stop-motion scene to the anime-inspired scene were all well done and was another highlight.
God of War China?
Black Myth: Wukong is a fast-paced third person action game. Closer to something like last year's Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty or Nier: Automata than a Soulslike game. Combat consists of you attacking with your trusty staff, the Ruyi Jingu Bang, in quick flourishes with magical attacks peppered in once or twice in a fight. There's no weight limit or anything similar so your movement and dodges remain consistent throughout the game. There's a parry that you can do with a magical spell, but the cooldown on that means you're left with dodging as your primary means of mitigating damage.
As you defeat enemies, you gain experience points that give you Sparks once you reach the threshold. These Sparks are points that you can use to unlock abilities. You can also gain these Sparks through finding points on the map where you can meditate, similar to Kena: Bridge of Spirits. You even get a nice montage of the location you're meditating in, showcasing more of the environment that you might have missed out on as you attempt to seek out the next location that you need to go to.
You spend your Sparks on abilities in a very extensive skill tree that improve your survivability through health and stamina upgrades, dodging, magic attack, etc. One thing I liked was that the game gave you the ability to respec your points without costing you but the desire to experiment was low as I focused more on increasing my health and stamina as well as one or two abilities that served me we throughout the whole game.
You can further strengthen the Destined One by crafting pills that upgrade your health, mana, defense, etc. Your staff can also be upgraded and you can craft newer and better armor either through vendors or your menu in the shrine.
Most of the gameplay revolves around you going from one location to another with progress punctuated by a boss fight or two as well as looking for shrines. As mentioned earlier in the review, there's not much reason to explore outside of gathering Wills or finding the crafting materials. Once in a while you might find accessories such as talismans or gourds that have different effects but those are mostly a consequence of finding bosses and not due to the player spending the effort of looking for them.
There is this ability to fly around as a golden cicada as a way to scout out areas and reach hard to reach areas but it doesn't feel worth it after the initial time you transform as the maps as so big at times, you might as well look up a guide instead of wasting your own time flying around.
And in a lot of instances, that's the problem that I had with Black Myth: Wukong. That it's just a waste of time. I don't mean that the game itself is without merits. It's the way the game is designed that made me feel that a lot of the game is just fluff. If we were to compare it to a Devil May Cry game where there is little more to it than combat and traversal to the next boss fight. At least in those games, areas are small and you get to the next point quickly. The environments here while pretty, have way too much open space for how much is going on. Many times I went into a wonderfully designed area thinking something would happen here, but it only had a spot to collect Wills. Then there would be similarly looking areas that you have to pass through to get to the new area, then they would only have one or two enemies in there and nothing much else.
The game could have relieved the monotonous nature of exploration by including environmental puzzles or make use of the abilities that you learn to reach closed off sections. There is one stealth ability that lets you bypass enemies, but then you would have to give up one of your ability slots.
It felt like a lot of the areas where designed to scale, which can make a game look grand and make use of Unreal Engine 5, but they would then have those sections where you squeeze through the gap to hide loads. It just felt inconsistent and probably a less is more approach would have been better. Combat however, has too little and more could have been better.
Very early on in the game, you receive abilities that are so powerful and versatile that you have very little incentive to switch out to anything else from that point onwards. One is the enemy-freezing ability and another is the transformation spell (you transform into one of the bosses that you've beaten and use their abilities). Not long after this, you can unlock your downward staff attack. With these abilities alone, which you unlock just a hour or two into the game, you have pretty much all you need to finish the game.
Even with these abilities, you still have to make sure that your weapon and armor pieces are upgraded and kept in line with what the game wants you at that moment. The fact that these abilities are not only able to dish out the most damage to enemies when you upgrade them, but they also act as get out of jail free cards is what devolves the game into a mindless hack and slash.
There is little variety in terms of your staff attacks and enemies mostly get stunlocked due to your quick attacks. So you try to kill them as quickly as possible. You use the freeze ability to not only stop them in their tracks but also increase the damage enemies receive in this state. The transformation ability transforms you into a powerful form that attacks quickly and last for quite a long time. It also gives you a new health bar and doesn't penalize you if you lose health in that form. And lastly, that downward staff attack deals more than twice the normal damage you do, lets you perch on top of it to avoid attacks, heals you and is the one with the fastest cooldown. As long as you attack your enemies, you can reuse this ability as many times as possible while the others might have much longer cooldowns. All these, unlocked less than an hour into a 20-30 hour game.
You could try and make the game more difficult for yourself by not using these abilities. But you're just making it more annoying for yourself as you're not actually increasing the engagement in your fights but making them longer. Enemies aren't particularly clever or do fatal damage unless you're careless and get surrounded and as you progress through the game they just get more health, making even regular enemies annoying to fight.
Bosses on the other hand, some of them are pretty good, but most are just as annoying to fight as the regular enemies. Especially those who have attacks where they are just floating in the air, spamming AOE attacks and are unreachable to your attacks. Some of them designed to allow the boss character to go through their scripted quotes before dying. So you're left running around for a period of time before you can get back in and attack again. If you're fairly consistent with your upgrades, you can pretty much tank all damage up until the end of the game with no worries of getting killed.
I’m not saying that a game has to be Soulslike difficult to be enjoyable. Mario games have bosses that die in 3 hits which are fairly enjoyable by most people. The lack of a difficulty can be a plus side for those looking to spend a couple of minutes of their already small free time making progress. I just felt hollow and that I wasn’t asked to learn anything from one boss encounter to another. If a boss had a punishing attack, you would learn to look out for it and that made you feel like you’re growing if ever so slightly. But when the game, even up to the final true ending, has the player regenerating health, not fearing that the boss will have an attack that would meaningfully break me out of my current flurry of attacks. Now that I think about it, even those “character” moments in the fights where they monologue. It just gives you time so that you could use your cooldowns again before the fight is over thus giving the player another 5-10 seconds of respite knowing that I could just smash buttons and it will have no consequence to my performance.
I could see an argument that you're not supposed to rush through the game and have multiple play sessions and this feels like a good way to include more gamers by having a lower ceiling. Which is fine, but when you overdesign the earlier areas and leave large later areas with bland, monotone looking areas. By the time I pick the controller back up to play, I would have forgotten where I was at already. The only reason I could plough my way through was because in a short span of time, I made numerous wrong turns into areas that I wasn't meant to go into and turned back immediately that I was able to bump into the next boss and progress further into the game.
Technical Boo-Boos
Compounding on the desire to just finish the game as quickly as possible is the technical issues this game has on the PS5. I’ve looked at videos online for the PC versions and while the PS5 version is comparable at times, you can notice how the developers have cut back on the visuals especially if you’re looking at them side-by-side. Even without comparing, you can still notice textures just lacking detail as you run through the world and pop-ins happening. The amount of particle effects, such as the volumetric fog and leaves that dance around in combat are pared down on the PS5 as well. It’s not that I’m trying hard to notice these blemishes but when you’re presented with a world that is hyper-detailed, the textures that don’t match up to that level of detail gets noticed very easily such as a rock that was broken off just stop in mid-air completely losing all it’s momentum in cutscene or combat on it’s first bounce or when clothing clips through each other.
The next point might be more subjective, but if you’ve played Elden Ring at the launch on the PlayStation 5. You’ll know what to expect with Black Myth: Wukong. You have the option of 3 graphics modes in Black Myth: Wukong. Quality, Balance and Performance mode. I initially chose Performance mode, as I felt the game would be dodge heavy based on previews and it should give you a smoother gameplay. Boy was I wrong. The intro cutscene and fight itself saw frame rate drops and worse of all is input lag. According to Digital Foundry, it seems that the game is using FSR 3 with Frame Generation on to hit the 60fps. Frame Generation can cause significant input lag, depending on how much it’s trying to “catch up” to it’s target fps. On top of this, I thought that my TV was forced into game mode or something, as everything looked slightly off. If you’ve played around with TV modes before, you would notice that when game mode is selected you get this harsh outline and boosted contrast that manufacturers use to give you that sense of better visibility. In Black Myth: Wukong, it looked as though the developers did this as well for Performance mode by adding sharpening, perhaps to combat any drop in visual quality trying to hit 60fps.
I wouldn’t even bother with the other two modes, Quality and Balance. As neither mode provides a locked 30fps (Balance seems to be a locked 45fps but has a ton of juddering), instead the developers have decided to keep the frame rate unlocked in Quality. With the frame rate varying as much as it does, it is just a recipe for nausea for me. Playing the game with these modes gave me the same headaches I had playing Elden Ring at launch on the PlayStation 5. While the Black Myth: Wukong doesn’t have the fast movement on horseback and the player spinning the camera quickly to track enemies they passed by on the horse like in Elden Ring, the numerous boss fights where you’re dodging around quickly, which causes a burst of particle effects, causing slowdown or latency. It’s just annoying and the end of play sessions had my head pounding.
For those who were wishing for an Xbox version during launch as well, seeing how the game performs on the PS5 and it being a new development studio. I think it’s fair to say having to create another two versions of the game at the same time would be too much for them to handle. Hopefully by the time there is an Xbox version, all these issues would be ironed out or have an upgraded next-gen version that can handle the game’s visuals properly.
Final Thoughts
Although I had an amazing first couple of hours with Black Myth: Wukong, the later chapters just made me more frustrated and annoyed with what could only be described as padding. I wasn't really learning any new abilities past the first few chapters and those that I had learnt earlier on were so powerful that I never felt the desire to try anything else out. Combat also didn’t get any more interesting beyond quickly smashing the attack button hoping that the enemies drop before they could land a hit on me. It just left most of the game unsatisfying, even though the visuals were telling me to feel otherwise.
On top of the lack of gameplay variety or challenge, the performance of the game with it’s input lag on Performance mode made me wish that there was a PlayStation 4 version similar to Elden Ring or The First Descendant where I could play at a locked 60fps (without drops or lag) albeit reduced visuals and then do a NG+ with Quality mode on the PS5 just to enjoy the visuals.
The game could have sold this power fantasy of a deity slowly regaining his true form, but with all the bosses and enemies keeping at pace with you and being spongy, uninteresting fights that take way too long to kill. The game feels nothing more than eye-candy followed by the harsh realities of having to fulfill a quota for a modern AAA game. Good first effort though, I hope they learn their lessons from this game and go on to make a great second outing.
6 out of 10