Black Myth: Wukong Review

Journey to the West Arguably one of the most influential pieces of Chinese literature and has had a tremendous impact on the media we love today. (We won’t dragon ball (Except this one, for example.) Developer Game Science set out to create an expansive action RPG that draws directly from fantastical elements of the novel to bring Sun Wukong’s world to life. Black Myth: Wukong ($59.99) The result: a familiar, yet delightfully unique action RPG For PC and PS5, full of charm, spirituality and general weirdness. Defeat supernatural creatures with your trusty staff, or transform into them to give yourself an edge in battle. Minor balance issues and performance hiccups aside, Black Myth: Wukong is a fine action game packed with content worthy of your attention.

World of Wukong

Black Myth: Ukong is a world of men and monsters, filled with religious symbolism with a supernatural spin. You take on the mantle of the Destined One, a skilled warrior monkey, and enter the wonderful and dangerous world of Chinese legend. The religious and spiritual elements of the story’s roots seep into the game’s environment and architecture, while mythology inspires enemy designs. Yaogui, the sentient monster, haunts every corner of the world and constantly gets in your way.

The game is divided into multiple chapters, each of which drops you into a different setting with unique enemies to face. These include lush forests, arid deserts, snowy mountain peaks. But you also have a great deal of variation within each zone. The first area of ​​the game is set in a forested mountain and contains caves, temples and ruins. Each area you visit has a clear entrance and exit, but the areas themselves are large, with many enemies to engage or avoid, and plenty of treasure to find. It seems similar in scope and size to many maps Dark Souls III.

You save and rest at shrines scattered throughout each region. You can also teleport to these temples once you’ve rested, making travel fairly quick. This is especially important because Black Myth: Ukong hides plenty of secrets throughout the region to encourage thorough exploration and even backtracking, making casual wandering feel particularly rewarding.

Simple and effective melee combat

You spend as much time fighting as you do exploring. Fortunately, the basics of combat are easy to grasp. You have a string of basic light attacks, a single heavy attack, and a dodge command. However, Black Myth: Wukong adds subtle complications to make the battle more interesting and interesting than it seems at first glance. Heavy attacks are powerful single strikes that take a long time to charge up. You can speed up this charge by building Focus Points, which you earn with light attacks. Different stances change your heavy attacks, from overhead smashes to long-range thrusts.

As a result, hand-to-hand combat revolves around these two systems. You create focus with light attacks and burn that focus to unleash heavy attacks. Learning when to unleash a heavy attack and when to dodge gives the game a tactical element that is simple yet satisfying to execute. This is especially true as you progress through the game and the bosses start to become more aggressive. Knocking a boss out of his attack with a well-timed heavy hit never gets old.

Your character, the Destined One, does not have a conventional block ability. You cannot match your opponent’s strikes to yours Sekiro: Shadow dies twice or Stellar Blade. The key to your defense is your lith dodge, which you can use to snake under any attack thrown at you by the enemy. Evasion is quick and responsive; It feels similar to the aggressive dodging system Final Fantasy XVI. The Destined One doesn’t need a block, and the gameplay is designed around its elusiveness instead. In a few instances, a hitbox felt unfairly larger or longer than you’d expect, but Black Myth: Ukong feels fair and balanced in most combat situations.

That said, you have other defensive tactics up your sleeve. You can deflect projectiles (and only projectiles) with a staff-whirling technique, which also works as a close-range multi-strike attack. You also unlock a stone skin ability at the start of the game, which you can use to block and parry incoming attacks at a cost of some mana. This usually creates a large opening for you to counterattack. But for the most part, the basics of action remain the same: light attacks, heavy attacks, and dodges.

Monkey around the magic

If you are all familiar Journey to the WestYou know the story has a surprising amount of supernatural elements. The Destined One acquires many of these as his own powers, represented as Black Myth: Wukong’s many spells and transformations. For example, you can collect the souls of fallen Yaogui and transform them into battle to attack, similar Neoh 2Its yokai shift mechanic. This yaogui even offers status benefits, such as improved stamina regeneration or improved critical damage when equipped.

You unlock tons of spells as you progress. You can only equip four spells at a time, and you can swap between them wherever you rest. The first spell you earn is the Time-Stop ability, which freezes enemies and bosses for a few seconds. You also get the full transformation spell, which differs from the spirit version in that you can fight as a specific Yaogui for a limited time. They have unique movesets and a separate health bar, which add admirable variety to melee combat.

Ships are another ability you can use in battle, giving you a temporary buff. The first one you encounter, the Fireproof Mantle, grants you burn immunity and fire resistance, making it a great tool to use during the game’s first main boss, for example. All of these abilities, as well as your basic melee skills, can be further enhanced through a comprehensive enhancement system from the menu. You can allocate the points you earn by fighting enemies to power up your favorite abilities by reducing cooldowns, increasing stamina, improving focus regeneration, and more. If you want to invest in different skills, you can re-specialize in shrines, which is pretty easy.

I enjoyed having an encyclopedic list of spellings at any time. These provide a significant edge in combat, giving you the distinct feeling that the game is letting you cheat a bit with how much you have in hand. That said, my biggest gripe is that many of your special abilities and spells are not only cooldowns, but they also consume mana. Having a system, be it cooldown or mana, limits the abuse of said abilities, but both feel unnecessarily restrictive in combat. For example, the stone skin spell allows you to deflect incoming attacks with good timing. However, this spell has a 15-second cooldown by default, so you can’t use it liberally. With a mana limitation on top of that, there’s a strict limit to how many times you can use the spell in a given encounter, which is a bit frustrating.

Can your PC run Black Myth: Wukong?

As an Unreal Engine 5 game, Black Myth: Wukong makes heavy use of AI upscaling via DLSS, FSR or TSR to squeeze the best possible performance out of your gaming rig. Our test PC, equipped with an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 processorNvidia RTX 2080 GPUAnd 16GB of RAM, seemed to handle the game pretty well at first. We enjoyed the game at 1440p at over 70fps, with only occasional hitching and drops to 50fps. However, I suspect that memory leak might be the problem, as an extended amount of play would tank performance regardless of the settings I adjusted, even at the lowest graphical values ​​available. The problem will fix itself after restarting.

Apart from the technical issues, there are a few bugs worth mentioning. Sometimes the text will appear in Chinese instead of English. For example, when crafting a permanent stat boosting item, I lacked the necessary ingredients and was given a warning in Chinese. There were a few instances where the spoken dialogue went into Chinese and the audio cut out in rare cases as well. We hope these issues clear before or after launch.

Black Myth: Wukong is not yet Steam Deck Verified or playable, but we’ll update when more information becomes available.

Why you should play on a PC

Verdict: A fantasy worth exploring

A reimagining tackle Journey to the West A tough task, but developer Game Science has delivered a great game based on this iconic novel. Black Myth: Wukong honors the mysticism and fantasy of the story, while delivering a tightly bundled action-RPG package featuring cleverly designed systems and mechanics. It’s fun to play, and a joy to explore the world. Look past the restrictive cooldown system and weird performance hiccups and Black Myth: Wukong is a great game worth checking out.

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About Gabriel Zamora

My career has taken me through an eclectic array of fields, and connected me with people from all walks of life. These experiences include construction, professional cooking, podcasting, and of course, writing. I’ve been typing geeky type since 2009, eventually landing a freelancing position at PCMag. This turned into a full-time technology analyst position in 2021, where I lend my personal insight into web hosting, streaming music, mobile apps, and video games.

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