Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty Reviews

If you like Soulslikes or ancient china highly recommend it. its a blast

Nioh but Dynasty Warriors instead of Samurai Warriors I guess

only 1 problem . its less martial arts than nioh

Fast combat that's less challenging and methodical than other souls- and niohlikes, but it looks sick and combat feels great. More of a soulslite, as death is quite forgiving. + Ton of QoL features to the genre. – Super flat story and NPCs. –/+ Sidekicks as lore exposition is a cool idea, but the lore seems shallow. + Each weapon grants a different playstyle. + Quite some hybrid build variety: melee, ranged, spirit and magic. – Not a fan of the bombardment of loot (that's part of the Nioh formula). +/– Exploration is adequate, but nothing special. + Platforming is very smooth. A game like this leans heavily on combat and that simply feels great. It's fast and responsive. If you need more narrative depth, skip this one. If you enjoyed Nioh, this will be probably fun for you. Solid 7/10.

Combat is where the largest issue arises for this game, it is so parry heavy there's really no point in doing anything else other than that, it's always the correct choice in every single situation and this leads to the difficulty of the game being entirely based on how well you can memorize each enemy's attack pattern. Enemy design is also poor because they range from crazy high damage with 5+ hit normal hit combos or back to back red attacks to standard sword wielding mooks that can be stunlocked to death within 2 seconds with barely anything in between. But do keep in mind the arbitrary boost in morale some enemies have because if it's high enough, even those mooks can one shot you with their unblockable, uninterruptible red attacks. It's also important to note the game loves to make enemies summon invisible great shields that allow them to whitstand your relentless onslaughts, this is clearly done to force you to let up so they can throw out an attack you can parry and finally get back to damaging them again. It's honestly understandable, without this most mooks would become truly trivial, the problem is that once you learn to reliably parry them this mechanic just becomes something that artificially extends fights and will quickly become tedious. The actual pacing of the game is out of whack, you can basically cruise through the game while remaining on level with enemies until you reach the battle Hulaouguan Pass where suddenly there's a spike in difficulty and you'll likely find yourself under leveled and under geared, even if you cleared a considerable number of the available side missions at that point. After clearing that issue and leveling a bit as well as upgrading your gear, once you reach the boss of this stage you'll come face to face with the personification of everything wrong with boss design in this game: Lu Bu, an absolute slog fest of a fight where you'll spend the first hour memorizing his attacks while struggling with a camera that can't keep up with his wild movement on horseback, halfway through you'll realize the only way you can actually beat him is by standing still and parrying everything while whittling away at his enormous HP and spirit, and when you finally break his spirit you realize you don't even get to do a critical attack like every other boss, he just gets dismounted and his attack patterns change again. Generally speaking, when it comes to every boss fight in this game you'll often be fighting against a camera that feels like it belongs in one of those shitty Sony exclusive "Cinematic experiences", so zoomed in you can barely make out what the huge boss is doing. Build variety also feels extremely restricted because, for one, there's only 5 attributes. Throw on the fact that all you really need to do in this game is parry and suddenly it all feels very pointless. Even when attempting to rely heavily on wizardry, you'll quickly come to realize trying to open up a fight with any impactful wizardry will put you in an extremely vulnerable spot because of how much spirit it drains, so when you want to use something like poison bog to apply DoT at the start, you limit yourself to a parry or landing an attack (This will likely push the enemy out of the poison bog) to get your spirit back, other wise if the enemy lands a single hit you're spirit broken and will lose at least half your HP. This means that if you want to use wizardry at all, you need to build spirit first by attacking but the reality is that by the time you build up enough, the enemy is either already dead or at the point where just using a Martial Art will get the job done faster. Easily the worst of all of Team Ninja's "Souls-like" line of games.

Excellent combat system, LARGE maps, MANY enemies, and EXTREMELY DETAILED loot system.

review will be updated later on in my playthrough so far I think this game deserves a mostly positive, the games only major graphical issues are the horrible LODs and the inability to disable vignettes. Performance wise its a bit iffy, somewhat frequent stuttering, and critical focus attacks either lower frame rates or just make the game stutter, but overall frames are somewhat high on my rig (rtx 4080 s, dlss 4 transformer balanced, high settings) even ue5 games have better performance but its not THAT bad the menus arent very confusing but there is a ton of information unavailable, I suggest finding a starter guide to get your foot in the door and realise what your gameplay style should be, its very promising so far and there seems to be some depth to it this review is only positive because its 48% positive reviews are very ridiculous, it deserves a percentage in the low 70s just ignore every review released in 2023, they're no longer relevant

I have never been a big fan of Souls-like / Difficult games, but I had a lot of fan with this one. You can have two NPC allies, which makes things easier and the combat feels very good. Parry / Deflects are quite easy to perform. Got it on sale for 30€ and it took me around 40h to beat the main mission and sub battlefields, but there is still some content left. So good value for money. I was worried about the performance, but the game ran very well for me. So, if you like fast-paced action games and don't mind a bit of a challenge, you should give it a try!

[h2]Wo Long is honestly amazing in its own right.[/h2] It still has some DNA from the Nioh series, but it makes a new thing on its own, and I think that it is a game where Team Ninja really would benefit from at least experimenting on something new while sticking to the souls-like or rather Sekiro-like formula. The thing that I really like about this game is, again, as expected from Team Ninja, the combat. Once you learn the attack pattern of enemies and when to deflect, it’s literally addicting, especially when you hear the clashing sound when you deflect something, the shouting of both you and your enemy at the top of your lungs, and when you chain and flow beautiful martial arts moves. The wuxia and Chinese martial arts theatric vibes are there, and I love every bit of it. Now, yes, compared to Nioh 2, Wo Long’s combat system is much simpler and streamlined, and that is to keep players focused on just being aggressive while also avoiding taking damage by deflecting attacks. Although the complexity of the combat ramps up again when you get to later NG pluses, what with the additional martial arts slots that you get and need to occasionally swap to and wizardry spells you get, it’s still focused on being aggressive while deflecting. But despite the lack of complexity and depth, I still really liked and enjoyed my time role-playing a Wuxia character. I even completed all missions on every difficulty, DLCs included, just because I really like the combat and bosses. Speaking of bosses, Wo Long has some of the coolest bosses I’ve ever fought, sekiro style wise like omg. Lu Bu, Zhang Liao, Guan Yu, Dong Zhou, Gan Ning, and many more are really, really good bosses. They are aggressive and merciless and won’t give you time to breathe, kind of like Saito Toshimitsu from Nioh 2, but less annoying since you can deflect any of their attacks and they fight fair. Sure, some of them will take you quite a while to learn (looking at you, Gan Ning), but once you learn them, they’re really good bosses that, honestly, with how many times I defeated them, I never got bored fighting them, and I would gladly fight them again. Some footage of me fighting bosses just to see the combat: [list] [*]https://youtu.be/kfYpAbFMbr0 [*]https://youtu.be/GK4uNZEiuQk [/list] OSTs in Wo Long are also bangers, though not as interesting and impactful as the music in Nioh 1 and 2 due to one thing, which I will discuss later. The OSTs in this game really hit the nail on the head of expressing a “sinister dark fantasy Chinese” vibe that Team Ninja is going for while also hitting the “I fight for justice and friendship” vibe at the same time. Zhang Bao, Zhang Jiao, Lu Bu, Liu Bei, and Xu Chu themes and the menu theme are some of the OSTs that you can listen to to get the vibe of the game. Now this can’t be a Team Ninja game without some lacking parts and flaws, so let’s start with the story. I’m really curious about the Three Kingdoms story since I heard of it but never really knew the full story, and so I’m also curious about how it’s going to be told by Team Ninja this time since I expected at least the story to be as good as Nioh 2, which I really liked, but sadly, they kind of went back to square one with the story, mainly because of how it’s told. The first section (Yellow Turban Rebellion) is told fine, and honestly I liked it since the components of the story are still being introduced to the player, but after that it kind of went like, “Huh? Where is this in the story? ” “Oh shit, Lu Bu!! ” “Huh? Why though?” Then proceed to zone out until the end mission cutscene and epilogue, which I actually vibe with, but yeah, storytelling quality went back to Nioh 1 and this is also the reason why I felt like the music and OSTs didn't have that much impact for me. But hey at least all the cutscenes looks really cool right? The end game loop is also kind of lacking and honestly disappointing since Team Ninja just went, “Here! Beat 10,000 miles of the so-called ‘a thousand miles’ journey, which are all randomized mini levels, and we will spread the rewards on every 100 miles you beat! Have fun!” Like, bro, they had the perfect endgame loop in Nioh 2, just 108 static underworld floors to prepare you for the 30 randomized harder floors. A short endgame to be sure, but it is the most fun I had playing a game’s endgame content. But despite what I said, I still beat up to 500 miles. So in conclusion, Wo Long is a really good game if you can ignore some of its flaws like the storytelling, enemy variety, endgame content, etc. It has an amazing combat deflection system paired with amazing bosses to test your prowess with. Honestly, if you like to roleplay a Wuxia character, I really recommend this game just for that alone. Get it when it's on a deep sale and have a blast.

I will keep it short. Is it better than Nioh 2? No. Is it a good game on it's own though? Yes. Main damage avoidance is parrying so it's basically Nioh's Sekiro. Performance is fixed. There is tons of endgame things to do. It's the gear grindfest we all know and love from Nioh or SoP. Good value on sale (DLCs were a borderline scam for what they asked for them before complete ed.) As for biggest negatives: - low enemy variety (half of enemies you fight are just humans) - map design is meh and often it just looks like someone cobbled them fast in some kind of editor, barricades on the roof? Really? - unnecessary hub (with annoying blacksmith that is too far away) - some textures are low resolution even on high preset All in all, good buy on sale. Most of bad rep it has has been addressed already and it deserves better than "mixed".