This is a very weird and janky game that has at its core something really good, but does not properly expand upon it to become an actually good finished product. If this were an alpha release I'd say it's a really promising potential, but this is the 1.0 release and there are a vast sea of unfinished, lackluster mechanics that don't hook up to each other or to a core goal or progression. There is a nod at a story (which makes nosense) and a nod at a simulation (which makes even less) and the rest of the game is minigames and grinding stats.

There are a couple of persistent characters who have no real personality, and the rest of the world is randomly generated stat bundles with badly translated names like Shinian1Lingg who might declare love to you or kill you for literally no explicable reason. My first death happened because I walked too close to somebody I had never met before who accused me of trying to kill him before I knew he existed and my (much stronger) fellow disciple who happened to be nearby then killed me instantly. My second happened because I refused to be extorted by a bandit in the middle of a music hall where I had been playing for an audience and the tavern owner decided to help him kill me because he didn't like that I was a 'loyal' person (which was assigned to me without my knowledge).

You can build buildings (which don't matter) and open businesses in them (which are useless), gather resources (that you don't need for anything), and fight a couple types of animal and random strangers populating the simulation (often for unexplained reasons) in order to boost your kung-fu and associated abilities (which you only need to fight the randos attacking you for having the wrong hat on). You can ostensibly also make weapons and armor, but the systems surrounding that are not well built either, and are further gated behind joining the one sect that is allowed to be any good at making weapons.

Speaking of sects, there is also ostensibly a sect system for earning merits and working your way up the hierarchy, but I can't imagine that makes any more sense or is any more compelling than the many other half baked mechanics. I joined a sect and spent 10ish hours doing stuff in and around it and never saw or heard from the sect system at all in that time.

The combat is a deck based puzzle system where you pick different sets of moves to use, with a couple twists to unlock extra moves or empower the moves you have this turn, and a set of skills you can activate with certain combos of moves. It could be good if they had spent a lot less time building a worthless open world simulation space and instead focused on combat, but it's underdeveloped and once you comprehend what the absolutely nonsense tutorial tells you (might take a while, see my playtime) you realize that there's not really anything more than "check upcoming moves, make combo 1, transition to combo 2, transition to combo 3, trigger surprise move, activate skills, repeat"

Additionally, the 'world' is in fact a series of pre-built tiles that you unlock by doing objectives. When the game starts, it's just a small square of land in an infinite ocean, and you have to build up the rest as you go. This adds nothing at all to the game in my opinion, and in fact serves to dramatically multiply the confusion, jank, and broken continuity that is ubiquitous throughout the whole game.

The sole mechanic I do find well implemented and enjoyable is the meridian map, where you can create paths of Qi to activate various acupoints for buffs, with learned abilities called inner kungfu activating if you combine certain sequences in the right order. This alone, especially in combination with the state of the rest of the content, is not enough to recommend the game on. It's sad, because I wish I could suggest this. It could be great if expanded properly, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that it will never be the great open world kung fu game we are all hoping to see in our lifetime.

My China man journey started with "Yan Zhengzheng" a lowly roamer with no martial arts understanding. he quickly progressed in the marital world by learning from masters all over the plains and deserts. Zhengzheng could defeat any bandit who came his way demanding money or items, however he had hit a roadblock in his martial understanding. Zhengzheng, to get passed his wall of understanding travelled to the coldest and furthest of mountains to join the "Oro Sword Sect" who had mastery over cold energy and perfect understanding of blade and palm arts. After join the sect Zhengzheng made great progress in his path to power so to further his understanding and test his limits he decided to spar with a fellow disciple. This disciple was a transcendent in their martial understanding while Zhengzheng was 5 levels below them at incredible agility. Needless to say he got beat the ♥♥♥♥ up by this transcendent and was accidentally killed by them thus ending my first journey into become the Matchless Kungfu artist.

in other words game is solid, if you like having the freedom of doing whatever you want with no hand holding outside of very basic mechanics very good game, does have some Engrish translations but their is a mod to make that a bit better 10/10

10/10

goofy aah engrish game

A little clunky but pretty fun! Too bad i'm being extorted by a women who is stronger than me.

Best purchase in a very long time

peak gaming

I love Wuxia inspired games but god my time with this was rather... miserable. And the time it says I have is, frankly, a lie. The game wouldn't ever properly close, steam kept thinking it was running and I had to forceclose Steam to get it to stop, so my "4 hours" of playtime is more like 1.5. Regardless...

The English localization is frankly abysmal and several tutorials still popped up in Mandarin. It isn't just a case of "Engrish" or stilted dialogue - some of it is absolutely incomprehensible. Now, I know plenty of people can work around this or use guides but I'm the type of guy who likes to take a game as it is - with no outside resources or help - and enjoy it. And I frankly couldn't. I've enjoyed many other Chinese/Wuxia inspired games - even some with similarly rough translations - but their systems were also just more intuitive to figure out.

Take the "Verbal Dueling" in this game for example. Even having read the "tutorial" twice, it felt like an absolute mess of trying to be a deckbuilder of sorts but with no real clear indication to where I was pulling stuff from, what a lot of it did, etc. Then when I leveled up my jumping, I got a popup tutorial in full Mandarin so... if that gave me something extra, I have no idea what it was.

Some positives - the actual combat system is really pretty fun and cool, very stylized. Definitely the best part of the game. It's just a shame that it unlocks new options and ways to engage with it SOOOOOO slowly. If there was a faster way to do it, I couldn't find it... might have been one of the untranslated popups.

Frankly, I'm disappointed with my time here, but maybe with time it will be a better game. But as far as being "Matchless," I find that claim falling very flat: Hero's Journey - Road to Passion and Wandering Sword both have pulled off what I wanted this game to be better in their own ways.

Good context but VERY BAD gameplay mechanic, BAD quest system, and BAD sect management system...
In my case, for about ~80 hours, VERY PATIENT to want to complete the game ONCE but the BAD MECHANIC just made my stress stacked up then... my first bad review for a game, very disappointed.