Finally, after around 75 hours I completed 100% achievements and can now make my review.

Black Myth: Wukong to me is a phenomenal game making me reminisce about why games are so amazing. Most importantly, the game takes you on an adventure, a journey, showing you awe-inspiringly detailed environments, creative enemies and incredibly badass bosses and encounters. Plenty of moments make me think back to one of my favourite games: Asura’s Wrath, which in a similar manner strikes awe into you with how cool the things are that are happening on your screen.

The production quality of this game is through the roof. The animations in this game are some of the best I can remember, from how enemies and bosses move, to dynamically chaining together different moves and creating a fast-paced flow of combat with the enemy. The environments are incredibly detailed and authentic.

Game Science went above and beyond going extra mile after extra mile to achieve this.
Aside from regular motion capture, for some enemies and bosses (Tiger Vanguard for example), they even went so far as to motion capture literal cats with a custom software they had to develop alongside this process. This is why some of the animations, like the Tiger Vanguard drinking from the pool of blood you find him in seem so authentic. Not only that, but they supposedly travelled across China to different cultural sites to analyse and scan temples and other places so they can accurately recreate these structures in the game. If you look at comparisons between the game and the locations they are based on, you will notice the love for detail and amount of effort that went into this.

Now, the narrative of the game can be a bit confusing, if you are not at all familiar with the Journey to the West. Yet despite not necessarily knowing what is happening exactly on screen, the game does a phenomenal job at providing a very cinematic and fun experience.

Black Myth: Wukong is actually not a retelling of Journey to the West, but rather takes place some time AFTER the events of the novel, in a “what happened after?” scenario thought up by the devs. Several characters you encounter during the game are from the original story.
It gives you a basic foundational quest of “go on this journey to collect these 6 relics” and takes you on this incredible adventure showing you amazing and unexpected things one after the other.

On this adventure, you can encounter a wild variety of enemies, without seeming repetitive whatsoever. Even the bosses are not repeated except for 2 instances, despite there being a whopping over 90 bosses. Yes, you read that right. There are over 90 bosses in this game. With only 2 minor instances of having a base model be reused. A lot of these bigger bosses are incredibly cinematic, having moves, mechanics and moments in cutscenes that make you feel like you are in the middle of an epic movie.

The enemy designs in this game are very creative and varied, providing a breath of fresh air from all the typical and stereotypical types of enemies you can find in a lot of games. Bipedal snake-necked tiger monk? Check. Giant skeletal chicken mash with a Cubone summoning blood blades? Check. There are things happening in this game so wild, I am not even sure how to accurately describe them.

The combat in this game feels very fluid and deliberate. To me, it just “clicked”. You have to be very deliberate with what you are doing, because depending on the actions you take, you will lock yourself to that action without being able to dodge out of it, meaning you have to decide when to commit to what by observing what is happening around you.

There are a lot of progression systems in this game, from skill points, to equipment, to spirit skills (like yokai abilities in Nioh 2), set bonuses, vessels, curios (like rings), celestial medicines (max stat increases) to the gourd (I will mention this one later).

With all these systems, it would be nice to be able to respec right? Want to redistribute your skill points to change your build? Different staff stance? Different spell setup? No biggie, just head to a shrine and move them around for free. This game gives you a lot of agency to play the way you want to play without locking you into one chosen path.

Your gourd is basically your heal (Like an estus flask). But not only are there different gourds with slightly different effects, but you can also change the actual drink and so called “soaks” that are infused into the drink. All of this allows for an incredible amount of customization where you can adjust your gourd to fit your specific build.

This game is not designed to follow trends or be a safe product to profit from. This game is designed to be fun. There are quite a few moments that make you go “Wait, I’ve never seen anything like this before”. From all these things mentioned, to minor QoL features like having the UI actually change a bit depending on whether you use a keyboard and mouse or a controller, you can feel the passion and care put into this game. The devs wanted this to be good and fun. And oh boy, fun my journey with this game was.

Let us go over to a simple Pros and Cons list.

Pros:

• Highly detailed and authentic environments.
  
• Creative and varied enemy designs featuring all kinds of animal-esque monsters.
  
• Incredible and dynamic animations.
  
• Amazing boss designs that make you go wow.
  
• No reused bosses outside of 2 instances (and even then, it is not that bad).
  
• Very fluid and deliberate gameplay (If you don’t just button mash that is).
  
• Lots of progression systems giving you a lot of agency to fine-tune your builds.
  
• Free respecs.
  
• Fascinating glimpse into Chinese mythology.
  
• Amazing music throughout the whole journey.
  
• Good game length. Took me around 35h to fully complete my first playthrough with most bosses killed (except 2 minor side bosses iirc), 75h for 100% achievements. Will definitely play the game more in the future just for fun.
  
• Makes you become monke during intense fights, having you let out monkey-like noises.

Cons:

• Invisible walls (Could have hidden a lot of these with natural barriers like impassable rocks etc).
  
• Clunky pickups/interactions (You can interact with things that are right in front of your character, so if you are sprinting and going too fast, you might need to turn around to interact. A small 360 degree radius would have been better).
  
• There are items with random drop chances from enemies or plants that are needed to get 100% achievements. I spent over 10 hours farming 2 specific plants before finally getting my final achievement. This was incredibly frustrating. I’d hope for “skewered rng” in the future, slowly increasing the drop chance the more times it does not drop. This way, they could control the maximum amount of kills/pickups needed to get the items.

Technical issues that will probably be ironed out (I played on high preset at 80% upscaling with frame gen and usually had 100+ fps in most cases throughout the whole game):

• Thumbnails of items not properly loading in menus.
  
• Sudden but short stutters presumably when loading in something big.
  
• Sometimes had issues with shadows/clouds seeming…pixelated for some reason.
  
• Framedrops when using bound items/spells when it opens the “radial”-esque menus for them.

All in all, a lot of the issues I have with this game are things that can improve with experience for future projects. This is the first major self-developed title this studio made, so they have plenty of chances to improve on these things in the future.

It is a feature complete game. No paid content. No corporate influence or agendas noticeably influencing the games narrative or game systems. The devs had a vision and they focussed on that vision with full creative freedom, wanting to share what they love and have players enjoy it.

This game reminded me why I love video games.

I 100% recommend this game.

Finally, after around 75 hours I completed 100% achievements and can now make my review. Black Myth: Wukong to me is a phenomenal game making me reminisce about why games are so amazing. Most importantly, the game takes you on an adventure, a journey, showing you awe-inspiringly detailed environments, creative enemies and incredibly badass bosses and encounters. Plenty of moments make me think back to one of my favourite games: Asura’s Wrath, which in a similar manner strikes awe into you with how cool the things are that are happening on your screen. The production quality of this game is through the roof. The animations in this game are some of the best I can remember, from how enemies and bosses move, to dynamically chaining together different moves and creating a fast-paced flow of combat with the enemy. The environments are incredibly detailed and authentic. Game Science went above and beyond going extra mile after extra mile to achieve this. Aside from regular motion capture, for some enemies and bosses (Tiger Vanguard for example), they even went so far as to motion capture literal cats with a custom software they had to develop alongside this process. This is why some of the animations, like the Tiger Vanguard drinking from the pool of blood you find him in seem so authentic. Not only that, but they supposedly travelled across China to different cultural sites to analyse and scan temples and other places so they can accurately recreate these structures in the game. If you look at comparisons between the game and the locations they are based on, you will notice the love for detail and amount of effort that went into this. Now, the narrative of the game can be a bit confusing, if you are not at all familiar with the Journey to the West. Yet despite not necessarily knowing what is happening exactly on screen, the game does a phenomenal job at providing a very cinematic and fun experience. Black Myth: Wukong is actually not a retelling of Journey to the West, but rather takes place some time AFTER the events of the novel, in a “what happened after?” scenario thought up by the devs. Several characters you encounter during the game are from the original story. It gives you a basic foundational quest of “go on this journey to collect these 6 relics” and takes you on this incredible adventure showing you amazing and unexpected things one after the other. On this adventure, you can encounter a wild variety of enemies, without seeming repetitive whatsoever. Even the bosses are not repeated except for 2 instances, despite there being a whopping over 90 bosses. Yes, you read that right. There are over 90 bosses in this game. With only 2 minor instances of having a base model be reused. A lot of these bigger bosses are incredibly cinematic, having moves, mechanics and moments in cutscenes that make you feel like you are in the middle of an epic movie. The enemy designs in this game are very creative and varied, providing a breath of fresh air from all the typical and stereotypical types of enemies you can find in a lot of games. Bipedal snake-necked tiger monk? Check. Giant skeletal chicken mash with a Cubone summoning blood blades? Check. There are things happening in this game so wild, I am not even sure how to accurately describe them. The combat in this game feels very fluid and deliberate. To me, it just “clicked”. You have to be very deliberate with what you are doing, because depending on the actions you take, you will lock yourself to that action without being able to dodge out of it, meaning you have to decide when to commit to what by observing what is happening around you. There are a lot of progression systems in this game, from skill points, to equipment, to spirit skills (like yokai abilities in Nioh 2), set bonuses, vessels, curios (like rings), celestial medicines (max stat increases) to the gourd (I will mention this one later). With all these systems, it would be nice to be able to respec right? Want to redistribute your skill points to change your build? Different staff stance? Different spell setup? No biggie, just head to a shrine and move them around for free. This game gives you a lot of agency to play the way you want to play without locking you into one chosen path. Your gourd is basically your heal (Like an estus flask). But not only are there different gourds with slightly different effects, but you can also change the actual drink and so called “soaks” that are infused into the drink. All of this allows for an incredible amount of customization where you can adjust your gourd to fit your specific build. This game is not designed to follow trends or be a safe product to profit from. This game is designed to be fun. There are quite a few moments that make you go “Wait, I’ve never seen anything like this before”. From all these things mentioned, to minor QoL features like having the UI actually change a bit depending on whether you use a keyboard and mouse or a controller, you can feel the passion and care put into this game. The devs wanted this to be good and fun. And oh boy, fun my journey with this game was. Let us go over to a simple Pros and Cons list. Pros: [list] [*]Highly detailed and authentic environments. [*]Creative and varied enemy designs featuring all kinds of animal-esque monsters. [*]Incredible and dynamic animations. [*]Amazing boss designs that make you go wow. [*]No reused bosses outside of 2 instances (and even then, it is not that bad). [*]Very fluid and deliberate gameplay (If you don’t just button mash that is). [*]Lots of progression systems giving you a lot of agency to fine-tune your builds. [*]Free respecs. [*]Fascinating glimpse into Chinese mythology. [*]Amazing music throughout the whole journey. [*]Good game length. Took me around 35h to fully complete my first playthrough with most bosses killed (except 2 minor side bosses iirc), 75h for 100% achievements. Will definitely play the game more in the future just for fun. [*]Makes you become monke during intense fights, having you let out monkey-like noises. [/list] Cons: [list] [*]Invisible walls (Could have hidden a lot of these with natural barriers like impassable rocks etc). [*]Clunky pickups/interactions (You can interact with things that are right in front of your character, so if you are sprinting and going too fast, you might need to turn around to interact. A small 360 degree radius would have been better). [*]There are items with random drop chances from enemies or plants that are needed to get 100% achievements. I spent over 10 hours farming 2 specific plants before finally getting my final achievement. This was incredibly frustrating. I’d hope for “skewered rng” in the future, slowly increasing the drop chance the more times it does not drop. This way, they could control the maximum amount of kills/pickups needed to get the items. [/list] Technical issues that will probably be ironed out (I played on high preset at 80% upscaling with frame gen and usually had 100+ fps in most cases throughout the whole game): [list] [*]Thumbnails of items not properly loading in menus. [*]Sudden but short stutters presumably when loading in something big. [*]Sometimes had issues with shadows/clouds seeming…pixelated for some reason. [*]Framedrops when using bound items/spells when it opens the “radial”-esque menus for them. [/list] All in all, a lot of the issues I have with this game are things that can improve with experience for future projects. This is the first major self-developed title this studio made, so they have plenty of chances to improve on these things in the future. It is a feature complete game. No paid content. No corporate influence or agendas noticeably influencing the games narrative or game systems. The devs had a vision and they focussed on that vision with full creative freedom, wanting to share what they love and have players enjoy it. This game reminded me why I love video games. I 100% recommend this game.