Black Myth: Wukong review – Monkey see, monkey do

We’ve been blessed with a flood of great action games and soulslikes in recent years, but Black Myth: Wukong has been one of the most anticipated games of the bunch since its initial reveal, and for good reason. The game’s striking visuals catch your eye, and since Black Myth: Wukong is heavily inspired by the great Chinese novel Journey to the West, it has a style and vibe that immediately set it apart from its contemporaries. Thankfully, Game Science’s debut console/PC release is more than just a pretty face.

Black Myth: Wukong places you in the shoes of the Destined One, sending you on a journey across China to defeat mythological monsters and hone your combat skills with spells, transformations, and other magical abilities. Some may call it a soulslike, but it leans more heavily toward traditional action games outside of a few surface-level similarities.

More than a souslike

For one, the story is much more straightforward in Black Myth: Wukong. It still takes a backseat to gameplay (and what’s there isn’t all that interesting, either), but it’s much easier to get invested in the world and characters. This is largely due to the gorgeous visuals and excellent cutscene direction, but also surprisingly due to the voice performances as well. Play the game in Chinese, trust me on this one.

Combat is the star of the show here, though, and it feels great. Taking a page out of Sekiro’s book, the Destined One only has access to a single weapon and moveset for the entire game. You can equip four abilities to augment your playstyle, but you’ll be using the same set of combos for the entirety of your adventure.

As all good action games do, Black Myth: Wukong rewards aggression with its main moveset. Instead of parries, perfect dodges are the key to success. Narrowly avoiding attacks and smacking enemies with your staff will fill your Focus meter, letting you unleash buffed heavy attacks for big damage when the opportunity arises. It’s a simple combat system at its core, but the process of mastering the timing of each move and learning the best times to weave in skills or go for big burst damage with a magical transformation keeps things engaging.

Black Myth: Wukong feels closer to Star Wars: Jedi Survivor than Elden Ring in terms of difficulty, but there are still a few major bosses that will put a pause on your westward journey with some pretty big difficulty spikes. This is where most of the game’s soulslike comparisons are sourced from, but Black Myth: Wukong isn’t a hardcore soulslike just because it has tough bosses and bonfire-like checkpoints.

You don’t lose anything of significance when you die, the runbacks to bosses are incredibly short, and it feels like you can’t walk more than a few feet in any direction without encountering a new boss battle. There’s not much in the way of buildcrafting, either, and exploration is rarely rewarded with interesting items or gear. In this way, Black Myth: Wukong plays out more like a big-budget boss rush than an expansive soulslike RPG.

Exploration and progression

Black Myth: Wukong still has wide-open environments that it expects you to explore, however, and its refusal to commit to its best linear boss rush bits is a fatal flaw. Exploration rarely feels rewarding, and it’s not uncommon to end up finding just a few common crafting materials at the end of a hidden path. There are valuable items that increase your health, boost your stamina, and upgrade your character in other ways, but these are so far and few in between that the excitement of stumbling upon a hidden area is watered down.

These problems stem from Black Myth: Wukong’s subpar progression systems, which also feel tacked on. You can craft new weapons and armor throughout the game, but each of them is a straight upgrade over the previous one so your equipment doesn’t require much thought. Some armor has set bonuses that provide certain buffs (like improving your attributes when standing in water), but these are typically too situational to be useful over the raw defense boost you get from crafting the latest armor set you’ve unlocked.

Since weapons are armor are basically an afterthought, the main way to get stronger in Black Myth: Wukong is unlocking new abilities on the skill tree. Skills start off exciting, unlocking new combat stances and modifying your moveset in helpful ways, but the excitement quickly dies down. Skill upgrades are largely minor buffs to things like Focus gains or stamina costs. These are definitely helpful, but they’re not enough to make you look forward to opening the skill tree after conquering a difficult boss battle.

All of these just make me wish they would have trimmed the fat and made Black Myth: Wukong a tighter, even more linear experience that doubles down on the solid combat. Getting stuck on a boss already feels bad enough, but deciding to explore the surrounding area for potential upgrades and items only to be met with middling rewards feels even worse. Also, there’s no map, so add the frustration of navigation on top of that.

The bosses

Thankfully, when Black Myth: Wukong cooks, it cooks hard. The boss battles are the best part, so they just threw in dozens of them in all directions in every region. These one-on-one duels are just challenging enough to keep you on your toes without feeling insurmountable, and paired with Black Myth: Wukong’s visual flair and stellar score, they’re exhilarating.

The game’s limited moveset works in its favor here, too, since every enemy is specifically designed around the staff and its combo timings. Both your moveset and the bosses’ movesets feel intricately woven together. Everything fits together like a puzzle designed for nonstop aggression from both sides, making those last-second dodges all the more satisfying.

The audiovisual spectacle of it all really sells that fantasy, too. Black Myth: Wukong looks and sounds absolutely gorgeous, and that beauty applies to boss battles just as much as it does environments. It feels next-gen in a way that few games do.

The Verdict

Even though the visuals do a lot of the heavy lifting, Black Myth: Wukong is still a solid game with a deep reverence for Chinese folklore. The game depicts its culture with such charming authenticity that it’s hard not to fall in love with it, and that makes the duller moments in between the stellar boss fights much more bearable. While the lackluster progression and exploration hold it back from being truly excellent, Black Myth: Wukong is a great action RPG with outstanding visuals and music.