Wo Long is a fantastic soulslike action game. It is fast paced, frenetic, features a robust and satisfying parry system (Sekiro Fans will love this combat) and brings over that boss-rush feel from Nioh in triumphant fashion.

Unfortunately, that's not all it retains of Nioh's DNA. The loot system is so unbelievably obnoxious that it almost feels like a parody of itself. It's a needlessly complicated statistical nightmare. At the end of the day, this is an ACTION game, that excels when you are PLAYING it. Managing your inventory for 30 minutes in between every mission so that it doesn't fill up is a chore. There's no way to sugarcoat this. It feels like homework from your least favorite class.

Wo Long is, ultimately, Nioh meets Dynasty Warriors. If you ever played the DW titles when you were younger, you're going to have lots of "hey wait a second!" moments, and I loved that about this game. Characters, plot beats, weapons and attack patterns. It's varied, and it's recognizable, and it's super cool. And personally, I thought the best Dynasty Warriors entries were the ones that didn't feature endless loot, but that instead allowed you to choose a weapon, and then level it up by USING it. That always felt best. No worries about inventory management or nitpicking over almost entirely irrelevant stats. Just play the damn game, and it will allow you to keep up by dishing EXP points for your gear of choice.

I WISH Wo Long did this. But instead you're getting loot, man. SO. MUCH.. LOOT! People have been complaining about this since the first Nioh title. I was shocked when I read that Nioh 2 was going to do nothing to fix it. So shocked in fact that I didn't play Nioh 2. But here we are, 6 years after Nioh, and Team Ninja is still drawing a fat blank on this. How can they be this tone deaf?

I understand the notion that perhaps 1% of people who play these games enjoy playing them multiple times. Content creators like fashioning cracked builds and sharing them online. So I suppose the complexity and variance on display here with the weapons and armor will enable those types of players that extra dash of fulfilment. But for the rest of us? We're just trying to play the game, man. And you HAVE to stop getting in our way like this!

At one point I simply gave up on it, and figured whatever, I'm just not going to look at the loot at all. But then my inventory filled, so I was forced to go sell. I had hundreds.. HUNDREDS of items to look through. Sifting through this trash, trying to sort out what's good (it's not easy to do, since items are all discovered at different levels, and there's nothing to tell you if a weapon, a helmet, will be better or worse than yours were you to level it up to the same degree) absolutely sucks. I hated it. I wish that they'd trim the fat on these systems so that we could just play the game and feel that power fantasy as our gear leveled itself up.

Anyways back to what makes this a good game! The level design is really tight. Lots of fun branching paths, begging you to double back, but not winding themselves into such a labyrinth that you're lost or confused. A really intriguing "Morale" system which serves as a soft level-gate system self-contained by each individual level. Your own morale rank goes up and up as you mercilessly slaughter demons and humans alike, which serves as really good motivation to try to see and attack everything rather than just running on by. You'll also find magic-user enemies who are putting up shields, and downing them serves to lower the enemy's morale rank. So, if you scour the area and play the game with patience and precision, you'll be maxed out by the end of each level, and the area boss will be somewhat diminished. It's a really cool system that clicks and really helps to enhance the game's addicting qualities!

The weapons are sweet, the martial arts techniques are cool, and the fatal blow system (though confusing at first) is awesome. Deflecting enemy attacks feels good from the first second of the first level, and remains a blast all the way to the end. Deflecting a succession of enemy attacks without allowing them to hit you will fill their stagger gauge, and once that sucker snaps you can deliver a grueling hit courtesy of a number of epic animations, lopping off a significant chunk of their health in a single blow. The game uses this system to reward patience and accuracy, and it's surprisingly forgiving considering the average difficulty level of a game of this nature.

The game is longer than you might expect, with plenty of levels to carve your way through. A nice variety of environments, and a gigantic array of cool boss battles. Some of them SUCK.. (Aoye, I'm looking at you) but most of them are perfectly balanced to give you a challenge but not prompt you to tear your hair out. Oftentimes you'll get one-shotted, or dunked on within moments, by a new foe. But a few attempts later, you'll be taking his ass to school. As with so many soulslikes before it, Wo Long is about learning your enemies attack patterns, the timings of them, and when it's safe to attack. It's really good stuff!

So, yes. Given the shoddy nature of the PC launch, I was tempted to rate this game lower. I had to turn the graphics way down and the effects all off, even though I'm running a 3070 and an i7 11700k processor, to avoid having the game chug itself to death. and even still, it would occasionally drop frames to the point that I was watching a slideshow. Which.. given the type of game this is?.. that's unacceptable. But I can only imagine they'll have that patched up at some point in the near future.

I had a couple really entertaining afternoons with Wo Long. Once it had me in its grasp, and I had entered that coveted flow state with it, it became a joy to experience.

This was the most conflicting game I've played in at least a decade. I couldn't even figure out how to score it. Based on gameplay alone, I'd have ranked it much lower.. but the way the story ebbs and flows, the way Mick Gordon's soundtrack hits, the way the highs reach SO high.. it's bizarre! On the one hand this feels like true event gaming, the kind of project that should be on the tips of everyone's tongues these days. And yet on the other, it's a frustrating, jank disaster.

Where to begin? At the beginning? Sure. The game's world building is easily one of its strongest elements. It borrows liberally (perhaps too liberally) from the Bioshock franchise. In fact there's an homage within the first 3 minutes. So it wears it on its sleeve, at least, and from that foundation it totally spins off into its own thing. The way the timeline is expressed to the player, as well as our protagonist's intentionally vague role within, is crafty as hell. The first two hours trade off explorative gameplay, huge cinematics, an endlessly intriguing soundtrack.. you feel like you're slowly but surely being sucked into the pits of hell, and if you're anything like me.. you like it!

Then you wake up in Jurassic Park, except robots. And here's where it all spins out of control. It SHOULD rock. It really should. The fantasy that Mundfish has set out to convey here is that you're in a very dangerous place. Despite your capabilities, you should NOT be here, and survival is an absurd concept. And damn, man, if only actually playing it felt this way.

The game can't get out of its own way. Ironically, it's poor AI that disassembles so much of what is being aimed at here. Perhaps down the line it'll be all patched up, and it'll be a much better game, and it'll be the talk of the town! But if you're asking me, it feels fundamentally broken.

The devs have gone to great lengths to provide us with an open world well and truly worth exploring. We're meant to gaze at it in wonder, desperate to solve the mystery as to what's around the next bend. They even go as far as to give us car mechanics, so we can hop into these little beaters and get where we're going faster. And there are a plethora of optional dungeons, rife with cleverly designed puzzles, placed clear as day. The goal is to collect blueprints for weapon upgrades that will make the game more FUN!

But goddammit, it's NOT FUN. The way the enemies endlessly respawn in this open world makes it feel like an overtly hostile place, and not in a fun way. It seems the only reasonable tactic is to make a beeline for the next quest marker, and to hell with all of that optional garbage! The game begs to be stopped and looked at for a minute, breathed in and considered thoroughly, and yet if you so much as take a piss break, you're dead, Comrade!

So I don't know what to make of it. I couldn't figure it out. I rolled credits on this stupid game and I still don't know how I was supposed to play it. The explanations as to how the open world functions are quite limited as well. I spent a while having to google answers to basic questions because I had no idea what the hell the game even wanted me to do for the first little while.

So anyways I beat the whole thing having only completed 2 of the 11 or 12 optional dungeons, and as much as I think that's a shame, I felt like I had no other choice. I HATED being out in the open world. I felt constantly antagonized and I never had any clue where the danger was even coming from.

But let's go back to the story for a second. Atomic Heart has some of the most insane story beats in any game you're likely to see this generation. There were sequences that had my jaw on the floor, and my head spinning. It's nuts. When those big moments hit? They HIT. And Mick Gordon ensures that they HIIIIIIIT. The potency and craftsmanship of this story just makes it all the more disappointing that the game itself is so uneven and unwieldy.

But even the story isn't bulletproof. When it's being delivered to us via cinematics, it's wild. How much did these cinematics cost, I wonder? Some of them are total bats8#t and I loved them. But the majority of the story is told during gameplay, via fast-paced dialogue. And this is.. most unfortunate. You've doubtless already heard many complaints regarding the protagonist and his .. er.. douchiness. These complaints are well founded. Though I must say! The douchiness DOES fit the guy. If you give it some time, you'll come to understand this grouch, and that his anger is born of an intriguing concoction of backstory elements. I actually kinda liked it.. but jesus the delivery, man..

I'm not even talking about the Voice Actor. It has more to do with the pacing of it all. It never stops. And the overlap is enough to make you want to put a drill through your own skull. No matter where you are, there is a f&*king cavalcade of dialogue cocked and loaded and ready to let rip. You and your glove are going to say a lot to one another. A LOT. And the NPCs in the world are going to compete for the prize.

It's so annoying. And the fact that it's annoying is annoying! Because the story is really cool! And the writing is honestly really good! There are so many insane ideas packed in here, such a unique promise. It's totally unprecedented. But the way it's all getting machine gunned into your brain, typically two or three layers at a time, is maddening. You'll have an audio log going, and then some asshole will start shouting mainline dialogue at you from down the hall, and then you and your glove will start having a sidebar, and then you'll hit up a vending machine and it'll start trying to smoke you off. And all of this is just railing your ass all at once. it SUCKS. And honestly? I don't know how I'd fix it. The pacing of such things has got to be one of the most incredibly difficult aspects of game development. And unfortunately, Mundfish just doesn't have this down yet.

So.. yes. I don't really know how to rank this. It'd be such a travesty to rank it low, but it'd be a complete lie to rank it high. When the bosses are flying circles around you, and the smoke and particle effects are popping off, and Mick Gordon is slappin bangers straight into your drums, and you know that a HUGE mystery is about to unfurl around the next corner.. you're going to feel like you're playing the best game that's been released in a long time. At least, the best single-player FPS. That's for damn sure. But when you're trying to drive down a road, and you hit an invisible barrier, and the windshields blow out and the car lights on fire, so you hop out only to get jumpkicked by a robot that's apparently been instantly repaired even though you just expended all of your ammo only moments ago taking it down, and alarm bells are going off and lasers are ripping through the air around you, and now there's a miniboss in the picture, and it's the 7th time you've seen this miniboss, and it wraps you up in the same stupid QTE sequence you've seen time and time again, and your quest marker keeps changing position so you're not actually sure where to go, and the map's sure as hell not going to lend a hand, and then oh shi# one of the robots just kicked you up against a wall and now you're frozen.. and you're dead... and oh god damn it you've just been loaded into a file from 30 minutes ago.. shiiiiiiiiiii-

Yeah that all happened. At least 3 times.

The first 15 hours of this game are everything a Harry Potter fan could possibly ask for, and then some. The design of the castle itself is absolutely spellbinding, and I'll never forget staying up until 4 in the morning picking apart every corner of it. If you were a fan of the books before the movies, you'll be delighted by the easter eggs on display. Things that were mercilessly cut from the 700 page tomes for the feature films to fit their ~2 hour runtimes, and subsequently lost to time, are back! And sharing screen real estate with all of the other, more familiar elements.

The graphics are unbelievable, and although I experienced an avalanche of bugs pertaining to the lighting, I was stopping to take screenshots constantly. I just wish there were an easier way to make the HUD vanish so I could do so.

The combat is slick, and the open world is vast. But I must say, once you've done enough of it, every fight does unfortunately become the exact same routine. The lack of enemy variety, and the lack of strategy required to pop the differently colored bubbles, makes bandit camps eventually become a rote spinning of the wheels.

The broom traversal is superb. The animations and the control scheme, once you get used to it, really make you feel the speed and handling of the thing, and it's a joy to pop on and off of it as you explore. The downside here, though, is that once you've unlocked the thing, hoofing it on foot begins to feel too slow by comparison. But once you're beelining from one objective marker to another on the map, up in the air, as the crow flies, you're suddenly missing out on all of the intricacy of the design down on the ground. I don't know how I'd solve this problem, but the game lost a bit of its magic the second I had access to the broom.

The story is, unfortunately, the weakest part of the game. When I started this experience, my internal monologue was going "game of the year! masterpiece! 10/10!" but as I hit hour 30, hour 40, and beyond, I was gradually feeling myself entirely losing my grip. Well before its runtime had ended, the illusion had diffused. Where once I was hypnotized by the majesty of the castle, and finally seeing all of my favorite HP lore brought into the AAA spotlight, by the end I was frustrated and sobered by the realization that the story just wasn't very good.

Any time Avalance went off book to create their own slice of this world, they failed to conjure up any magic. The characters have backstories and whatnot, but there's next to nothing compelling going on. People praise Sebastian's subplot, but I found it to be about as predictable as one could imagine. The overarching narrative of the goblin rebellion never feels even remotely threatening. The game lacks the air of mystery that was so crucial to the books. The lengthy dialogue sequences during sidequests are hamstrung by the same 6 camera angles every. single. TIME. And altogether, it eventually had me wanting to skip the voice acting altogether. I really, really wish I cared more about the characters. And my young self would kick me for saying this, but I wish I got to spend more time in the classroom! I was looking forward to the wizard student simulation, and that aspect was available in extremely short supply.

And this is what has me worried for the inevitable sequel! Hogwarts itself was by far the best part of this game, and you can't really cast that spell twice. Simply making the open world bigger would do absolutely nothing for me, not because elements felt copy-pasty (necessarily), but because zipping from Merlin Trial to Merlin Trial on a broom becomes a tiresome activity even in small spaces. And if Avalanche attempted to bring the second game to a NEW castle, one which did not have a massive pool of lore to draw from, I am not sure I'd trust this team of writers to do anything truly compelling with it.

One last thing - the loot. Drove me nuts, man. Shouldn't be randomized at all times. Finally getting Alohomora Lv 3, and rushing to that chest I'd always wondered about, only to pull some green Dragon Spectacles out of it that were about 30 pts lower than my current facewear.. yeah.. that was disappointing.