Team Ninja's attempt at making a Sekiro clone turned out to be a showcase of absolute failure and ineptitude at designing games. That is mostly due to all the contradicting design choices existing in the game simultaneously

First off, RPG mechanics being a thing makes absolutely no sense when the flag marking system is far more significant in terms of mitigating the amount of damage you receive from mobs/bosses and how much damage you deal to them. While I initially thought the flag system was a genius addition, they somehow managed to execute it so badly that I have nothing really positive to say about it other than the concept itself.
Which brings me to my next major complaint about Wo Long and that is the combat and its piss poor execution when paired with the terribly designed enemies. So, despite the game being built around this combat mechanic called "Parrying", which is by all metric an offensive mechanic masked as defensive one but here it is entirely defensive and is simply a means to avoid getting hit until you stagger what you're fighting against, which clearly incentivizes braindead defensive playstyle. All of that is somehow amplified with the bosses being designed to keep you on the defense with annoying amount of follow ups to their strings to catch you off guard if you take a seemingly safe opening, which adds a lot of RNG to already mediocre movesets, thus making parrying an absolute low IQ guessing game. But credit where credit is due, the posture system in Wo Long is basically the perfected version of Sekiro's, which I find bafflingly stupid how they managed to not capitalize off it and actually deliver a cohesive combat package.
Oh and of course, can't forget to mention just how blatantly unbalanced the entire game becomes due to all the conflicting mechanics, which is the sole contributor to the difficulty curve being all over the place

I'll wrap up the review by quoting my friend
"Seriously their games feel like 10 different people in a project who just do their own thing without communicating with the others"
which also serves as a tldr for the review and my thoughts on Team Ninja in general

Reviewed on Mar 17, 2023


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