Wo Long feels like a feature and content stripped Nioh with a lower budget and an overly basic parry system and nonsensical morale system added, but since I love Nioh I still kind of like it.
The majority of features are similar or basically identical to the previous two Nioh games, on top of it mostly looking the same and sharing the same stage structure. The game is broken up into parts/chapters with each one having main and side levels where you fight through human and demon enemies in an area, possibly while joined by some NPC or co-op allies. You raise your stats when you level up with each giving their own passive bonuses and each of the game's weapon types having three stats that have a high, moderate, and low effect on the bonus damage that they do. You can learn five different elements of magic with each having their own attacks, buffs, and debuffs. You will find or acquire loot in the form of weapons, armor, accessories, and items with some weapons and armor giving passive set bonuses when you equip gear that goes together. You will also unlock different guardian spirits whose powers are charged up as you fight and they can either be summoned for a quick attack on your enemies or for a longer buff for your character and possibly your allies.
Combat is fun. It is faster paced than most games in this style, probably slower than Nioh for a good player and certainly slower in terms of the input required from the player. There is no stamina system limiting your main attacks, you can continue to do your primary attack as long as you want and hitting enemies with it will build your spirit which is used to power your magic, allow you to deflect attacks, and to use martial arts skills (special weapon attacks). Getting hit will lower your spirit which can cause you to become stunned or prevent you from using attacks other than your primary quick attacks. Avoiding combat will slowly balance your spirit meter out to the default middle. Every enemy attack can be deflected and as you damage them, apply status effects, and deflecting their attacks will lower their spirit until you can perform a powerful fatal strike (often not necessarily fatal) attack on them when their guard is broken.
I'm not much of a fan of the deflection system. It lacks the variety of Sekiro in just having it be one button for every kind of attack, and the limited animations make it less fun to deflect attacks than it should be. It doesn't help that the size of some enemies means the camera doesn't always cooperate well when it comes to showing you what you need to see, and that the way body parts and weapons can clip through the environment doesn't help either. Enemies really love going into their unblockable/unstaggerable strong attacks that you can only dodge or deflect immediately upon seeing you, while you are stealth killing an enemies near them, or while they are outside of your field of vision as you fight something else. The biggest problem I tend to have with deflections is that Wo Long isn't one of the games where you can block, dodge, or deflect to cancel out your attack animations so what frequently happens is that an enemy will be doing nothing, you will start an attack and your attacks typically don't stagger many types of enemies, the enemy will start an attack right after you (often a fast unblockable charged attack) and you can't do anything about it. I've never understood games that completely negate your ability to dodge or block by canceling out of an attack, and there are so many ways to make it a more challenging and interesting system if you wanted to punish for canceling out of attacks like lower dodge range, smaller parry windows, falling over, etc things that would require more skill for adopting a more aggressive style rather than just your character being an idiot that won't stop twirling their swords around for two seconds.
The poor lock on feature of Nioh is just as bad here and the focus on deflections and the game more often having you face off against more enemies at one time than was common in Nioh only make the locks-ons and occasional camera issues even worse. Mostly, I just ignored the deflection system against normal enemies and the majority of bosses, instead just making use of dodging or spells buffs. As you are typically just seeing the same repeated animations over and over, it's not even a system that is particularly fun to be or attempt to get good at using.
What hurts the game, outside of me just not liking the deflecting system, is almost everything new feels unfinished and everything that Nioh had that was removed here (sometimes for seemingly no real reason or as a possible means to give less options to make it simpler to get into). Instead of having 11 main weapons with three different stances to switch between and a large variety of moves to learn and three varied ranged weapons you instead technically have more weapons but many don't feel that different, what made each one unique in Nioh is mostly gone, there are no stance options, and there are no weapon skills to learn instead one or two special attacks are assigned to the weapon when you get them. You lack customization for your playstyle as most of these moves just aren't as unique, fun, or just badass looking as many of the ones found in Nioh, being limited to two per weapon also means you don't have much choice to begin with. The ranged options of a bow, rifle, and cannon in Nioh is now a bow, crossbow, or repeating crossbow and none of them feel particularly satisfying to use, and all of them only increase damage based on one stat (the few unique ones that are part of equipment sets might scale off something else) so if you aren't focusing on that one stat they aren't going to be doing much for you. While there is still a fairly ridiculous amount of blood, the dismemberment is gone which tones down some of the kind of badass moments you could have in Nioh. No more chopping an arm of with an Iaijutsu quick draw attack, swatting an enemy soldier into the air and impaling them with a spear, or channeling a powerful fist punch that explodes an enemy demon's head, mostly because you can't even do those kind of fun attacks to begin with. The three kinds of demon transformations and ability to use almost every enemy and boss demon as some kind of attack or summon in Nioh 2 has been replaced with, absolutely nothing. Ninja magic, skills, and equipment have been replaced by, nothing (you can still find some fire bomb pots to throw I guess).
The story, as is common with the company, is mostly poor. It takes place during the early period of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms from the Yellow Turban Rebellion to Cao Cao's war against Yuan Shao. The addition of a corrupting figure tempting people with demonic powers and killing those that don't listen to him takes a lot of the more character driven moments of the story away and the structure of the game has us rushing through events. Even with the larger battles that should be going on in many of the game's missions everything ends up feeling just as, if not more confined, to just you alone (and summoned allies) fighting through the stages than the Nioh games rather than making any effort to at least show a larger battle going on around you. It does the common thing almost any adaptation does and for some reason mostly ignores the Wu characters after their introduction (it looks like the DLC might all take place in the middle of the game with two of them revolving around Sun Ce based on the names).
While the main missions are typically well designed, the side missions are a massive step down from the Nioh games. Nioh's side missions might have you exploring new, sometimes large, areas and having multiple possible endings to some missions based on your actions in it either for a minor reward difference or for some difficult end mission text from the person that asked for your help. Wo Long completely removes any kind of epilogue text making an already bad and mostly flavorless narrative worse, but the mission design almost always just places you at the end point of the previous main mission and has you go backwards slightly towards the start of the mission to do some minor thing. Even the arena style combat side missions seem weaker than Nioh's offering with some of them being so short and easy it doesn't even make sense to make them missions. An early one has you paired with Guan Yu and Zhang Fei and only has you fight three waves of pitiful enemies that wouldn't even have been a challenge alone. Most of the side missions, that were sometimes as good as main story missions in Nioh, feel like complete afterthoughts here furthering the game's lower budget and rushed feel. The side missions could have at least been used for aiding the Wu characters like Sun Ce and Zhou Yu who are just brushed aside in the main game.
With all that is gone you would hope the magic has been improved to make up for it. It has not. Because the damage of offensive skills is highly tied to you raising your stats in the matching element you aren't too likely to use much of them, which the game thinks is fine because instead of allowing you to equip up to 16 quick slow abilities like in Nioh, Wo Long lets you equip four spells at once. Oddly enough the game's magic system has its own kind of deflecting system where firing a spell that is the stronger opposing element of your enemies will cancel their spell and have your continue on to hit them. This could have lead to some fun fast paced mage duels, but obviously the system can't really work in any meaningful way when your ability to equip spells is limited (and out of those four your probably are using 2-3 slows for buffs, debuffs, and/or utilities not just offense) and casting is a fairly slow and spirit costly process anyway. The magic is useful, can be powerful, and can be fun to use but it's just so limited by what it gives you and the completely needless limit on what you can equip. There is nothing mechanically or limited by the number of buttons on a controller that lead to this limit as having more spells options wouldn't even make you more powerful due to spirit and low time limits on buffs and debuffs, if anything it would have just saved people some time swapping spells out at rest areas.
A morale level system was added to the game that acts as a kind of backwards difficulty system. This seems to have no actual reason to exist and when I first heard about it and putting up battle and marking flags found in the environment to lock you to higher morale levels I had assumed they were making an open world game. In most stages you start at 0 morale, as you kill enemies you gain morale points until your raise your level (more gain with stealth or fatal strike kills). The higher your morale level compared to an enemy the more damage you do and less you take (or the reverse if you are a lower level). If you are killed you lose morale and the enemy that killed you gains morale, while playing online you can see fallen flags of dead players and avenge them by killing slightly more powerful enemies that will drop accolade points that can be exchanged for certain items. Spells are also locked and require you to at a certain morale level in order to use them. Outside of the online aspect of running into a few buffed enemies (at least compared to what they were not necessarily compared to your current morale level) there seems to be no reason for this system outside of wasting your time slightly. You can easily just go back to a battle flag to rest then hit some respawned enemies to quickly raise your level if you want to access to your magic faster or if you want to be stronger than some enemies. If you are exploring the map for everything you are likely to max out your morale level by the end which will often put you at a higher level than the boss, possibly making the game easier than you would have wanted. If you are hit by an enemies charged attack you will lose a point of morale while deflecting them will cause the enemy to lose one, pretty much nothing is alive long enough for this to have any meaningful effects.
The marking flags seem like they felt a need to put some kind of hidden collectible in each map and just made it these useless things that are half obvious and half hidden in each stage. When you lose to a boss the vengeance system does not apply in the same way as a normal enemy, you will instantly gain back your lost XP and morale at the start of the next fight. It's one of those backwards system where the morale level would only matter for people that would die a lot to normal enemies, and if you are the kind of person dying to the game's normal enemies then you probably aren't the kind of player that needed the game to be made more difficult and having it lock off some of your magic options. On the other side, the person who easily gets through the stages probably didn't need to have an advantage on the stage boss in the first place from their ever increasing morale until it caps above enemy levels. The entire system, that just comes down to do you want to do more or less damage and do you want to take more or less damage, seems like it could have been handled by asking the simple and traditional question of easy, medium, or hard? And most likely everyone that got to answer that would get an experience either closer to what they want or that gets to what they want faster.
The titles from Nioh are in this game where you get points for doing specific action, number of kills with weapons, beating bosses without allies or taking damage, etc. The system is now useless though because instead of spending title levels on useful passive upgrades in Nioh, here you build up points to be given worthless items that can be easily farmed in the base game.
Stage design is very similar to the Nioh series, for good and bad. There are some atmospheric sections, varied environments, and some good enemy placement. On the other hand, years later the game still looks about the same as the over six year old Nioh 1, the addition of jumping adds more focus on verticality but it rarely ends up making a meaningful difference except for a way to hide mostly pointless marking flags or collectibles and the double jumping and what and how your character leaps up certain types of objects always looks and feels a bit unfinished. They have kept a similar Nioh and wider Souls-like series design where in each stage you can often knock down paths, unlock doors, put out fires, etc that opens shortcuts to what was behind you, although due to Wo Long having an average of twice as many rest points (battle flags) and the new addition of a large number of marking flags that heal you when reached, they removed the primary reason to backtrack in it being a way to get back to previous needed rest points. The morale system seems to be used to basically give you a left path and right path near the start of many stages, one path will have an enemy that has around a 10 morale rank higher than you, you can go that way (and if you are good or have AI allies summoned, not much if going to stop you) or you can go the other way which will allow you to fight weaker enemies first and likely circle back to the other area anyway. It doesn't have a meaningful effect, it would be like an FPS level starting you with no ammo and asking if you want to rush the heavily armed group first or go the way that has less people with small arms to get some ammo first, what you do will almost certainly be both and again just having difficulty options seems like the more rational option over this morale system.
Enemy variety is quite low, you will see a lot of the same very enemies repeated in the same form with the same weapons. There's a strangely high number of zombie like soldiers that don't do much but raise your morale ranking, I'm hoping that on new game plus runs that many of them either can do more or that they are replaced by more normal soldiers that can actually do something. Though you do have a good variety of bosses and side stages that can let you duel your allies, and the enemies themselves are usually well designed. There is a problem with the large stone giants where if you just keep spamming attacks at a close range, they just won't attack judging by the 5-6 I fought like that.
Animations for stealth and fatal strikes are, as they were in Nioh, very lackluster and limited. When I watched earlier videos of the game I saw the move where they jump off an enemy and slam down on them with a spear and I though, that must be one of the spear's fatal blows when you break an enemy's guard. That is partly true, for the most part it is the only fatal blow, doesn't matter what weapon you have, doesn't matter if the demon is some giant ape creature, smaller more nimble water creature, or some giant flaming porcupine you get the same move every time even with the majority of boss enemies. Obviously, like all similar style attacks in other games, this animation looks great when in a confined area with a roof lower than the animation's jump. Stealth attacking a demon, same move. Stealth attacking humans can have some differences depending on your weapon but you will still see some odd things like it treating the wooden staff like a spear where you will thrust it through an enemy's back in a ridiculous looking attack.
Some things that have improved from Nioh is that you do not have to waste dozens of hours trying to grind for blacksmithing scrolls or unique boss weapon skill drops. Set drops seem to come much easier from enemies. On top of that, there are are a number of important Three Kingdoms characters that you can summon with you in stages to help you, as you fight together you raise your bond level and when you reach max bond they will give you the four star tier version of their entire weapon and armor set. The tiers of gear go from one star to five with each star giving the set an additional passive ability, these abilities are able to be swapped out at the blacksmith and the weapon/armor itself can go through upgrades that enhance damage/defense by spending different tiered steel and leather materials. This is so much easier and much less of a massive intentional time waster that it is a huge advantage over the Nioh games. Unfortunately, they don't allow you to swap out a weapons assigned martial arts moves. Many of the unique set weapons have a martial art that is unique to them but obviously it would have been an improvement to allow you to set what skill you want for the second martial art rather than to just hope you find a rank 4-5 weapon that has the one you want. The inventory system is easier to manage than Nioh, but still isn't always convenient as you will constantly be getting things you just have no use for. It is also very easy to respec your character's stat build once you unlock the game's village area, all you end up needing to is talk to a man near the spawn and raise and lower them as you see fit. Much faster than how most games do it where you need an item or some form of currency that then resets everything.
PVP invasion seem to have a very high chance of not working properly, where enemy players might appear to just teleport around everywhere. Best to turn them off in the online options settings unless they are fixed. There are still occasionally NPC character invasions, these seem to be in set areas where the character will be named something relevant to the area, to their position, or they might have the name of a Three Kingdoms minor character that would or could have been in the area. An odd thing to do instead of having a normal character model to fight that could have had some dialogue like they would have in Nioh.
The PC version has some issues, for the most part these didn't effect me much, but I did have a few moments where the game suffered massive FPS drops for about 20 seconds or so before getting back to normal and I had three crashes, all while stopping at a battle flag, which also saved the game and as it didn't corrupt the save or anything like that this wasn't a big deal for me. Other people seem to be having more consistent framerate issues. There is an issue that causes the screen to quickly flash white and continue to do so fairly often (edit - this now seems to be fixed). If you minimize the game it will randomly move your mouse around the screen at times while you attempt to do other things on your computer. Like the developers past PC releases, the support for using the keyboard and mouse is poor, why you would want to play anything like this or why you would own a gaming PC and not a $15-$50 controller for certain genres I have no idea other than people seeming to have some ridiculous mindset of anything related to a console being inferior for everything, but for the people that actually matter that suffer from any kind of disability that would cause them to avoid controllers this is unfortunate.
It's an ok game that feels like Nioh .5, which makes it all the more disappointing they didn't just make Nioh 3 since they didn't meaningfully update the engine or art, did nothing with this story or setting, and could have continued to build on everything already in those other games instead of throwing it all away. I would recommend picking up those much better and feature complete games that sell for a lower price and on the PC come bundled with all of their DLC, but if you already own them this is an ok purchase.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1634737544322768897
The majority of features are similar or basically identical to the previous two Nioh games, on top of it mostly looking the same and sharing the same stage structure. The game is broken up into parts/chapters with each one having main and side levels where you fight through human and demon enemies in an area, possibly while joined by some NPC or co-op allies. You raise your stats when you level up with each giving their own passive bonuses and each of the game's weapon types having three stats that have a high, moderate, and low effect on the bonus damage that they do. You can learn five different elements of magic with each having their own attacks, buffs, and debuffs. You will find or acquire loot in the form of weapons, armor, accessories, and items with some weapons and armor giving passive set bonuses when you equip gear that goes together. You will also unlock different guardian spirits whose powers are charged up as you fight and they can either be summoned for a quick attack on your enemies or for a longer buff for your character and possibly your allies.
Combat is fun. It is faster paced than most games in this style, probably slower than Nioh for a good player and certainly slower in terms of the input required from the player. There is no stamina system limiting your main attacks, you can continue to do your primary attack as long as you want and hitting enemies with it will build your spirit which is used to power your magic, allow you to deflect attacks, and to use martial arts skills (special weapon attacks). Getting hit will lower your spirit which can cause you to become stunned or prevent you from using attacks other than your primary quick attacks. Avoiding combat will slowly balance your spirit meter out to the default middle. Every enemy attack can be deflected and as you damage them, apply status effects, and deflecting their attacks will lower their spirit until you can perform a powerful fatal strike (often not necessarily fatal) attack on them when their guard is broken.
I'm not much of a fan of the deflection system. It lacks the variety of Sekiro in just having it be one button for every kind of attack, and the limited animations make it less fun to deflect attacks than it should be. It doesn't help that the size of some enemies means the camera doesn't always cooperate well when it comes to showing you what you need to see, and that the way body parts and weapons can clip through the environment doesn't help either. Enemies really love going into their unblockable/unstaggerable strong attacks that you can only dodge or deflect immediately upon seeing you, while you are stealth killing an enemies near them, or while they are outside of your field of vision as you fight something else. The biggest problem I tend to have with deflections is that Wo Long isn't one of the games where you can block, dodge, or deflect to cancel out your attack animations so what frequently happens is that an enemy will be doing nothing, you will start an attack and your attacks typically don't stagger many types of enemies, the enemy will start an attack right after you (often a fast unblockable charged attack) and you can't do anything about it. I've never understood games that completely negate your ability to dodge or block by canceling out of an attack, and there are so many ways to make it a more challenging and interesting system if you wanted to punish for canceling out of attacks like lower dodge range, smaller parry windows, falling over, etc things that would require more skill for adopting a more aggressive style rather than just your character being an idiot that won't stop twirling their swords around for two seconds.
The poor lock on feature of Nioh is just as bad here and the focus on deflections and the game more often having you face off against more enemies at one time than was common in Nioh only make the locks-ons and occasional camera issues even worse. Mostly, I just ignored the deflection system against normal enemies and the majority of bosses, instead just making use of dodging or spells buffs. As you are typically just seeing the same repeated animations over and over, it's not even a system that is particularly fun to be or attempt to get good at using.
What hurts the game, outside of me just not liking the deflecting system, is almost everything new feels unfinished and everything that Nioh had that was removed here (sometimes for seemingly no real reason or as a possible means to give less options to make it simpler to get into). Instead of having 11 main weapons with three different stances to switch between and a large variety of moves to learn and three varied ranged weapons you instead technically have more weapons but many don't feel that different, what made each one unique in Nioh is mostly gone, there are no stance options, and there are no weapon skills to learn instead one or two special attacks are assigned to the weapon when you get them. You lack customization for your playstyle as most of these moves just aren't as unique, fun, or just badass looking as many of the ones found in Nioh, being limited to two per weapon also means you don't have much choice to begin with. The ranged options of a bow, rifle, and cannon in Nioh is now a bow, crossbow, or repeating crossbow and none of them feel particularly satisfying to use, and all of them only increase damage based on one stat (the few unique ones that are part of equipment sets might scale off something else) so if you aren't focusing on that one stat they aren't going to be doing much for you. While there is still a fairly ridiculous amount of blood, the dismemberment is gone which tones down some of the kind of badass moments you could have in Nioh. No more chopping an arm of with an Iaijutsu quick draw attack, swatting an enemy soldier into the air and impaling them with a spear, or channeling a powerful fist punch that explodes an enemy demon's head, mostly because you can't even do those kind of fun attacks to begin with. The three kinds of demon transformations and ability to use almost every enemy and boss demon as some kind of attack or summon in Nioh 2 has been replaced with, absolutely nothing. Ninja magic, skills, and equipment have been replaced by, nothing (you can still find some fire bomb pots to throw I guess).
The story, as is common with the company, is mostly poor. It takes place during the early period of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms from the Yellow Turban Rebellion to Cao Cao's war against Yuan Shao. The addition of a corrupting figure tempting people with demonic powers and killing those that don't listen to him takes a lot of the more character driven moments of the story away and the structure of the game has us rushing through events. Even with the larger battles that should be going on in many of the game's missions everything ends up feeling just as, if not more confined, to just you alone (and summoned allies) fighting through the stages than the Nioh games rather than making any effort to at least show a larger battle going on around you. It does the common thing almost any adaptation does and for some reason mostly ignores the Wu characters after their introduction (it looks like the DLC might all take place in the middle of the game with two of them revolving around Sun Ce based on the names).
While the main missions are typically well designed, the side missions are a massive step down from the Nioh games. Nioh's side missions might have you exploring new, sometimes large, areas and having multiple possible endings to some missions based on your actions in it either for a minor reward difference or for some difficult end mission text from the person that asked for your help. Wo Long completely removes any kind of epilogue text making an already bad and mostly flavorless narrative worse, but the mission design almost always just places you at the end point of the previous main mission and has you go backwards slightly towards the start of the mission to do some minor thing. Even the arena style combat side missions seem weaker than Nioh's offering with some of them being so short and easy it doesn't even make sense to make them missions. An early one has you paired with Guan Yu and Zhang Fei and only has you fight three waves of pitiful enemies that wouldn't even have been a challenge alone. Most of the side missions, that were sometimes as good as main story missions in Nioh, feel like complete afterthoughts here furthering the game's lower budget and rushed feel. The side missions could have at least been used for aiding the Wu characters like Sun Ce and Zhou Yu who are just brushed aside in the main game.
With all that is gone you would hope the magic has been improved to make up for it. It has not. Because the damage of offensive skills is highly tied to you raising your stats in the matching element you aren't too likely to use much of them, which the game thinks is fine because instead of allowing you to equip up to 16 quick slow abilities like in Nioh, Wo Long lets you equip four spells at once. Oddly enough the game's magic system has its own kind of deflecting system where firing a spell that is the stronger opposing element of your enemies will cancel their spell and have your continue on to hit them. This could have lead to some fun fast paced mage duels, but obviously the system can't really work in any meaningful way when your ability to equip spells is limited (and out of those four your probably are using 2-3 slows for buffs, debuffs, and/or utilities not just offense) and casting is a fairly slow and spirit costly process anyway. The magic is useful, can be powerful, and can be fun to use but it's just so limited by what it gives you and the completely needless limit on what you can equip. There is nothing mechanically or limited by the number of buttons on a controller that lead to this limit as having more spells options wouldn't even make you more powerful due to spirit and low time limits on buffs and debuffs, if anything it would have just saved people some time swapping spells out at rest areas.
A morale level system was added to the game that acts as a kind of backwards difficulty system. This seems to have no actual reason to exist and when I first heard about it and putting up battle and marking flags found in the environment to lock you to higher morale levels I had assumed they were making an open world game. In most stages you start at 0 morale, as you kill enemies you gain morale points until your raise your level (more gain with stealth or fatal strike kills). The higher your morale level compared to an enemy the more damage you do and less you take (or the reverse if you are a lower level). If you are killed you lose morale and the enemy that killed you gains morale, while playing online you can see fallen flags of dead players and avenge them by killing slightly more powerful enemies that will drop accolade points that can be exchanged for certain items. Spells are also locked and require you to at a certain morale level in order to use them. Outside of the online aspect of running into a few buffed enemies (at least compared to what they were not necessarily compared to your current morale level) there seems to be no reason for this system outside of wasting your time slightly. You can easily just go back to a battle flag to rest then hit some respawned enemies to quickly raise your level if you want to access to your magic faster or if you want to be stronger than some enemies. If you are exploring the map for everything you are likely to max out your morale level by the end which will often put you at a higher level than the boss, possibly making the game easier than you would have wanted. If you are hit by an enemies charged attack you will lose a point of morale while deflecting them will cause the enemy to lose one, pretty much nothing is alive long enough for this to have any meaningful effects.
The marking flags seem like they felt a need to put some kind of hidden collectible in each map and just made it these useless things that are half obvious and half hidden in each stage. When you lose to a boss the vengeance system does not apply in the same way as a normal enemy, you will instantly gain back your lost XP and morale at the start of the next fight. It's one of those backwards system where the morale level would only matter for people that would die a lot to normal enemies, and if you are the kind of person dying to the game's normal enemies then you probably aren't the kind of player that needed the game to be made more difficult and having it lock off some of your magic options. On the other side, the person who easily gets through the stages probably didn't need to have an advantage on the stage boss in the first place from their ever increasing morale until it caps above enemy levels. The entire system, that just comes down to do you want to do more or less damage and do you want to take more or less damage, seems like it could have been handled by asking the simple and traditional question of easy, medium, or hard? And most likely everyone that got to answer that would get an experience either closer to what they want or that gets to what they want faster.
The titles from Nioh are in this game where you get points for doing specific action, number of kills with weapons, beating bosses without allies or taking damage, etc. The system is now useless though because instead of spending title levels on useful passive upgrades in Nioh, here you build up points to be given worthless items that can be easily farmed in the base game.
Stage design is very similar to the Nioh series, for good and bad. There are some atmospheric sections, varied environments, and some good enemy placement. On the other hand, years later the game still looks about the same as the over six year old Nioh 1, the addition of jumping adds more focus on verticality but it rarely ends up making a meaningful difference except for a way to hide mostly pointless marking flags or collectibles and the double jumping and what and how your character leaps up certain types of objects always looks and feels a bit unfinished. They have kept a similar Nioh and wider Souls-like series design where in each stage you can often knock down paths, unlock doors, put out fires, etc that opens shortcuts to what was behind you, although due to Wo Long having an average of twice as many rest points (battle flags) and the new addition of a large number of marking flags that heal you when reached, they removed the primary reason to backtrack in it being a way to get back to previous needed rest points. The morale system seems to be used to basically give you a left path and right path near the start of many stages, one path will have an enemy that has around a 10 morale rank higher than you, you can go that way (and if you are good or have AI allies summoned, not much if going to stop you) or you can go the other way which will allow you to fight weaker enemies first and likely circle back to the other area anyway. It doesn't have a meaningful effect, it would be like an FPS level starting you with no ammo and asking if you want to rush the heavily armed group first or go the way that has less people with small arms to get some ammo first, what you do will almost certainly be both and again just having difficulty options seems like the more rational option over this morale system.
Enemy variety is quite low, you will see a lot of the same very enemies repeated in the same form with the same weapons. There's a strangely high number of zombie like soldiers that don't do much but raise your morale ranking, I'm hoping that on new game plus runs that many of them either can do more or that they are replaced by more normal soldiers that can actually do something. Though you do have a good variety of bosses and side stages that can let you duel your allies, and the enemies themselves are usually well designed. There is a problem with the large stone giants where if you just keep spamming attacks at a close range, they just won't attack judging by the 5-6 I fought like that.
Animations for stealth and fatal strikes are, as they were in Nioh, very lackluster and limited. When I watched earlier videos of the game I saw the move where they jump off an enemy and slam down on them with a spear and I though, that must be one of the spear's fatal blows when you break an enemy's guard. That is partly true, for the most part it is the only fatal blow, doesn't matter what weapon you have, doesn't matter if the demon is some giant ape creature, smaller more nimble water creature, or some giant flaming porcupine you get the same move every time even with the majority of boss enemies. Obviously, like all similar style attacks in other games, this animation looks great when in a confined area with a roof lower than the animation's jump. Stealth attacking a demon, same move. Stealth attacking humans can have some differences depending on your weapon but you will still see some odd things like it treating the wooden staff like a spear where you will thrust it through an enemy's back in a ridiculous looking attack.
Some things that have improved from Nioh is that you do not have to waste dozens of hours trying to grind for blacksmithing scrolls or unique boss weapon skill drops. Set drops seem to come much easier from enemies. On top of that, there are are a number of important Three Kingdoms characters that you can summon with you in stages to help you, as you fight together you raise your bond level and when you reach max bond they will give you the four star tier version of their entire weapon and armor set. The tiers of gear go from one star to five with each star giving the set an additional passive ability, these abilities are able to be swapped out at the blacksmith and the weapon/armor itself can go through upgrades that enhance damage/defense by spending different tiered steel and leather materials. This is so much easier and much less of a massive intentional time waster that it is a huge advantage over the Nioh games. Unfortunately, they don't allow you to swap out a weapons assigned martial arts moves. Many of the unique set weapons have a martial art that is unique to them but obviously it would have been an improvement to allow you to set what skill you want for the second martial art rather than to just hope you find a rank 4-5 weapon that has the one you want. The inventory system is easier to manage than Nioh, but still isn't always convenient as you will constantly be getting things you just have no use for. It is also very easy to respec your character's stat build once you unlock the game's village area, all you end up needing to is talk to a man near the spawn and raise and lower them as you see fit. Much faster than how most games do it where you need an item or some form of currency that then resets everything.
PVP invasion seem to have a very high chance of not working properly, where enemy players might appear to just teleport around everywhere. Best to turn them off in the online options settings unless they are fixed. There are still occasionally NPC character invasions, these seem to be in set areas where the character will be named something relevant to the area, to their position, or they might have the name of a Three Kingdoms minor character that would or could have been in the area. An odd thing to do instead of having a normal character model to fight that could have had some dialogue like they would have in Nioh.
The PC version has some issues, for the most part these didn't effect me much, but I did have a few moments where the game suffered massive FPS drops for about 20 seconds or so before getting back to normal and I had three crashes, all while stopping at a battle flag, which also saved the game and as it didn't corrupt the save or anything like that this wasn't a big deal for me. Other people seem to be having more consistent framerate issues. There is an issue that causes the screen to quickly flash white and continue to do so fairly often (edit - this now seems to be fixed). If you minimize the game it will randomly move your mouse around the screen at times while you attempt to do other things on your computer. Like the developers past PC releases, the support for using the keyboard and mouse is poor, why you would want to play anything like this or why you would own a gaming PC and not a $15-$50 controller for certain genres I have no idea other than people seeming to have some ridiculous mindset of anything related to a console being inferior for everything, but for the people that actually matter that suffer from any kind of disability that would cause them to avoid controllers this is unfortunate.
It's an ok game that feels like Nioh .5, which makes it all the more disappointing they didn't just make Nioh 3 since they didn't meaningfully update the engine or art, did nothing with this story or setting, and could have continued to build on everything already in those other games instead of throwing it all away. I would recommend picking up those much better and feature complete games that sell for a lower price and on the PC come bundled with all of their DLC, but if you already own them this is an ok purchase.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1634737544322768897