This year's had a real drought of good character creators. Street Fighter 6 is almost entirely designed for generating monsters, and Silent Hill Ascension is... well, you know. So Wo Long made a very strong first impression simply by letting me create an attractive human being. I'm a man who loves some good hair options, and this game left me straight up indecisive. With my feudal warrior properly yassified, I bounced into the main game... literally. Whole lot of jiggling going on here.

Oh right, this is a Team Ninja game. I almost forgot.

I have a real love/hate relationship with Team Ninja, in that I love Dead or Alive and hate everything they release that doesn't have "dead" and "alive" in the title. I've been told Ninja Gaiden Black is good, but I got filtered out by the second boss. Metroid Other M is the worst old game I've played this year. Nioh never left much of an impression on me and I grew bored of it a few hours in. I'll hoot and holler at the top of my lungs for the DOA movie - my username is a direct reference to one of its characters - but trying to experience any other Team Ninja property feels like torture.

And as I was diving into Wo Long's early missions, struggling with combat that felt just as weightless and floaty as my character's chest, I worried that might be the case here as well. But after trading out swords for weightier pole arms and getting a better feel for the more unique systems, like the spirit gauge, I found that I was actually starting to have a good time.

It helps that, unlike other games I've played this year with combat that is heavily reliant on countering enemy attacks, Wo Long is pretty forgiving and plenty generous with its parry timing. I've complained at length that stagger meters are often used to prolong battles in these types of games, effectively severing as armor that must be depleted before you can do "real damage." While it is the case that draining your opponent's spirit gauge will leave them stunned and open them up to a finishing attack that deals a high amount of damage, your basic attacks and spells are all pretty effective on their own. Combat does not feel nearly as rigid as something like Lies of P, and not needing to be surgical with my timing and actually having versatility felt refreshing.

In fact, there were times where I felt the game might be a bit too easy. Thankfully, you can always even that back out by summoning AI partners. You'd think that would trivialize the game but considering Wo Long abides by Souls rules and buffs enemies and bosses when summons are present, and considering AI partners are effectively braindead, they become such a liability that it actually raises the difficulty.

Wo Long is also lacking in variety. By about halfway through the game, you'll have likely seen every weapon, every piece of armor, and every enemy that you'll ever encounter. There is so much loot to pick up, and yet it's always the same low-level swords and axes, clogging up your inventory with dozens upon dozens of duplicates. The shop rarely updates, so selling excess items feels a bit pointless, and breaking them down for upgrade material is about as trivial.

Though much of my enthusiasm for Wo Long is bottled up in its combat, there's thankfully enough offff iiiiiiit thaaHHHHT IIIII HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRHHHHHHHH-DRRRRRRRRRRRGGGHHHHH

Uh oh. The review slowed down. Hold on, let me back out to the main page and start again. At least it autosaved before it crashed...

Wo Long updated a few days ago, and something about this particular patch broke the game. For me, personally. I can't find anyone else bringing up any of this crap.

I have no idea what happens narratively in the last quarter of the game, as every time a cutscene loaded it would suddenly freeze and audio would grind down to a demonic growl. These softlocks happened over and over again and required relaunching the app every single time. I've never seen a game do this before, and I suspect the uniqueness of it is due to the proprietary nature of the Katana engine.

I also began encountering persistent notifications that I had been disconnected from online play, despite remaining logged into my PSN account and experiencing no actual service interruptions with my internet. These notifications pop up using the PS5's UI, and I could go on a whole rant about how it should be standard for notifications like this to pause a game, especially when Wo Long does have a pause function built in, but unfortunately having to hit the O button to dismiss this mid-combat just became a natural part of the game for the last three or so hours I played.

I could've reinstalled the whole game, go offline and keep it at a more stable version, but that felt like too much of a hassle when I was so close to the end, so I just pushed my way through until I rolled credits.

So, yeah, Wo Long is pretty fun but marred by a lack of variety, an abundance of systems that the player is rarely incentivized to use, a stunning lack of variety, and (in my case) glitches that made the game borderline unplayable. I guess that's what I get for playing a Team Ninja game. Now if you'll excuse me, I left the stove on and I really need to touch the burners with my bare hands, again.