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.
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.