I'll start with praise: Wo Long's spirit system is genuinely brilliant, elegantly intertwining Bloodborne's reward for aggression with Sekiro's posture- and deflect-oriented combat, giving an extra dimension to combat and organically rewarding the player for mixing and matching between normal attacks, heavy attacks, and martial arts. I think you could build an excellent game on top of that system, but I don't think Wo Long quite hits that mark.

The first chunk of this game, through about the Ayoe boss fight, is paced so that this combat system shines. But as time goes on, the difficulty ramps up in ways that specifically undermine its greatest strengths. Enemies start having long, frenetic normal-attack combos that are very difficult for mere mortals to consistently deflect and which simultaneously leave no room for normal attacks. Fights start to boil down to dodging out of range, memorizing the timing of exploitable critical attacks, and nothing more.

This is compounded as the game starts dumping multi-foe fights on you, demanding that you react to layered overlapping combos that are barely feasible on their own. It's not even the difficulty that's frustrating—you can smash your way through these fights with enough patience—but all the nuance that's compelling about the combat is gone. After beating Lu Bu and feeling nothing more than vague annoyance, I think I'm done with this game for good.