A bit of a disappointment, this one. I really liked the setting and the way that the plot linked in with the classic Three Kingdoms story. I got a kick out of seeing the characters I'd spent hours with since the PS2 and how they twist the story a little bit to fit in the new plot: similar to how I enjoyed Nioh's take on the Warring States period in Japan. It did end a bit quickly though, and I'd have liked to see more of the story represented. Still, this leaves plenty of material for future games.
The game itself feels underbaked in comparison. There are some weird difficulty spikes and the odd level that seems to have missed a balance phase entirely. The fighting is very simple in a way that seems deliberate to reduce mechanical complexity but there's still a lot of numbers in the background that overcomplicate things for little gain in a game that's much shorter than either Nioh title. I'm hopeful for a sequel which either moves things forward or actually goes fully in on the simpler gameplay as it feels like it's falling between two stools at this point.
After finishing the game I went back to Nioh 2 and immediately started having much more fun because you have so much more to do, compared to Wo Long where there are only really two fun buttons: parry and stealth/stun attack. Multiple stances for each weapon, more moves and combos, more interesting magic and usable items and, weirdly, some quality of life stuff that really should have been in this. The way the item menu sorts in Wo Long is never good, and the fact that rest points don't restock arrows etc from your stash (indeed, you can't even do it manually unless you leave the mission) is pointlessly over-complicating things.
On a side note, the KTGL/Katana engine used by Koei Tecmo's games is getting worse and worse as they bolt more modern features to it. In the year 2023, having an engine that uses frame skip when running at less than the frame rate cap to maintain game speed is embarrassing. It did the same thing on Series X when I played it there too, so it's not just the PC port at fault here. Team Ninja clearly have a talented programming team because of how much better their games run than Omega Force or Gust efforts, but even then they're really starting to struggle.
Steam Deck report: Don't bother. I played the demo and had difficulty maintaining 30fps in low detail, never mind the later areas which cause the frame rate to get really unstable even on a larger PC because of the inefficient renderer. It ran even worse on a friend's 6800U handheld.
The game itself feels underbaked in comparison. There are some weird difficulty spikes and the odd level that seems to have missed a balance phase entirely. The fighting is very simple in a way that seems deliberate to reduce mechanical complexity but there's still a lot of numbers in the background that overcomplicate things for little gain in a game that's much shorter than either Nioh title. I'm hopeful for a sequel which either moves things forward or actually goes fully in on the simpler gameplay as it feels like it's falling between two stools at this point.
After finishing the game I went back to Nioh 2 and immediately started having much more fun because you have so much more to do, compared to Wo Long where there are only really two fun buttons: parry and stealth/stun attack. Multiple stances for each weapon, more moves and combos, more interesting magic and usable items and, weirdly, some quality of life stuff that really should have been in this. The way the item menu sorts in Wo Long is never good, and the fact that rest points don't restock arrows etc from your stash (indeed, you can't even do it manually unless you leave the mission) is pointlessly over-complicating things.
On a side note, the KTGL/Katana engine used by Koei Tecmo's games is getting worse and worse as they bolt more modern features to it. In the year 2023, having an engine that uses frame skip when running at less than the frame rate cap to maintain game speed is embarrassing. It did the same thing on Series X when I played it there too, so it's not just the PC port at fault here. Team Ninja clearly have a talented programming team because of how much better their games run than Omega Force or Gust efforts, but even then they're really starting to struggle.
Steam Deck report: Don't bother. I played the demo and had difficulty maintaining 30fps in low detail, never mind the later areas which cause the frame rate to get really unstable even on a larger PC because of the inefficient renderer. It ran even worse on a friend's 6800U handheld.