Black Myth: Wukong review – A beautiful stepping stone to something greater

China has been an evergrowing presence in the gaming world. It’s an increasingly large playerbase, and developers are starting to produce more and more, which is hitting our shores.

While there have been past breakthroughs with games like Naraka: Bladepoint, Black Myth: Wukong feels different. This is a big, AAA single-player game, that isn’t building its audience after release – no, it’s been highly anticipated for years.

It has seen several showcases and every time, it’s appeared to be a really impressive boss-centric game that has people marveling at just how pretty it looks. 

After four years of building that hype, Game Science is ready to release its debut title. The question now becomes though – does it live up to the visual impressiveness we’ve been seeing for years? And potentially more importantly, does it have enough going on under the hood with robust systems and layered mechanics? And how does it fit into the broader genre of its contemporaries? Well, almost none of that has a straightforward answer – apart from just how beautiful this game really is. 

Black Myth: Wukong Key Details

• Price: $59.99
• Developer: Game Science
• Release Date: August 20, 2024
• Platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X|S, & PC

Tech and art at their strongest marriage

Game Science

Black Myth: Wukong is one of the most impressive-looking games ever made. From the moment you boot up, and are thrown into a high-stakes fight featuring Wukong against the heavens, it’s clear where Game Science’s strengths lie. 

While too much emphasis is often placed on engines by commenters who don’t have enough knowledge to understand them (like me!), at the very least, Black Myth: Wukong is a strong advertisement for Unreal Engine 5.

It’s really something to behold with the way lighting hits, the textures, the animations, and all the technical graphical power the game sports. These aren’t rigid creations either – enemies adjust their feet to different heights, and as you interrupt big hits and parry, bosses transition to a recoil nicely.

Sometimes, with beautiful graphics and animations, their malleability to react to certain situations can be limited. Black Myth: Wukong doesn’t. It all honestly feels like a bit of a technical magic trick. 

However, it’s not just the technical side. There are lots of graphically impressive games. What makes Black Myth: Wukong sing is just how well it marries that technical power with artistic vision. Using Chinese mythology and the Journey to the West novel as a jumping-off point, the artists involved have done some brilliantly striking work that never ceases to surprise and delight.

Character and boss designs are genuinely compelling, making seeing what beautiful creation is around the next corner one of the biggest pulls through the campaign.

The boss-forward structure really lends itself to Game Science’s strengths here too. 

Boss fights provide a big showcase moment for the game to show off its visual flair, from the technical, the artistic, and the animation. For a debut game, Game Science’s biggest strength, its mastery over everything visual and stylish, doesn’t take long to emerge. 

Aping the best 

Black Myth: Wukong isn’t just things to gawk at. There is a video game under the hood here. While Game Science has been cautious to align Black Myth: Wukong with the ‘Soulslike’ genre – calling a spade a spade, it is.

You navigate, through areas filled with enemies, picking up their essence, which you can use to upgrade yourself and various items and spells, while you find rest points as you progress through an environment until you eventually find a boss. There are flourishes that differ from FromSoftware’s classics, but there are clear influences on display here. 

Generally, Black Myth: Wukong keeps the distance between bosses much shorter than say Elden Ring, Bloodborne, or Dark Souls. While in some chapters there’s a little more exploration to be had, for the most part, the connective areas are relatively brief. Wukong knows it has strong bosses and wants you to get to them quickly. This mostly creates very linear paths, and what few forks there are, you generally just have to just finish one prong before heading back to explore the other.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It creates a strong directed feel, with Game Science trying to get you into the action as fast as possible and moving forward at all costs. However, it does sometimes create this feeling that can permeate the game. That this is a cutdown version of a much grander vision. A string of verticle slices sown together that intend to be made into something bigger. 

This isn’t to say every game needs to be as vast and deep as Elden Ring, which is a generational game. Nor is it to say that bloated open worlds aren’t tired and there’s a strong argument that tight, focused experiences are a lost art form we need more of. But throughout my time with Black Myth Wukong, I found myself feeling like this epic journey felt just a bit smaller than it should have and that’s almost entirely down to the construction of the world. 

The boss’s shadow

Let’s get to the headline acts though. Black Myth: Wukong’s gameplay highlights are easily in its bosses. These are absolutely gorgeous creations, and each one feels like a flex by a development team. That all feeds into the game’s stellar presentation, which I feel like I’ve sufficiently outlined. That said, it’s worth really emphasizing – these are really something wonderful to look at. 

That said, they aren’t always quite as polished when it comes to how it feels to fight these hulking monstrosities. Black Myth: Wukong isn’t quite as tight as the best in the genre when it comes to hitboxes, forgiveness, dodging, and parrying. While we’ve been spoiled, FromSoftware’s top-tier has become an expected standard. That’s a tough bar to clear and Game Science stumbles a little in the fluidity of movement and how everything flows into each other. 

There are also certain bosses that can feel a little laborious, especially as the game goes into the latter half. While it can take a lot of tries to master a boss in a FromSoftware game, generally, your winning run is not going to be much longer than five minutes or so. Black Myth: Wukong’s bosses take a lot more to get down.

It’s hard to regain mana, so often you have a finite number of spells and resources to use, meaning you have to methodically work through all of your abilities and medicines to whittle down a big health bar.

Some fights just generally take a while, and can feel a little heavy-handed. At times, you feel like you’ve mostly mastered a boss’s moveset, but the thing holding you back is the pure attrition of having to avoid the attacks a greater number of times than you’d like. 

Again, the bar for expectation is at the ceiling due to how good FromSoftware is at making bosses. It’s a little unfair to compare, so removing that context, these are generally really spectacular and impressive boss fights – From’s shadow just looms large over this kind of game though. 

Just to broach difficulty for a moment too – if you never used Spirit Ashes in Elden Ring, Black Myth: Wukong will likely hit as easier than the popular title. However, if like me, you relied heavily on them to get through that game and the DLC, there are definitely some bosses that will test your might here, without the respite of a spirit taking some aggro for you. Still, if you’ve any sort of competency with games in this genre – you should be fine with a little perseverance.

Losing your gourd in systems

One thing you can’t accuse Black Myth: Wukong of is not having enough systems. The game is laden with various ways to improve your performance and try to define your playstyle. 

There are three staff stances that all have their own upgrade path. There are four spells you can have equipped at any one time, also with their own upgrade paths. You have a transformation that allows you to change your form to a previous boss, that you might want to upgrade.

You have your Gourd which you can brew to have special effects when you heal. There are Spirit Ash-like abilities you collect that let you transform into enemies that you kill to do one of their attacks. Medicines. Celestial medicines. Relics. Vessels. Items. Permanent stat boosts. Weapons and armor with different effects. 

You get it. There’s a lot here. However, some feel more fleshed out than others. Collecting and upgrading enemies to call upon in a fight is a really nice touch. Having to run around and backtrack to farm ingredients for medicines is less so.

Even with all these systems, you’re not going to drastically change the tools available to you. It’s going to instead be where you place your emphasis. For example, I preferred to up my critical chance and damage while falling back on the Immobilize spell. However, someone trying to maximize their damage reduction and transformations will still have that Immobilize and do occasional critical hits.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing either. That just makes this something that, within the build process anyway, is closer to Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice than Elden Ring where you can completely revolutionize how you play every time you approach it. You’re still going to be pulling from the same limited toolbox every time, and you’ll have to achieve victory through a relatively rigid constraints. Again, that can work, and largely does here – but it does make all the systems on display here feel potentially a little less impactful than they should. This smacks of a little feature creep, leaving the vague sense that the game focusing on a couple of these systems and going deeper, rather than spreading them across so many avenues thinly, might have had a stronger impact.

Hitting its primate

Style over substance is a phrase that can be applied to Black Myth: Wukong. It’s usually used to suggest something is definitively bad. That it’s hollow at its core, with enough sheen and flashy lights to distract you. However, there is room for subjectivity in the phrase. In fact, it can be good – even great.

Black Myth: Wukong excels at everything on the presentation side. It’s an impressive-looking game, from a culture we don’t usually see flexing this kind of resource, meaning it feels distinctly unique, artistically fresh, and striking to look at. There are a few titles out there that you can boot up and be as enamored by by just looking at it. Black Myth: Wukong is the personification of style, and Game Science has, in its debut title, carved out its strength impressively. 

Style over substance also doesn’t mean ‘no substance’. Black Myth: Wukong’s boss fights are largely impressive, and while there are too many that don’t affect play enough, there are systems that help you define your playstyle in creative ways. They often don’t go far enough though. Ir can lead to the permeating feeling throughout the game that this is merely a blueprint for a bigger, more fleshed-out gameplay experience – but this only hinder so much. This is the obvious area for Game Science to improve in the future but you can see the vision. There is a path to greatness laid out here that experience, feedback and resources could mold into something truly breathtaking. 

Black Myth: Wukong isn’t quite Games Science’s masterpiece. But it’s easy to see how it could be a strong foundation to get there. 

The Verdict – 4/5

Black Myth Wukong is style over substance, but it has so much style and enough substance, that it largely works. It excels in what it is trying to do: making one of the most striking marriages of graphical prowess and artistic vision. And even when you get to the substance part, while it won’t rival the best in the genre, it has enough going on with enough decisions and systems to let you craft your own playstyle, even if you’re going to be pulling from the same hymnsheet with each playthrough.