Four years after its reveal, Black Myth: Wukong, the hotly anticipated game from developer Science Works is here. It is an action RPG that adapts the Chinese mythology story of Journey to the West, with jaw-dropping views, flashy combat, and animations topped with striking, challenging bosses. It’s understandable why such a hook has gamers chomping at the bit to play it. Following all those years of hype, the game mostly delivers on all its promises, providing a cruel but beautiful world to explore and work through. Though one or two elements of overambition prevent it from being the masterpiece game of the year contender everyone was perhaps hoping for. Buckle up.

You are a character known as the Destined One. You’re a man of legend, going on a trying journey to the West in search of a series of great relics, coming face to face with many different mythical beasts, Maoists and the like intent on stopping you in your path. Controlling Sun Wukong, a figure that has heavily inspired just about all your favourite badass kings of combat in anime, it’s high time he got his own game. He’s a staff-wielding bipedal monkey man who can cast many a spell and even transform into other beasts to best his opponents. Why hasn’t a game like this come out sooner?

Black Myth: Wukong is immediately compelling. You’re exploring luscious environments where each footstep is met with a more odd and curious character or enemy than the last. Your journey begins in a jungle village dense with forestry and bipedal lizard skeletons, wolf-like henchmen and golem babies with heads that are way too big for them, making them almost trip and stumble over themselves. This area is what’s known as the Black Wind Mountain, an area adapted from a chapter of the same name from Journey to the West. While I can’t speak to authenticity having not read the source material, the environments are depicted beautifully: the overcast daylight seeps through the gaps between leaves in trees, ancestral shines are found in the recesses of areas just off cobblestone paths while swamps are home to frogs hiding underneath lilypads and reeds ready to strike at any time.

It only gets better from there. Black Myth: Wukong’s environments are unbelievably lifelike. Snow-drenched mountaintops littered with bodies in the hundreds only have the closest semblance of refuge in monastery buildings that are home to punchy, cruel monks who’ve mastered the martial arts. Deep under the ground, you’ll explore caves lit only by the occasional torch and spots where the moonlight lets through a crack in the earth. These areas are home to terrifying cave spiders and insects that are as skilled with their pincers as others can be with a sword or bow.

Where this doesn’t quite work is that Black Myth: Wukong’s insistence on high graphical fidelity can also at times be its detriment. I say this facetiously but I almost wish there was yellow paint to guide me around. So many ledges or nooks in-game look like traversable areas where you’ll find secrets only to be blocked off by very apparent invisible walls. A symptom of its environment, sure. It’s easier to depict cut-off areas in say, Lies of P where a lot of its environments are streets. Still, Black Myth: Wukong is another example of modern game design where fidelity can sometimes breed less readability in an environment. It’s because of this that the game’s level design, while competent, feels less intricate than other Action RPG counterparts.

There’s no doubt the game is depicted beautifully. There’s also no reason though that my PC with Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10700F CPU @ 2.90GHz 2.90 GHz processing and 16 GB of RAM with the game stored on an SSD should be chugging this much. It’s nowhere near the launch Cyberpunk 2077 levels of disaster with bugs, but Black Myth: Wukong still is home to a lot of stuttering, crashes and freezes on PC. The game also is unfinished in other regards; translation and localisation aren’t finished with some menus and HUD still being in developer GameScience’s native language of Chinese. This leads me to have doubt when occasionally characters will exposit and regularly flick between English and Chinese in each sentence. Is this a stylistic choice? Is this an area that still needs work? I don’t know but what I do know is I’m taken out of the experience. A patch that came days after having the game (and mere days before release) has helped ease some of these issues, but not all. Be advised: performance mileage may vary.

Black Myth: Wukong does a pretty damned good job at standing amongst the genre giants. It’s certainly harder than combat-heavy games like Bayonetta but isn’t quite the extremes of a Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.  In fact, the game feels at its hardest early on when it hasn’t fully kicked into gear yet and the pacing is yet to be all there. For the first third, Black Myth: Wukong almost feels like a bossrush game. There aren’t the staple of sizable walkbacks after death with waves of enemies to work through to get back at that boss you fell to, for example. There’s just three or four guys and then you’re at the boss again. Beat that boss and walk what feels like only two steps and then you’re at a miniboss. If you’re struggling here (because there’s no blocking or parrying until a very specific ability for it with a big cooldown comes later), and you’re not at your best game, dodging and jabbing at your foes when the opportunity presents itself, then you might just get stuck. There’s little grinding you do here. You just simply have to get good.

Oddly enough, there’s a lot more opportunity to ‘git gud,’ later on when you can breathe a little more because, inexplicably and jarringly compared to its start, you’re presented with more mooks to fight between bosses. Here, you can learn enemy-type attack patterns as well as those of your own. In these quieter moments, you’ll grow to appreciate Black Myth: Wukong’s animations and diverse skill sets. The skill tree will see you unlock three stances to mess around with your staff. Pillar Stance, Thrust Stance and Smash Stance. These can be switched between any time in combat and are most distinguished by the heavy attack they perform.

Animated so smoothly and satisfyingly, the Pillar Stance sees you charging your Focus (a meter used for your heavy attacks), climbing atop your staff, with it growing and extending each time a Focus charge is fulfilled. This is prime for dodging attacks on the ground, towering above your enemies, only for you to flip out your staff from underneath you and devastate them as you slam it down upon them. This is just the start of the brilliant animation work: the way you spin your staff around, perform flurry attacks or even the way foes leap, dodge and dance around you, almost mocking you… it’s hypnotising and all so satisfying. Especially when you pull off that last hit of a complex combo.

It’s exactly one of these types of bosses that I’m currently stuck on, nearly forty hours deep in what I believe to be the game’s second last chapter. Full respect for its design which has me memorising how its sweep attack works when it telegraphs it’s going to do its devastating AoE and how best to get out of the way for these. It’s in fights like these that it’s worth looking at your gear and abilities equipped and maybe respec. Especially when some gimmick fights remove the capacity to perform some of these abilities entirely. One boss fight would have me stop using all my abilities because it would waste my time and efforts by entering a nearly impenetrable defensive state. In this moment it was down to just skill and I had to go back and look at all my little passives and combo trees I could invest in. More games need to be like Black Myth: Wokong in this regard: they simply need to demand more of you. They need to test you.

Your skills and abilities are, predictably, paramount for getting through the game’s tougher fights. There are some incredibly cool ones in there: ‘Cloudstep,’ lets you spawn a decoy of yourself while you go invisible, amplifying damage if you break disguise by attacking an enemy. ‘Immobilize’ lets you freeze a foe in place to give breathing room. This is paired perfectly with ‘A Pluck of Many,’ which deploys several clones of yourself to really stack damage while a boss is locked down. My favourite of the bunch is ‘Transform,’ which allows the Destined One to shapeshift into one of several different mythical creatures each with different status elements (frost, fire etc) you can inflict.

These are perfect for when you’re desperate because you can’t die while in this transformed state. You get a different health gauge that swaps back if whittled down and a limited amount of time with it (depending on how much you upgrade this skill). Sometimes, this is all I need to just get through the last leg of that one fight that I can’t quite get down pat.

Black Myth: Wukong is such a beautiful game and there’s still so much I can’t tell you about. There are quality game-changing abilities that are better left discovered for oneself. Storytelling is at its best when it comes to the end of each chapter and you’re treated to these gorgeous cutscenes all in varying styles, depicting a little vignette story before moving you on to your next adventure in the next land. There’s also a lot that you’re reading here that might not even be true once you get this game in your hands. GameScience really appears to be patching and working on this game avidly and wants it to land with audiences. I want it to as well!

I’ve reviewed and played a lot of these sorts of games. Trust me when I say this game is hard. A balance-focused patch or two would go a long way for Black Myth: Wukong. Particularly when it comes to the earlier chapter-ending bosses that players won’t be able to grind it out against. It would turn a dodge-focused game that is empowering for some and restricting for others into an incredible experience for all. On another selfish note, if anyone at GameScience is reading this and wants to give me pointers for the boss at the end of chapter five let me know. My DMs are open.