Black Myth: Wukong PS5 review: Return to monke

Action games are defined by the dance. You know, the back and forth between you and (preferably) a boss, dodging, parrying, landing a sick punish, backing off, occasionally getting hit, managing your health pool, taking risks. Pulling off the big comeback or, heartbreakingly, dying before you land the final blow. Getting back up. Dusting yourself off. Trying again. Finding little moments of perfection. The perfect dodge. The gutsy parry. The risky combo for the kill. Dodging that one move that’s had you stumped all fight at just the right time. Action games come alive in those moments. They sing.

So I hope you’ll believe me when I tell you I wish I liked Black Myth: Wukong more than I do. Because there are parts of it where it sings. But it’s also dragged down by a lot of little annoyances and it takes an awful long time to get to that point, and I wouldn’t blame you if you’d dropped off long before you see the best of what Wukong has to offer. And that’s a damn shame.

Monkey Man

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning. If you’re unaware, Black Myth: Wukong is more or less a sequel to Wu Cheng’en’s seminal Chinese novel Journey to the West. I wasn’t overly familiar with the novel prior to playing Black Myth: Wukong, which was a bit of a problem. Developer GameScience understandably references events and characters from the novel, but it doesn’t spend a lot of time explaining them outside of readable journal entries. These are fun, but there’s a lot here, so it might be a good idea to brush up on the story of the original novel (and have a decent idea of what a kasaya is) before you hop in. 

You step into the shoes of The Destined One, a monkey who is seeking out the six relics of Wukong. Conveniently, The Destined One also looks just like Sun Wukong, but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence. Black Myth: Wukong’s story isn’t anything to write home about: The Destined One never speaks, wading through Chinese myth like a staff-wielding grim reaper, and the characters he encounters, while beautifully animated and extremely well-voiced, don’t often get enough screen time to make much of an impact. There’s more here if you are familiar with the original novel or willing to dig into who these characters are, but if you’re going in blind, there’s not enough to carry you without a lot of reading. 

By far the best part of the game’s storytelling, though, are the beautifully animated cutscenes that play at the end of each chapter and give you some background on that chapter’s big bad. Each has its own unique visual style that I won’t spoil, but all of them look incredible, and I loved watching them. I wish the rest of the game’s storytelling had that kind of verve to it.

Souls-like? More Like Soulslite

It’d be easy to label Black Myth: Wukong a Souls-like, but that’s only half-right. Yes, there’s a stamina bar you have to manage; shrines that function as bonfires and serve as checkpoints you’ll return to when you die and respawn; and an emphasis on dodging enemy attacks and punishing them while they recover. But crucial elements of the formula are missing. First, there’s no penalty for dying aside from respawning at the last shrine; your experience isn’t a lost item you have to retrieve. You just keep it. Secondly, gear is less important. There are weapon and armor upgrades here, but you mostly craft them and just swap the old stuff out for something better when you get it rather than holding onto something and upgrading it over time. Finally, you just use your experience to upgrade your skills. Nothing else.

It’s an interesting series of design choices, and it mostly works. For the most part, Wukong functions as a traditional action game with Souls-like features. A Soulslite, if you will. But combat, at least against bosses, largely plays out the same way. You’re dodging attacks, some of which are intentionally delayed to catch you panic-dodging, and dishing out the hurt when you get an opening. You’ve got a traditional light attack combo, but landing hits and timing your dodges well builds Focus. Build enough, and you’ll earn a Focus Point, which can be spent to initiate a Varied Combo, pumping up your combo damage and options, or cashed out to power up your heavy attacks for even more damage. Build multiple Focus Points and you can cash out for absolutely massive damage.

But that’s not the only monkey business you can get up to. You’ll also get access to spells that can turn the tide of a fight. The first you’ll come across is Immobilized, which does exactly what it says on the tin, freezing enemies in place so you can whack them with your staff and potentially stagger them for even more free damage. And yeah, it works on bosses. Then there’s Cloud Step, which makes you invisible and leaves a decoy in your place. It’s ideal for escaping tight spots, and if you come out of it with an attack, you’ll get some nice damage. Rock Solid turns you to stone, and if you time it right, you can use it as a parry and open enemies for even more damage. And so on. These spells have a mana cost, but they’re also annoyingly on a cooldown, so you’ll need to pick your spots.''

A Little Bit of Sicko as a Treat

Defeating certain foes will also allow you to transform into them. Defeat Guangzhi, a wolfman with a fiery glaive you encounter early on, and you can turn into him. Guangzhi has his own health pool and moveset, including a nasty dash attack that you can chain together. Earn Focus Points with him, and you can dodge into a powerful leaping blow that lights enemies on fire. It’s pretty cool, and he’s just the first one you get. Best of all, these transformations don’t cost mana; they’re just tied to a cooldown. Then there are Spirit Skills, which you’ll earn by defeating powerful mini-bosses and absorbing their essence into the Destined One’s gourd, which doubles as a healing flask. There are a ton of these, but I was particularly fond of the Wandering Wight, one of the first ones you get, because his headbutt deals absolutely massive damage and can stun a boss in their tracks.

It’s a neat combat system when it finally — emphasis on finally — lets you use all of your options. If Black Myth: Wukong has one major flaw in terms of its combat design, it's that it takes absolutely forever to give you your kit. You spend a lot of the first two chapters mashing your light attack combo because, for a while, you don’t have much else. Even Rock Solid, which doubles as your parry, isn’t something you get until chapter two, which means it takes a long time to get what most action games consider basic functionality. Pair this with exceptionally boring fodder enemies that drop like flies and easy bosses early on, and Black Myth: Wukong is deeply boring out of the gate. I bulldozed through almost everything in the first couple of chapters on my first try, and I wasn’t having a lot of fun doing it, despite the visual appeal of the boss fights themselves because there just wasn’t much I could do. This is a common problem — Final Fantasy XVI suffers from this, too, as an example — but it’s particularly noticeable here.

It does get better. Once you unlock more stuff in the skill tree (yes, there's a skill tree and the upgrades vary from “really cool thing that opens up new combat possibilities” to “running costs less stamina”), get more spells, transformations, and Spirit Skills, Wukong’s combat really opens up and becomes much more satisfying. There are some neat combos and tech here if, like me, you’re a sicko who wants to mine this stuff. The combat never hits the absurd highs of the genre’s best (think Devil May Cry, Ninja Gaiden, and so on), but it is good. It’s just a shame it takes so long to get there, and I wouldn’t blame anyone who bows out before that happens.

Monkeying Around

What doesn’t improve over time is Wukong’s environment design. That’s not to say that the environments you’ll traipse through aren’t gorgeous, because they are. Everything in Black Myth: Wukong is, whether you’re in a lush forest, a windblown desert, or somewhere in-between. The real issue here is that in shooting for such impressive visual fidelity, Game Science has lost something when it comes to readability. This isn’t a problem in combat, as enemy moves are easy to distinguish, which is essential in a game like this. But it is a problem when navigating the environment. There is no map in Black Myth: Wukong, and these environments, while more of the wide-linear than open world world variety, are pretty big. There are tons of branching paths, little secrets, and optional bosses hidden throughout Black Myth: Wukong, and finding them is a lot of fun. But boy do I wish I had some sort of reference to keep track of it all. I often found myself taking what I thought was a new path only to loop back to a place I’d already been, just from a different angle. 

Combine that with the fact that it’s often difficult to tell which objects you can climb over or break through and which you can’t, and Black Myth: Wukong’s penchant for invisible walls that aren’t in obvious places, and you have a game that can be downright annoying to navigate. There’s a reason game developers are slathering everything in yellow paint these days, and while I’m happy Game Science opted not to do that, I wish they had given me something to help me navigate these environments. Despite their beauty, they aren’t that memorable as levels in a video game, and don’t have that many enemies populating them. Mostly, I felt as though I was moving from boss fight to boss fight, and this was how. I wanted to explore them; doing so is just often very cumbersome and, rewards aside, not all that interesting. Stumbling across optional bosses, upgrades, and hidden areas is worth it. I just wish these environments were better designed.

I played the PS5 version for this review, and given Game Science’s reluctance to hand out PS5 copies pre-release, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Your mileage may vary, but I’m happy to report I didn’t experience too many bugs. Sometimes I, or an enemy or two, would get stuck in the environment or something, but for the most part, the PS5 runs smoothly (I played in performance mode) and looks good.

Once More, With Feeling

I wish I could say the same for Wukong’s camera and controls, however. The camera follows The Destined One very closely. Normally, this is fine, but if you’re locked onto an enemy and they leap into the air, it can jerk around to keep up in a way that can make dodging incoming attacks more difficult than they should be. Similarly, the triggers in Black Myth: Wukong do a lot of work, managing your usable items, spells, transformations, Spirit Skills, and so on, and I can’t tell you how many times I pressed the right and left triggers to trigger a Spirit Skill only to bring up the spell/transformation/item menu and watch as a boss knocked me upside the head because the thing I wanted hadn’t registered properly. Feels bad, man.

If you like action games and you’re willing to extend Black Myth: Wukong some grace while it finds its feet, you’ll probably have a good time. But I can’t overlook how much time I spent bored out of my skull because it refused to give me my kit at a reasonable rate, how annoyed I was by the lack of a map and how empty many of the environments feel, and control issues that kept me from doing what I wanted when I wanted to do it. Black Myth: Wukong isn’t a bad game, but it’s not a great one, either. I imagine it gets better on New Game +, when you’re not as limited by your kit, but you still have to get there. It’s not unusual for the initial playthrough in an action game to serve as something of a dry run, and for the real game to begin on the second playthrough. But I’ve never been as bored during the initial playthrough of any Devil May Cry game as I was here. That matters, and had I not had to push through to write this review, I would have dropped the game about two hours in because I wasn’t having fun.

Ultimately, Black Myth: Wukong is what I like to call “Peak Fine.” It’s great when it finally opens up and lets you play it, and has a number of memorable bosses to fight. There’s a lot to explore and see and do, and I imagine most players will miss a good chunk of the game’s optional content on their first playthrough. But even at its best, Wukong never reaches the highs of the genre’s greats, and never completely comes together in the way the best action games do. It’s not bad, but it’s not special. It’ll take you to the dance and it has a few killer moves, but how much you enjoy it will depend on how much you’re willing to put up with when you get there, and how much you don’t mind if it steps on your toes now and again. Me? I prefer an Action Jackson that lets me lead now and again, and that can hit the high notes.

This copy was paid for by the reviewer.

Will Borger

Contributing Editor

Will Borger is a Pushcart Prize-nominated fiction writer and essayist who has been covering games since 2013. His fiction and essays have appeared in YourTango, Veteran Life, Marathon Literary Review, Purple Wall Stories, and Abergavenny Small Press. His games writing has also appeared at IGN, TechRadar, Into the Spine, Lifebar, PCGamesN, The Loadout, and elsewhere. He lives in New York with his wife and dreams of owning a dog. You can find him on X @bywillborger.