Black Myth: WuKong Gamersky Score 10/10: Passing Bumps into the Road _ 游民星空 GamerSky.com

On August 20, four years ago, a golden cicada flapped its wings and changed the history of Chinese single-player games. From then on, the grand proposition of “the first Chinese AAA game” was placed on the thin cicada wings, bumping towards the unknown.

Four years later, we could finally announce to everyone when we finished our “journey to the west”: Pop the champagne! All the waiting is worth it. August 20th is destined to be remembered by generations of Chinese gamers.

OK, if you just want a score and wish to enjoy the game later, you could just skip the following. Because we might end up revealing some spoilers.

Top visual effects

When I first entered the game world, my first impression was occupied by the stunning art.

Thanks to the UE5 engine and Game Science’s lavish investment in art resources, Black Myth: WuKong achieves outstanding visual effects and excellent PC performance optimization.

The overall presentation of Black Myth: WuKong masterfully blends intricate micro-details with sweeping macro design. This isn’t just about the meticulously crafted 3D models and precise color adjustments; it’s also about the profound Chinese cultural immersion achieved through the careful selection of cultural elements and filter settings. The environmental modeling in the game is exceptionally detailed, with the gnarled textures of trees and the weathered cracks and moss on rocks feeling almost lifelike. The abundance of decorative stone carvings, architectural structures, and Buddha statues clearly draws inspiration from real-world designs, enhancing the authenticity and richness of the game’s visual experience.

The water effects in the game are even more amazing, and it is obvious that the details are manually adjusted based on the engine’s own effects.

Here we take the Black Wind Mountain as an example. The stream in the forest is clear and bright at a slow flow rate. The moss on the rocks at the bottom of the pool reflects the river water as green as a jade. When you step on it, ripples spread out in circles, which are represented in the Chinese garden art style. The vibrant vegetation on either side and the sound of splashing water create an immersive experience, making it feel as if you are truly wading through the river yourself, blurring the lines between reality and illusion.

As for the combat animations and cinematic cutscenes beyond, they also consistently showcase Game Science’s creative interpretation of the art and culture of Journey to the West.

In Black Myth: WuKong, the combat animations make extensive use of a single-camera perspective with long takes. The game kicks off with a battle sequence that rivals, if not surpasses, the intensity of Kratos vs. Baldur. During the latter part of the fight, the camera remains locked on the weapon clash as the characters move with incredible speed. The weapons rotate and strike in a dazzling display of combat, with swirling winds and the resonant clang of metal creating a palpable sense of excitement and awe.

In addition, Game Science has boldly engaged the ‘giant Boss’ concept, which is a challenging subject in game design that requires cautious arrangements, and they have delivered stunning results. The game features several scenes where units of vastly different sizes appear together. In these moments, the architecture, player characters, and bosses all maintain a consistent level of model detail despite their size differences, resulting in an astonishing visual effect.

The forewords and epilogues between chapters are a perfect display of artistic accomplishment. Game Science produced 5 animations of different styles in this section, telling 5 completely different stories, using a variety of art styles and animation techniques such as hand-drawn, puppetry, and Ghibli. The themes also span a wide range, covering classic tales and Chinese fables, each accompanied by superbly crafted, high-quality background music, making it feel like watching Yao-Chinese Folktales. Among all the games I’ve played, the presentation of these interlude stories in Black Myth: WuKong is truly unique, with an unprecedented level of artistic content and narrative depth.

To avoid spoilers, here’s a picture of Effendi to give you a sense of the visual style

Under the excellent graphics capabilities, Black Myth: WuKong’s PC optimization is also quite good. Those who have used the official performance test software may already know this. In our actual play, the RTX 3080 and 4070tis configuration can maintain 60 frames in the 4K extreme image quality option without ray tracing. In other words, as long as you have a current mainstream gaming graphics card, Black Myth: WuKong can at least let you play comfortably at 2K resolution.

Seventy Two Changes for the Eighty One Perils

Although I really want to start a monkey seminar in the review and talk to everyone about the story of Black Myth: WuKong , in order to avoid spoilers, I will only give a brief outline. In the game, the Chosen One needs to go back to the west, find several rare treasures, defeat many powerful enemies, see the ups and downs of the world, and experience the disasters from the Three Poisons of greed, hatred, and ignorance.

In Journey to the West, the familiar major monsters now possess additional magical artifacts and abilities. Some establish their own sects and achieve immortality, while others flaunt their banners and deceive people. If you want to vanquish these monsters and restore peace to the world, relying on the mediocre body and low spells of the Chosen One might not be enough. At this point, understanding the original trick of the Monkey King becomes crucial to victory.

To emphasize, Black Myth: WuKong is definitely not a Souls-like game and has no punitive death mechanics. It is more akin to the latest God of War, more like a traditional action game. As with previous demos, the combat system in Black Myth: WuKong remains centered around the concept of “Focus Point”. The regular combat style involves using light attacks to build Focus Point and heavy attacks to spend it for high damage.

Aside from light and heavy attacks, the Chosen One also has three different stances, each corresponding to different move derivatives and heavy attacks. The Smash Stance features light and heavy attacks combo for counter techniques, which is like the Sekiro’s Mikiri Counter that can parry enemy attacks and create flashy combos. Its finisher move deals significant damage but has a short range and can easily miss. The Pillar Stance can lift the staff high, avoiding some ground damage and attacking enemies at elevated positions, but being knocked down leaves the character with a prolonged vulnerability, which can be quite awkward. The Thrust Stance’s counter technique initiates a backward dodge, allowing for a counterattack while evading enemy strikes, making it the most flexible option.

This system functions similarly to the High, Mid, and Low stances in Nioh, providing players with specialized methods to deal with different types of enemies. Using specific stances against enemies with different attributes is an important learning aspect of the gameplay. When you’ve perfectly dodged and accumulated four layers of Focus Point, then you can enjoy watching your character descend from the heaven to deliver a mighty blow. Now that’s the Monkey King I would like to see.

In addition to stances and Focus Point, spells and transformations are also crucial components of combat. Spells such as Immobilize, Cloud Step, Rock Solid, Ring of Fire, and A Pluck of Many, which were shown in previous demos, will be gradually unlocked throughout the game. These spells consume mana but offer powerful effects, making them vital aids in battle.

However, it’s worth noting that, apart from certain special medicines and equipment, there are no convenient active mana regen methods in the game. Calculating how much mana you want to spend on minor enemies becomes a crucial resource management factor in the game.

As for the transformation system, it is more diverse and interesting. In fact, there are two transformation systems in the game. One is the Transformation system that is unlocked through the main story and side quests. Guangzhi’s Red Tidesboth to this category. They will completely change the action system of the Chosen One and give special and useful new skills.

Another system involves collecting Spirits from elite and mini-Boss enemies, similar to the Soul Core abilities in Nioh 2. This allows you to use a specific skill from the defeated enemy during combat. For example, the Essence of the Wandering Wight’s spirit lets you execute a powerful headbutt that can stagger most enemies, forcing them to follow your dance. Remarkably, nearly every type of minor enemy in the game can provide an Spirits, with a total of over 50 varieties. These Spirits can be combined with Focus Point combos to create impressive finisher moves. Personally, I particularly recommend following the heavy attack finisher with a Tiger’s Acolyte Essence strike: it goes with high damage and breaks enemy poise, but most importantly, provides a stylish, clean and satisfying execution experience.

As for the RPG elements in Black Myth: WuKong, they are composed of upgrades, equipment, and consumables, providing a varied but relatively light system.

In Black Myth: WuKong, character upgrades require Sparks obtained from defeating enemies or exploring the map. The skill tree is designed to be simple and straightforward. You can spend points to enhance the Chosen One’s basic attributes or improve the overall Focus Point system, allowing for more diverse actions in light and heavy attack combos. If you prefer spells, you can also use resources to transform spells in interesting ways. For example, Immobilize can become a crowd control spell after upgrades, highly reduce the risk to be overwhelmed and killed by minor enemies. Similarly, after investing in certain skill branches, Cloud Step can use heavy attack to replace the original stealth strike, turning the Chosen One into a stealthy assassin with the ability to ambush enemies with powerful strikes.

The Monkey King has the Monkey King Bar, Lotus Silk Cloudtreaders , and the Gold Suozi Armor , so naturally, the Chosen One can’t fall short in the equipment department. As the main storyline progresses and the map is explored, players will gradually unlock weapon and armor forging. In addition to basic defensive attributes, weapons and armor may have simple set bonuses like increased skill cooldown reduction after a perfect dodge” or “increased damage after being poisoned”. While equipment comes with attributes, they neither change your combat style nor allow you to have eight-digit damage with a single strike.

Spells, upgrades, equipment, and consumables give the combat system of Black Myth: WuKong a flexible concept of battle genres, also giving players more play-style choices. You can rely on the most basic perfect dodges and stick combos to face all kinds of monsters head-on, or you can summon a group of monkeys at the beginning of the battle, and then turn yourself into Guangzhi with your background music to bully Boss with your minors.

Though, Black Myth: WuKong prefers not to offer you the optimal solution within its concise RPG system. All the stylistic extensions you gained from the external will not be power creep. The RPG progression system remains to be an important but not crucial position. And action continues to be the pivotal element of the game. Even if you distribute all your points to spells, with all the related equipment and medicines - you will still have to come back again and again if you do not learn the key weaknesses of the monsters.

So much more monsters!

As expected, Black Myth: WuKong isn’t an open-world game. Instead, it follows a more traditional approach, offering a linear progression through large, sandbox-style levels. These stages aren’t physically connected, but don’t let that fool you—there are moments when a level might surprise you with something truly special, potentially bringing you to tears. But let’s not spoil the surprise.

This design choice is standard fare for action games, with titles like God of War, Devil May Cry, and Bayonetta following similar structures. However, Game Science has taken this familiar formula and pushed it to new heights by packing in an overwhelming amount of content.

In simpler terms, this world is just so, so, so big!

We mentioned in the last demo review that the first act Black Wind Mountain is three times bigger than the Pruple Cloud Mountain. The map was filled with 10 Bosses, and the recommended play time was around 4 hours. However, in the full version of Black Myth: WuKong, Black Wind Mountain is the smallest area among all acts…

Trust me, for a video game reviewer, it was really despairing.

In Black Myth: WuKong, starting from the second chapter, every level is at least twice the size of the first area, Black Wind Mountain. The maps are densely packed with not just enemies, sub-Bosses, and Bosses, but also sparks, chests, various collectibles, and important quest items all around. This sheer amount of content turns Black Myth: WuKong into an enormous game. Just exploring the map and completing the main story, without diving into the hidden side quests or Bosses, can take 6 to 8 hours per level. Simply finishing the main storyline could take around 40 hours, and going for full completion is almost impossible to estimate.

What’s truly mind-blowing is that Game Science has hidden roughly 40% of the game’s total content. Dozens of named Bosses with massive health bars are tucked away in corners of the maps, and several story-related NPCs and features require players to complete specific hidden quests to unlock. Even many of the chapter-ending Bosses can have their difficulty reduced by completing secret side quests. Each chapter might also contain hidden maps that affect the main story’s direction—these maps could involve time travel or alternate worlds and can’t be found just by brute-force search.

By the time this article is published, we still haven’t figured out the conditions to trigger some of the hidden Bosses and endings. It’s hard to say just how much Game Science has packed into this game. So, if you’re playing the final version and can’t find a certain monster, Boss, or NPC from the trailers, don’t be surprised—we might not have found them either, but they are definitely in the game.

Additionally, Game Science has cleverly presented all the in-game text, including achievement descriptions, in classical Chinese used during the time Journey to the West was written. Many of these are cryptic poems with hidden information, making it nearly impossible to decode the game content by the achievement descriptions.

To that, all I can say is, “Well played!”

Some regrets

As Game Science’s first AAA title, Black Myth: WuKong has been meticulously polished to near perfection through extreme investment of resources and painstaking handcraft on details. However, as for those of development experience, those that creativity and resources alone can’t compensate for, developers could only learn over the test of time. This is perhaps the only significant shortcoming of the final version of Black Myth: WuKong.

Unfortunately, our biggest worry before the game’s release has indeed come true.

In our previous playtest, we mentioned that the Black Wind Mountain level essentially felt like drawing a path in a large parking lot, then putting the enemies all over the park—a pretty moderate level design approach.

However, the levels after Black Wind Mountain， such as Yellow Wind Ridge and The New West , are more than three times the size. While the increased content naturally extends playtime, it also shows the shortcomings in the map design. These levels, like Black Wind Mountain, are also of vast open spaces. But they are in different biomes like deserts and snow-capped mountains. Unlike Black Wind Mountain, these areas lack the visual cues and terrain diversity for players to navigate effectively, making it incredibly easy to get lost. I often found myself spending considerable time exploring the entire map, only to take a seemingly untouched path and discover a chest I had already opened at the end.

Moreover, Game Science’s investment in the environmental art assets for Black Myth: WuKong is nothing short of extravagant. Even the most functionally insignificant transitional scenes are packed with aesthetic design, featuring natural landscapes or cultural relics, all modeled at a 1:1 scale. This makes every area in the game look as expansive as a tourist rest spot in a famous mountain resort, each with the potential to host a story or hide a Boss. You could easily treat this game as a Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism cultural tourism simulator, but you might also find yourself thinking, “This map sure feels empty.”

Where is the road

So, this is the final result of Game Science’s six-year endeavor. The praise for Black Myth: WuKong and its shortcomings have been thoroughly discussed, and there’s no need to dwell on them further. As I listen to the familiar song of “Dare to Ask Where Is the Road” as in the Journey to the West 1986 TV series, and watch the name of the people who have poured their hearts into this project since 2018 as the credits roll by, I find myself eager to talk about something else.

Back to the 2020 trailer, most people suspects it could be a overhyped project luring investors. No one truly believed that this monkey would stand before us today with a quality and level of completion that far exceeded our expectations. Perhaps there will never be another Chinese game like Black Myth: WuKong, where everything is risked and no expense is spared. But the pipeline and experience accumulated through this project might become invaluable assets for China’s single-player game developers for years to come.

This team has spent six years elevating Chinese games to a new height and paving the way for those who will follow. This is a path to greatness for Chinese games, and Game Science, leading the way, tells us:

“The road is long and arduous, but it lies beneath our feet.”

Epilogue: Why We’re Giving Black Myth: WuKong a 10/10 Score

Despite Black Myth: WuKong achieving world-class standards in art and presentation, with solid and engaging gameplay, rich content, and a narrative and artistic expression that is uniquely meaningful for East Asian players—especially those who grew up with Journey to the West—the game is not without its flaws. The inexperience in level design and the drawbacks of excessive resource allocation have indeed impacted the overall experience.

As a Chinese player who grew up watching the Journey to the West cartoons and TV series, playing Black Myth: WuKong is an experience that deeply resonates with me. I appreciate the developers’ unreserved presentation of Journey to the West culture, and I am in awe of the game’s artistic presentation. This profound cultural empathy has already made up for any shortcomings.