Name: Black Myth: Wukong - Before You Buy
Uploaded: 2024-08-21T11:41:38.000Z
Duration: 12 min 22 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hey, and we're back with another episode of Before You Buy, that show where we give you some straight up gameplay and our first impressions of the latest games releasing.

As usual, it's me, Jake Baldino, and today we're talking about Black Myth Wukong.

This is a big action combat adventure from GameScience.

This is a mobile developer jumping into their first big console PC game.

This game has been slowly hyped up for years, from its graphics to its character and story, and we've been cautiously keeping an eye on it.

Keep in mind with this video, this is my first impressions after the first 13-14 hours or so, but I'm actually liking this one more than I expected.

It's flawed for sure, but I think if you had your eye on this and were hopeful, yeah, it's pretty cool.

It's ambitious, and even where it stumbles, I think this is a great debut for this studio.

And just so you know, I've been playing a review copy on PC, that's where all this footage is, and all of this gameplay footage you see here is spoiler free.

So if you haven't already heard this, it's important to note that Black Myth Wukong is inspired by the 16th century classical Chinese novel Journey to the West.

Now, this to me is one of the game's defining bits, it's why I was interested.

You play as a badass monkey with a staff, and you go on a really varied adventure fighting zombies and creatures, rat kings, evil ancient monks, dragons, you name it.

This is a fairly linearly structured game with some diversions.

It's not really a Souls-like, like many people expected.

Sure, you rest and level up at bonfire checkpoints, but that's really where the comparisons end.

This is an action combat adventure with light RPG elements.

You have some stats to worry about, but you're not upgrading like a multitude of stats like endurance and strength and magic and intelligence, no, it's all just focused on the basic level up and simple loot and character progression through a skill tree, and some other tricks along the way.

Now, your character as a baseline has a heavy and light attack as well as a dodge.

A lot of it is based around focus points, so you need to dodge and strike and do well to build this up, or hold a button to waste some stamina and charge it up, and then bam.

When you have these points, you can launch a more powerful heavy attack that can often stagger enemies and have other bonuses.

You can also deflect certain enemy projectiles, but otherwise, your main defense is really just dodging like crazy.

Perfect dodges are rewarded with a satisfying effect and a little bonus, so get that focus stored up and hit triangle at the right moment and bam, a monster hunter greatsword level slam dunk that just feels so satisfying to properly pull off.

There are also multiple stances that are swappable on the fly with the d-pad.

These stances are really just variations on the monkey's staff.

Oh, did I forget to mention that it's like a staff that can transform?

Because that's part of the ancient lore, man, get with it.

These don't change your entire fighting style, but they do matter the most with that charged heavy attack for situational shake-ups.

There's the big heavy slam, which is just so satisfying, I tend to stick with that as the main, but then there's the elevated staff where the monkey perches atop it like a tall pole, avoiding some damage while also charging up a big downward slam.

There's more, and I'm still experimenting with them, but I'll let you discover them.

They seem pretty situational, and I've had a tendency to only swap to and use them in specific instances more than just having them equipped and using them consistently.

Even still, sometimes it's tough to learn where exactly a stance might work, because enemy attacks are so insane and aggressive, it can take a lot of trial and error to really get what the hell you're doing with a stance.

A lot of the times you're given these stances, and then their use case isn't really spelled out for you.

But still, I kinda like these implementations.

Along with that, you have a magic meter that you can spend on special abilities.

The first one introduced to you is a temporary and pretty short enemy freeze, like catching them for just enough time to land a few hits.

Some of these abilities are offensive, some that help a little bit in the defense department, and they're paced throughout the game and seem effective, but more importantly, entertaining and fun to pull off at the right moment.

It's just so good to screw over an enemy at the last second.

These are all cooldowns, but the bigger challenge and strategy is not burning your entire magic meter before getting to a challenging enemy, where you're really gonna need it.

You're also essentially defeating certain enemies and collecting some of their abilities.

Our hero character is canonically a shapeshifter, and throughout the game, you defeat and earn the ability to transform into these enemies temporarily.

There's a full transformation, where you can temporarily become a different creature and walk around and kick ass, or ones that you trigger and you will transform for a moment, for like a quick thing, or like a big special one-hit attack, or like a poison blast, stuff like that.

These things give variation to a pretty simple striking combat system.

You can do light attacks and then time it right with a heavy attack, and the animations are incredible, but after a while, you might find yourself just doing the same best combos over and over again.

It really only matters when an enemy feels like a grind, or like when you're fighting low-level enemies.

The more complex bosses, you really have bigger things to worry about.

If you were looking for a Souls-like, this is where you might be disappointed if you were looking for even more depth, but I had fun with it.

Story-wise, it has a lot going for it because of what I said, what it's based on.

I only know the basics of Sun Wukong, but I was really just here for the ride and to be exposed to Chinese myth.

You get mysterious tales, beautiful vignettes, thoughtful quotes, really well-designed and cool-looking characters, and cinematic action framing, but I didn't really get a good feel for a sense of story.

You just kind of go along, things happen, and characters say things and quote random things, and it really does not do a good job of ushering people into these ancient tales.

I was still curious the whole time and had fun seeing cool stuff, but I wasn't compelled or emotionally invested.

It's just like a sequence of really cool stuff.

There's typically a big bad boss at the end of a chapter, and it's a matter of you getting your way there.

You might run into one mid-boss that kicks your ass, so turn around and find another alternating path that likely brings you to another mid-boss you can cut your teeth on first.

Occasionally, you'll run into an NPC or a little mystery, but this is mostly areas with a few mob-type enemies that mostly aren't too crazy, and then a few tougher guys here and there, and then lots and lots of bosses.

You can fight one unique boss, walk through a hallway, and then bam, there's a completely new, different boss ready to square up.

This is where the game is really ambitious.

Like I said, the amount of unique fights feels really, really damn special.

The amount of times I was in a glorious, over-the-top, brutal fight with, like, you know, screen-filling animations and explosions thinking, oh man, this has to be the end of this whole chapter or sequence.

You know, maybe I'll get a big cutscene or something.

And then I finally beat them, and then nope, that was just a regular pedestrian boss in the middle of a level with another one right around the corner.

A mid-boss in this game rivals some of the best bosses in other, like, regular action games, and that's really damn impressive.

From the level of challenge to the music and setting to, like, the over-the-top crazy movesets of some of these enemies, it's just nuts.

And I've been having a lot of fun just consistently encountering new, cool stuff.

It makes it feel really well-paced and also got me a little addicted, man.

Like, I kept playing after I said I'd stop because I just wanted to see the next new thing around every corner.

And it's just really fun when you get a good run going and you just feel like a ruthless badass.

Now, some of the big boss enemies go so insane that they will actually trap you in a corner and, like, the camera lock-on screws up and makes it so you can't see attacks are coming.

This happened to me way more than I'd like, and it was pretty annoying when I was doing well but happened to get boxed into a corner by a taller enemy who jumps in the air, and then the camera gets stuck because it tried to pan up, and now, like, it's just a mess and then I can't see big hits coming my way.

Also, if we're talking about annoying stuff, this game really needs a map.

Even if it's just a vague map, it would really help because some of the chapters have really big areas.

It is worth noting that you can revisit and fast travel back to previous areas, previous little bonfires if you want, but that doesn't really show you much in terms of, like, getting a good read on an environment, on a layout.

But man, I will compliment the look of these areas.

Level design-wise, everything is really simple, like, structurally.

And I did encounter some invisible walls, which was sometimes a buzzkill.

But otherwise, damn, these areas look really good graphically.

Dry grasslands, deep deserts, lush green detailed forests, blinding white snow.

From graphics to art design, this game is absolutely gorgeous.

Flowing rivers, lush foliage, detailed textures, striking shadows, and ray tracing.

This is the rare instance of a game that was, like, originally teased as a graphical showcase, like, years ago.

And then the final product actually looks really good.

And even on a high-end PC, I did have some issues.

The occasional stuttering, a few glitches with some enemies floating, a few crashes, and some little frame rate issues, especially as you get deeper into the game.

Means if you're sensitive to this stuff, you should maybe wait or do some more research with a PC nerd reviewer.

I've seen some critics not have any issues.

I also have not seen the console version of this game.

And I believe none of my fellow reviewers have either.

Meaning, definitely wait until we know what's up.

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Black Myth: Wukong - Before You Buy

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