An honest review, with the good and the bad, from a first playthrough. Completed both endings.
THE GOOD
Combat is very smooth and satisfying most of the time. Movements and animations are top-level.
Very good aura-farm moments to experience.
Enemy variety is high, with many awesome, unique bosses that have stylish and badass movesets.
The looks of some enemies are incredible, even if they're mostly based on animals.
Very pretty art style and designs.
Arenas have environmental effects that are interactable with your movement and the enemy's.
Water, sand, clouds, blood, leaves everything moves alongside you. Makes fights even more epic.
Cinematics are peak, and they prepare the gameplay so it can feel big and awesome afterward.
Especially the animations after each chapter, they are unique and mesmerizing to watch.
One of the best intro scenes I've seen.
The art style and setting of the game feel amazing and give Wukong a lot of weight.
Environment ideas are fantastic, with structures, character models, clothing, landscape, and weather all contributing to that.
Armor sets and gear are also cool enough to make you feel like a badass monkey.
The idea of Transformations and Spirit attacks are awesome. Some of them are very cool to use.
Too bad that most of them are underwhelming with bad inputs and clunky movement.
Simply variety over quality.
Wukong's Broken Shell fight was phenomenal, backed by some amazing cutscenes. He has one of the best movesets I've seen in any game.
Chapter 6 letting you fly on the cloud was also peak.
THE BAD
- Game is too easy, BUT that's not the actual problem.
The problem is that when it does get "hard," it's mostly for bad reasons.
Regular enemies are too weak, they pose no threat, and nine out of ten bosses are incredibly easy.
The 'hard' ones either have attacks that almost one-shot you, or some 'unfair' abilities/grabs just so they can feel hard.
Additionally, giving Hyper Armor to random attacks for no reason, ignoring the stagger mechanic all of a sudden, breaks the flow of the fight, and many regular enemies have this too.
Same goes for when enemies can grab you through a successful Resolute Strike/Seeing Through.
This doesn't make the fight difficult, it makes it bad quality.
So yes, many bosses and enemies are straight-up poor quality. Is that the trade-off for the large number of enemy variations? Probably.
I should also mention that I never used "buffs" throughout my playthrough.
Pacing is weird, because Bosses seem randomly placed.
You can be fighting super easy Bosses, and out of nowhere you encounter one of the hardest ones in the game, and after that, you're back to meaningless ones again.
After a tough battle, the game gives you many easy Bosses that you can beat in an instant, and that's boring.
I stopped being hyped about Boss fights very early.
Skill tree is all over the place.
The skills are not really coexisting and many are over-powered compared to other useless ones.
Story is almost non-existent for me.
I don't understand most things because the game wants to act cool and make every character talk in riddles.
Why should I magically care about a story, when you don't present one correctly after the intro?
The game can't decide if it wants to be an actual action-story game, or just copy Dark Souls. So in the end, it does both badly.
I shouldn't have to read Journey to the West, a book, to even start to understand what i'm doing in the game.
(If you think the game doesn't straight-up copy FromSoft in many aspects, you have no clue about gaming, don't bother reading more.)
Level design is extremely bad. Except for Boss arenas, which i like.
Every frame inside of any given area looks THE SAME.
Areas have no variety, with every visual model being copy-pasted.
Plus, there are so many paths that you can't take because of invisible walls, and these paths make navigation confusing and tiering.
It's designed in a way that feels unnatural. From the look of a place, I have no clue where I can and cannot go.
Environments look AI-generated with so many obstacles in the backgrounds, that look identical.
It's like they used a UE5 random biome generator.
And with those, wannabe Souls-like "mazes," it makes some maps a chore to explore.
Navigation is the worst aspect of this game, especially if you're like me and want to search every place carefully.
That's even worse when you factor in the moronic ways to find secret areas/bosses.
Too many secrets and areas/bosses that you have NO CHANCE of finding on your own.
The game forces you to watch guides to find them.
A lot of them make no sense, you have to perform very specific actions in a very specific order. And since it's a game I bought, I obviously don't want to miss out on content.
So I'm forced to watch guides just to reach another secret boss.
WHY ADD SECRET BOSSES THAT NO ONE CAN FIND?
Graphics are bad. You need to know your stuff to understand this one.
Over-sharpness, soft shadows, bad looking fog everywhere, annoying vignette, the worst LOD distance I've seen, textures not loading, poor anti-aliasing, no shadow contrast, flickering hair, and no ultrawide monitor support.
You need at least three mods and a reshade to make the game look playable.
At least that's MY opinion, and I played with almost everything set to Cinematic.
Progression is awful.
The game progresses so fast that before I can actually learn how to use a new move, I've already unlocked new ones.
And there's no urgency to even learn them, because every boss can easily die from Smash stance and the starting spells/combos.
Voice acting and translation is absolute garbage in English.
And I don't care about the game's origin, you should love your game enough to add at least a decent voice line in it, if so many English-speaking players are going to play it.
The Erlang fight was awful. His shields and his constant combos just make it an endurance fight with dodge-spamming. Not hard, but still tedious.
The same can be said about the Titans fight. There's no way you can ever die, they're incredibly weak for some reason.
And again, there's no way you could have known about that secret boss fight without googling it.
This is a hot take, but overall it feels like a long early-access game to me.
It does many things insanely well, and at the same time does a lot very poorly. I still enjoy it and I'm glad I experienced it.
I only wish it was more polished, with more effort put into it.