Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty Review, is this Nioh 3?

In Wo Long, we take on the role of a random malicious soldier thrown into the battle of the Three Kingdoms set in China during the Later Han Dynasty. The game's main objective is to stop an evil villain from spreading what's known as The Elixir, an item that gives the person demonic Chi throughout the story. As we progress through the game, we come across a diverse array of locations such as war-torn villages, jungles teeming with soldiers and monsters, a peaceful hubtown village, and many more historic locations in the China set piece.

Throughout our adventure, we encounter lovable and cool characters, and the story is one of bonds and betrayal, told in similar fashion to Team Ninja's Nioh games. The game has high-quality cutscenes that make our character look good, like Nioh 2 and Wilder Hearts. Wo Long boasts an amazing character creator with a variety of options for the player to express themselves in full, including a zebuba slider. The physics in the game are also impressive.

Wo Long's combat approach is more simplified than the complex and hard to master Nioh series, opting for a two-button attack system of basic light attacks, a strong attack, and then two available skills per weapon, which vary weapon to weapon. However, it emphasizes a parry mechanic much like Sekiro, called deflect, allowing us to brush off enemy attacks to safely avoid them and build our spirit meter while also lowering the enemy Spirit too. Enemies all have red critical blow-like attacks which cannot be guarded, but if deflected, the player counters the attack and does huge Spirit damage to the enemy Spirit meter, which once drained, allows for a powerful critical attack taking huge chunks off the enemy's life.

The game also emphasizes a simplified way of executing combo attacks to land cool and quick visceral moves, but this comes at the cost of a rather shallow combat loop. Additionally, unfortunately, repetitive enemy encounters can make the game feel monotonous. Nevertheless, we can make use of NPC teammates, which the game provides a plenty of and practically forces on us every May Mission. We can summon them to fight alongside us and level up their bonds as reaching level 10 gets us their full unique armor set and weapon at 4-star rarity.

The game sports an amazing feature where we can go online and play with real friends via three-player Co-op. There is also an invasion system similar to Dark Souls, though we never got invaded during our review time, so we can't comment on how that would play out. The game also features a vast array of damage and tools that the player can mix and match throughout their adventure, including spells of the five virtue elements of wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. The game has a free infinite respect system, which allows players to never feel locked to a particular stat spread or build.

We played the game and found that it has 13 or so available weapon types to choose from, although it feels like half of that number as half of them share similarities between two or more types. In the end, you're kind of just pressing square or triangle all the time. But like Nioh or Stranger Paradise, you do have a loot system with the ability to find various armors and weapons of various grades and have the option to customize your stats at the blacksmith, perfecting a gear piece quite easily even in your first playthrough.

For those curious about the loot system being supposedly simplified, we hate to inform you that it's not really the case as you can see you get a ton of loot. The only simplification that was done compared to Nioh 2 is that Max weapon level is plus nine and there's only five Rarity tiers with the fifth unlocked and New Game Plus weapons upgrade, similar to the Soul series. Now, you don't have to do the whole soul matching thing, which is definitely an A Plus in our opinion.

Back to combat, you juggle between standard attacks to build meter to blocking or deflecting attacks to then using spells or weapon arts or the guardian spirits you can summon to change the tide of battle. While not as deep as Nioh, it still all leads to quite the fun experience for at least the bosses. By far the weakest link in Wo Long's Chinese armor is the enemy variety. Nioh 1's poor enemy variety rears its ugly head again resulting in you facing nearly all the enemies you'll face throughout these seven chapters of the main story. By chapter two or three, zombie soldiers, tigers, big Shrek mutant guys, mermaids, and the standard Chinese soldiers are in every chapter, repeated several times per mission. In other words, there's only like 10 enemies in the game where Nioh 2 was able to improve that aspect over near 1.

In the midst of the giant that is Elden Ring existing, it's embarrassing that the enemy count was this low for Wo Long, and it snowballs downwards due to the combat system. The combat loop really suffers from the poor enemy variety, leading every encounter feeling the same, spamming only light attacks or simply waiting for a critical blow to deflect them. One to two-shot the same 10 enemies, 6 chapters in a row. If it wasn't for the bosses and magic, we would say the combat took a very wrong turn from what team ninja found success in with Nioh.

That isn't all, though. The parry system has a fault in play as well. Basically, you'll find it very hard to deal any meaningful damage or spirit damage without deflecting a critical blow first. Countering a critical blow deals so much damage that it makes everything else almost irrelevant. This is made even worse when the deflect system, the main focus of the game if you will, cannot cancel any of your animations. It can shorten the tail end of the animations a bit but never cancel completely. This leads to many of the martial arts skills, you know, the only thing you can do with side light attacks, in a very bad position as they will have rather long animations and recovery windows causing enemy attacks or critical blows to punish you greatly.

Spells are ironically better for the most part in the fights over what you should spend your spirit gauge on, but not even spells are safe. Enter the morale system, another limiter that inhibits your ability to express the emotional artists within you. This system is a flag system that encourages you to explore each map to plant flags that raise your morale. Defeating strong enemies also raises your morale, but you can lose morale when you die. How far you can drop back down depends on how many flags you found.

morale plays an essential role in determining the difficulty of the game. The player's morale rank affects the amount of damage they can take and deal. If the player's morale is lower than the enemies, they will struggle in combat. On the other hand, if their morale is higher, they will have the upper hand. However, the morale system limits the player's ability to be powerful at the start of each map.

Moreover, the player cannot use certain spells until they reach a certain morale rank per map. This limitation makes it difficult to become a pyramid spellcaster. The player's options are limited until they get more flags, and they are limited to just four spell slots total, which is a downgrade from Nioh's omnio system that gave you around eight to sixteen slots total.

The maps in the game are not as expansive as an open-world game. Most items in the map are junk 2-3 star gear or consumables. However, the jump button feature does make the traversing better than Nioh games. It allows the player to sneak around and do visceral jump attacks. The morale system does nothing to encourage exploration.

We rate Pull along Fallen Dynasty an 8 out of 10. For fans of the Three Kingdoms, the story told by Team Ninja is wonderful, and the characters are enjoyable. Some people will like the more streamlined take on the action genre, while others will wish that the game was more like Nioh 3. The game has some performance issues, such as FPS drops even on FPS mode on PS5, which ran at 1080p. It wasn't a total smooth experience like Nioh 2 was.

Graphically, many of the levels, particularly inside areas, look exactly like Nioh 2 quality. Hence, the visual department was lacking. Nonetheless, we still had fun playing the game, and we think most action fans can find something good in it. However, it doesn't surpass what is currently on the market.