Saw all the reviews about performance and said to myself "it wont be that bad". It is in fact, that bad.

I.... really don't know how to review this. On PS5, it is FANTASTIC. On PC... the performance is so bad as to make it borderline unplayable. There is an excellent game in here and, on the platforms it has been optimised for, it is very enjoyable. On PC (Ryzen 7 5800X, RTX 3080Ti, 32GB RAM) it is so stuttery that it completely ruins the combat. I think I have to, regrettably, say "no" on Steam as it stands.

Wo Long is a fantastic game. It's also a flawed game. Unfortunately its flaws are almost perfectly aligned to its target audience. Hence all the mixed/negative reviews. Are they deserved? Maybe. But that's not the whole picture.

First, the good things. Wo Long has hands down one of the best combat systems out there. That's not an exaggeration. Team Ninja did a very smart thing with the spirit gauge. To make you gain spirit with normal attacks and successful deflects, the game removes the usual down time where you have to wait for stamina/ki/spirit to come back. The Nioh games dealt with this problem with ki pulses and anima, but in Wo Long it feels even more fluid. You are constantly making choices in combat about how to gain spirit with attacks and deflects, or how to use your spirit for spells and martial arts. It's one of the most engaging back and forth combat I've played.

Deflection is also a very strong combat mechanic. It offers a tool that can deal with any situation. No more being chased around in the Depth by human bosses in Nioh 2, or being insta-killed by Waterfowl Dance. You can always deflect. There is an argument that it's too powerful, and an opposite argument that to provide challenges, the game overtuned dlc bosses. I would say this, the balance is not always perfect. But I'd rather have deflect as a tool that I can master, than having to face situations where my only options are to run away or die.

On that note, the game also has some of the best boss fights, especially human bosses. I don't want to spoil anything but there are at least three bosses in this game, that I would rank above all Nioh bosses and most of the Souls games' bosses. At its best, Wo Long is probably only gonna lose to Dark Souls 3 in this regard. (Haven't played Bloodborne so no comment on that. Will it ever be ported to PC?) Even the more ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dlc bosses are very fun to fight, if/when you learn to fight them with proper tools (spells and martial arts that can hard counter them).

Another thing I find surprisingly good is how the game treated its source materials, the Three Kingdoms period. Not the novel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, nor the more famous (to the Western audience at least) Dynasty Warriors games, but the actual history. The game mixed both real history events and the novelized version, changed some key characters (Lu Bu, for example) and added in fantasy elements. Somehow it created a new version of the time period that is fresh, but still somewhat true. Characterization of Cao Cao, Sun Jian and several other major historical figures are very nuanced, better than a lot of stereotypical adaptations of the same source material. The game actually prompted me to really get into that time period. And the more I learned, the more I could see and appreciate all the threads and thinking process behind the choices Team Ninja made with the story. Is it perfect story telling? Is it easily accessible to players with no knowledge of that particular historical period? No. But the story and setting do have a strong inner logic.

I'm singing praises after praises over the game. But it does have big flaws.

First, the PC optimization was and is still somewhat poor. It got better after patches, but never silky smooth. And on top of that keyboard and mouse controls were broken at release.

The game is shorter than the Nioh games. It suffers a bit with enemy variety. Content-wise I would put it around 80% of Nioh, which is not bad, as Nioh games are 10/10 masterpieces. But people felt shortchanged.

The game has a very uneven look. Technically the graphics are not bad actually. I have no idea why people say it looks like PS3 games. If you look closely at textures and models, they are high quality. And all assets (weapons and clothing, etc.) are done with care and proper knowledge. What the game actually lacks is good overall art direction. Each map has an overpowering color filter, and most maps are covered in ugly veins everywhere. Whatever is good in the graphics is buried underneath. So sadly as a whole the game looks unimpressive.

I mentioned at the beginning that these flaws were almost perfectly aligned with the target audience - the Chinese market. Take the following paragraphs with as many grains of salt as you wish. These are from my personal experiences and from reading comments online.

Wo Long generated quite a buzz before release in China. Three Kingdoms is one of the most famous and exciting time period in Chinese history. And Team Ninja had a great reputation. But the majority of the Chinese gamers play on PC, unlike the rest of the world. (This was caused by a lot of factors too complicated to discuss here.) You simply could not mess up your PC port if you want good responses from this market.

A huge disadvantage Wo Long had was the comparison to Nioh 2. Nioh 2 was released on PC with all three dlcs. Nioh 2 was also built on top of Nioh 1, cannibalizing most of its assets. For a lot of Nioh 2 players on PC, we encountered it as a whole package. But it didn't get there in a vacuum. Wo Long at release certainly felt very bare-bone if you put it side by side to Nioh 2 complete edition. This feeling of being shortchanged can be very persistent. Wo Long got many quality updates and balances since then, but it's hard to overcome this particular feeling. I would also say players tend to be more critical and unforgiving when the economy is not great, and games feel more expensive.

Another weird thing is the story. Most people in China are actually more familiar with the novel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, rather than the history. In the novel the Shu aligned characters (Liu Bei, Guan Yu, etc.) are the definitive protagonists, while the Wei, Wu and other characters are side ones. Wo Long paid a lot of attention at treating all three factions with equal attention, and aligned a lot of its story to real history instead of the novel. This actually created some dissonance to players only familiar with the novel.

Personally, I've waited for all the game's content to come out before making a final judgement. In my own opinion, the game as a whole deserves a 9, even just for its fantastic combat system. But I also enjoyed its story and even certain parts of its graphics. It's not perfect and not a masterpiece, but I'm glad it got created. Wo Long opens the possibility for a better sequel that would focus on the meatiest part of the historical period, with even better systems and more variety, like how much of a giant leap Nioh 2 was compared to Nioh 1. But even without a sequel, the game can stand on its own. You get to hang out with your favorite Three Kingdoms warriors, that alone is cool.

Some suggestions to make the game more enjoyable:
Do not treat deflect like parry from Souls games. Use deflect like how you use dodge in Souls games. It's a fundamental damage mitigation, not a high risk high reward move.
Try to incorporate martial arts and wizardry spells into your actions sooner rather than later. Both add so much to the complexity of the combat system.
To get rid of the "oiliness", turn on ambient occlusion. It makes a huge difference to make skin textures look natural. It barely impacts framerates.
If certain part of the map tanks your framerate, rest at a flag and quit to main menu will fix it most of the time. I think either during zone transition or when the game generates a NPC invader, the game doesn't dump the memory properly afterwards. Quit to main menu forces the memory to reset and the game will run smooth again.

Enjoy!

A good game buried deep beneath the biggest catastrophe of a PC port that I have ever seen. The game runs poorly for how it looks, but the biggest issue are the controls.
These developers have learned nothing from nioh and have literally implemented the controller's deadzones into the mouse input. If you don't move your mouse fast enough, the camera will not react, regardless of your mouse sensitivity. I have never seen any developer do this (for good reason) and if you didn't understand what's going on here you might actually think that your mouse is broken. The game is completely unplayable on mouse and keyboard. The key layout is also an absolute joke. This has to be a bad trolling attempt by the devs. Deflect/Dodge bound to Tab by default? Ok then.
I know this is a wild idea, but maybe a game should properly support the platform's peripherals on which it is released. Otherwise just make the game console exclusive if you can't be bothered to even copy-paste one of the few dozen (good) control schemes that so many other games have already come up with.

Wait at least until this and the performance issues are patched before you consider playing this on PC.

edit: small update - the game also suffers from a severe bug where the game speed is tied to the relation of your current fps vs the max fps you set in the options menu. If you set your max fps to 120 and the game's fps drop to 90 or lower (which will happen quite frequently) the game will now only run at 90/120 = 0.75x speed. This makes the whole experience super inconsistent since every enemies attack timings constantly change depending on how well your game runs. If your PC can keep the game above 60, you should limit the game to 60 in the graphics menu to avoid this and have a consistent experience.

After having completely finished this game and gotten 100% achievments I'm a bit torn on how to rate it.
Having grown up with playing Dynasty Warriors, seeing all those characters I love and getting a new take on the Romance of the Three Kingdoms story might skew my perception a bit, but either way, these are my thoughts on Wo Long.

First off, Wo Long is a Souls-Like game and Souls-Like games have a reputation as being "difficult".
However I wouldn't say that Wo Long is a "difficult" game, and I don't think that's a "good" or a "bad" thing since it's very much a subjective point to make, and it all depends on what YOU specifically are looking for.
However when the first boss in the game is the one thing I struggled with the most out of everything else in the game, it not only sets false expectations of what to expect, but it also makes the other bosses feel really unsatisfying and lacking in comparison.
Basically what I want to say is the hardest challenge I faced was the first challenge in the game and that is, in my opinion, objectively bad game design.
Sure, maybe after that boss I had learned how the games mechanics worked but whatever.
As for the other bosses, they were all flashy and unique and while most of them were fun to fight, only around 3 of them actually felt satisfying to beat and weren't beaten on the first try.
My issue with that is that even though most of them were fun, all except for the first boss and the 3 other are incredibly forgettable.

Now to summarize how I felt about the difficulty in general.
Like I wrote earlier, Wo Long is, by Souls-Like standards, not a difficult game.
Most of that comes down to the morale system I believe, and I won't explain how that system works in this review, but basically as long as you don't die it allows you to easily snowball and become stronger than every enemy on the stage fairly quickly.
On top of that, on most stages you will have one or two AI companions with you, and if you don't, you can spend an item to summon them yourself, and because of these two things I can't say that there was a single stage that was challenging at all.
Again, the game not being "hard enough" is not a bad thing and personally I still had fun playing through most stages, and if you're not used to Souls-Like games the game might be pretty difficult.

Onto combat.
Most of combat will revolve around managing "spirit".
You can think of it as your mana and endurance both neatly packed into one bundle.
You get spirit by either deflecting blows or attacking, and you lose spirit by either casting spells, blocking, dodging or doing heavy attacks.
Once you loose all spirit you won't be able do any heavy attacks or cast spells and the next attack you take will stagger you for a second, but you can still deflect blows and do light attacks to build it back up again unless you get staggered.
The system keeps the pace of the combat up by promoting you to play aggressively and stay in the fight or weave in and out if you're a spell caster, rather than waiting for a stamina bar to recharge or chugging potions to cast more spells.
Honestly I really like it, good stuff!
[Edit]
I forgot to mention when I first wrote this review that it's a deflect/parry based combat system so no matter what build you choose you're going to need to deflect/parry at least sometimes.
[Edit end]

RPG elements?
You've got a character creator and fairly early into the game you'll be able to completely change your characters appearance if you don't like how you look.
As for the stats, it's based on the Chinese philosophy of the five phases.
In other words, you've got 5 stats you can pick and choose from and you could probably say that it's a dumbed down version of a stat system but honestly it's fine as it is.
Sure, you don't have as many stats to put points in but is that really a bad thing?
Look at which of the five phases works best with the weapon you like to use the most or the spells that look the most fun and put points into those stats.
If you want to try a different weapon or set of spells you can always just re-distribute those stats later on.

Quick note on the story.
Wo Long is based on the Romance of the Three Kingdoms so if you know your Chinese history you basically know the story of the game.
I don't know if I really liked it's implementation though, I liked the story (probably due to my bias) and most of the game felt like it had a good pace to it but then the ending just felt really rushed...
The ending was also incredibly unsatisfying and I think it's partly due to the story of the last part of the game feeling really rushed but also how the last couple main bosses just straight up were some of the most boring and easiest boss fights in the game, even though they felt like the most hyped up ones.
The last main boss fight was alright though, but since it came a little out of nowhere it felt like the game didn't have any momentum left and as such, it just felt like a chore to do.

As for the graphics and the sound I don't really have much to say.
It's a really beautiful game and I like the art direction they've got going.
The music is really nice and the sound effects sound really nice too.

Lastly a quick note on the state of the game.
Wo Long needs more time in the oven, there's no other way to put it.
Even though I enjoyed playing through it and don't regret buying it, it shouldn't have been released in the state it was released in.
Now don't get me wrong, the game is in a playable state...
Aside from one map that's basically guaranteed to hard crash every 10 minutes, most of the game runs just fine and doesn't crash THAT often.
Sure, a couple of times I'd get a lag spike during a critical moment where I'd need to dodge and basically at least once every minute I'd get a white flash and in a few places the lighting effects are non-existant but other than that it runs fine.
However, because of that lack of polish I can't really in good conscience give this game a good review.
It's a 69,99€ game for Christs sake, had it been half that price I could probably overlook it being unpolished but not with this price tag!
So until they've polished up the game to a standard that reflects the price they're asking for I'm going to leave this game a negative review. (Ooo, scary!)

Buy it if it seems interesting and you've got the funds to spare.
Or don't.
It's your money, why would I care?

TL;DR
It's an easier Souls-Like game that's fun but towards the end of the game it feels rushed.
It's also really unpolished and needs more work from the developers.

[Edit]
So apparently there are issues with keyboard+mouse.
I did try to play through a stage with it and aside from some weird button placements like dodge on tab (which you can change in the settings), and having to manually go into settings and switch from controller layout to keyboard+mouse it seemed to work fine for me.
Maybe I'm just lucky, maybe I didn't test it enough, maybe they recently patched it but either way, from what people say the game might be completely unplayable without a controller.
[Edit end]
[Edit 2]
According to patch notes the keyboard+mouse problems should be fixed but as I haven't really confirmed it myself I'm letting my previous edit stand.
[Edit 2 end]

Performance was never fixed

not worth your money on PC.
we're at the first round of paid dlc and they still havent fixed some hardware/controllers having more than a second of input lag, which in a game with big sweepy unblockable attacks that you're designed to parry or die just isnt feasible.

minimum graphics, maximum graphics, all resolution scalings and rendering options: completely worthless and have no impact on the input being delayed.

WOLONG FALLEN FPS

- Swing the sword -> fps drop.
- Destroy a breakable object -> fps drop.
- Move the camera too quickly -> fps drop.
- Moving too quickly -> fps drop.
- Enter combat -> fps drop.
- Enemy do a special attack -> fps drop.
- Deathblow a boss -> fps drop + game crash.

Overall because of skill issues, I give up on the game.

optimization for PC is needed, current performance is too poor.

TL;DR - If you were worried about performance issues with this game, they seem to have been fixed. This game runs well, plays amazing, and definitely deserves a better review score on Steam.

I tried the demo back when it was first available and the game ran like garbage. I left it on my wishlist in case it improved, and I'm glad I ignored the review score and just tried it because this game is awesome. The combat is fast and engaging (similar feel to Sekiro), the story and characters are interesting, and it has great weapons and abilities. I just played for 9 hours straight without a single crash or issue of any kind, so if you've been on the fence, it's definitely worth checking out. There's always the return window in case you still have bad luck with it, but hopefully it runs well for you too!