I guess this is a hot take, so bring on the clown awards, but in my opinion, Black Myth Wukong does not live up to the hype. It's absolutely lacking in so many ways I couldn't believe what I was playing based on the reviews I read and I'm sorry if that steps on the toes of your new favorite game, but it's true. I was in no way compelled to continue playing this after the first session and here's why:

For starters, the game's performance is unstable at best, even on my 3080ti, i9 CPU, 32GB RAM, liquid cooled machine. It constantly and unexpectedly dipped down to laughably low frame rates to the point that I thought the game was being ran by Microsoft Power Point, even with most of the settings on low and medium, RTX off, DLSS set to performance and frames capped at 120. Unacceptable.

Looking past that, the world traversal is some of the most boring gaming I've done in decades. There is nothing to do other than fight a handful of trash mobs, find some meditation spots and then fight bosses. And I mean like every 10ft, there's a new boss. I never even understand why I'm fighting them half the time and they're super forgettable. The title should really be "Wukong: Boss Rush" or something more accurate like that. I learn the fights just long enough to beat them and then I never think about them again after they're over.

And the game's scenery is so ridiculously bland that everything looks the same to me. There are no useful land marks and no map/minimap, so you're constantly getting lost and back tracking in circles. On top of that, they do absolutely nothing to make you 'feel' like a monkey God while running around. You have a basic sprint and that's it. No cool flips. No world interaction. No wall runs. No climbing. No swinging. No staff tricks. Not even a double jump... It is painfully boring to run around in this game and OMG the amount of invisible walls and dead ends that should be explorable is infuriating.

The core gameplay loop is:
1. sluggishly traverse through an uninteresting area
2. kill trash mobs until you stumble across a boss
3. spend an hour learning its gimmicky move set
4. finally beat it and repeat, that's it

This game is just way too shallow and bland right now. I got bored in the first sitting and I have no will to even finish it. I will admit though, that the bosses are beautifully crafted and have very imaginative designs that ultimately don't matter because they all seem to have the same basic concept: Rush-down AI, spam attacks, then reset every so often. It felt like I was fighting the same boss reskinned over and over and over, even after 20+ hours of play time. Not to mention that some fights are literally just ripped from other games with almost zero changes, like Ornstein and Smough for example.

Moving on from that, the game's main draw (the combat) is extremely hollow. There is no block system. No backstab system. No stealth system. You literally have a dodge and a stick. The rest comes from a handful of spells, stances and transformations (which are also inconsistent, like, why can't I even JUMP while I'm transformed???) The dodge windows feel awful. Enemies will stun lock you constantly. Tons of CC. Input scanning. Animation locks. Overpowered status effects like poison and fire. Spongy enemies with inflated health pools. Bosses become impervious to your attacks, but they can still hit you. Every cheesy trick in the book to create artificial difficulty and prolonged encounters. It is more frustrating than rewarding and when you finally beat something, you won't feel accomplished, you'll just be happy you got lucky enough to beat the enemy's gimmick one time after hours of failure with nothing to look forward to except doing it all over again in about 10ft.

Wukong, to me, is desperately trying to be a mash-up of Dark Souls and God of War, but it fails on both counts. I think the potential is there, but it still needs a while to cook before it gets to the level that these botted reviews would have you believe it's at. Make the areas/maps more interesting and less linear (a true open world would be even better). Bring these beautiful characters to the forefront and really lean into the story. Make the boss mechanics feel more unique in each fight. Improve the traversal. Optimize the performance. Fix these issues and the game's underlying potential will start to shine through.

It does some things well, like character designs, musical scores, graphics and beautifully cinematic moments, but it falls flat in so many other ways that I genuinely can't recommend this game in its current state. I really wish I hadn't purchased it yet, as it might be worth playing sometime late next year or in 2026. If not, maybe the inevitable Wukong 2 will hit the mark in ways this one couldn't, but as it stands, this ain't it for me. I would refund if I could.
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Edit: For anyone who might be wondering why my playtime keeps going up after a review like this, it's quite frankly because I paid $60 for the game and I don't want that money to go to waste, so I'm going to finish it. Still VERY disappointed with what Wukong COULD have been though.

Beautiful game, nice animations, good music, and interesting lore. Despite all those positives, the combat was so shallow to me. Some bosses in their second phase, does bs stuff to make it harder for no reason. Such as obscuring your vision or depleting your stamina. And the game is filled with invisible walls which makes it hard to discover. I found this game to be more frustrating than fun.

- Weak narrative - very fragmented and boring story that barely tie in together
- Poor level design - lot's of unnecessary clutter that can even be an obstacle during the battle, tons of invisible walls in places that look accessible
- Boring and annoying combat - the most efficient way to deal with most of the enemies is spamming the power attack; most enemies are not staggered long enough to complete light combos and the attack animation cannot be cancelled to dodge, so the best way is to charge power attack by moving around (AI is very stupid and will allow you to do so); charged attacks have also super long animations, so be prepared that an enemy will hit you before you will land the attack, but on the other side the enemy will be dead after the attack
- Unsatisfying character development - not many actual new skills to unlock, most of them are useless as the charged power attack is the only viable method to fight; you can focus on upgrading the charged power attack and use other skills on special occasions

Not worthy of GOTY. The combat feels dull compared to the last couple of action adventure games I’ve played, like Sekiro and DMC 5. While the level design look stunning, the invisible walls make the whole experience a frustrating guessing game about where you can go.

So, this game is fun and I like it, but it has a massive issue with input delay, and inputs not registering. I am not talking about trying to dodge while attacking, that is not an issue and makes the game more enjoyable in terms of timing attacks. I am talking about just standing still and doing nothing jamming the button to use a potion and nothing happens. Or dodging while not attacking and nothing happens. It is kind of crazy that no one has been talking about this.

Graphics and hype. No attachment or build up for any characters or bosses, lackluster combat that banks on the notion of "get good" to cover for bad balancing and enemy attack scripts. Zero sense of progression or build up towards anything. Is it really even a boss fight if every fight is a boss?

While it's not a terrible game it's also not even remotely as good as ratings would lead you to believe. It's a pretty game with good graphics but it's probably the least fun I have ever had playing a souls like game.

It is with genuine regret that I do not recommend this game, but because of specific circumstances. If you have photosensitive seizures like I do, there is almost no level of adjustment to the graphics which will make this benign. There is no warning, people will think it's just about flashing lights but it's also about conflicting texture layers. I am very saddened that I will not be able to play.

Unlike most people who reviewed this game after 30 minutes and declared it GOTY, i actually played the game.
TLDR: Fun at the start, get repetitive really fast and overstays its welcome, with a bunch of glitches and graphical errors.

Graphics and performance: Beautiful, but also really buggy, crashed multiple times, and when moving my character had a constant silhouette of artifacts which were really distracting. At least it had very little frame drops most of the time on a XTX7900 and an AMD 7800X3D.

Gameplay: Basically this is a boss rush game. Nothing more, nothing less. Combat is pretty to look at, basically stays the same for the whole game. Maybe that is why people hype it so much because it is fun at the start but gets boring real quick. Around 95% of the bosses are one shot pushovers which you will have forgotten about 5 minutes after killing them. The other 5% are just frustrating to fight because they were so badly designed especially the later game fights where every boss has at least 2 health bars as well as transition phases that make then immune to you but they will still attack you which go on for far too long. Also mechanics wise they have a lot of very similar moves e.g. basically every later game boss has a move that puts them above your head and makes them shoot a multitude of projectiles at you. Just very repetitive all around.
Also game would have really benefited from some sort of map.

Story: Know Journey to the west or don't bother trying to understand who the characters in the game are or what you are doing besides "get all the monkey king relics".

EDIT: Forgot to mention the absolutely terrible skill tree. It is almost always the best option to just take base "increase attack/defense/crit chance/crit dmg" nodes instead of skills that actually alter your gameplay which is just a straight up failure in designing an interesting progression system.

The game is just a linear boss run. The combat mechanics are incredibly simple. The story is an adaptation of a fandom written in the 1700s about Chinese mythology, if that's your thing then so be it. If you're an extreme casual when it comes to soul-likes and you want a game that looks 10x better than has actual quality content then this is for you. I can't bring myself to finish Act 2, I'm not interested in the gameplay loop.