![]() ![]() Wo Long explores that and the sacrifices people will make to achieve power in an on-the-nose but nonetheless enthralling way. If it serves us, we will do what is necessary to get power. There’s an oddly captivating quality to that desperation, one that helps drive home the game’s broad view of humanity: We are power hungry. In its world design, Wo Long is focused and intimate, hooking you in with little details like rotting produce in abandoned villages and decaying bodies pierced on the battlefield, visual elements that breathe life into an otherwise desperate, dying world. All the while you’re set on a fairly linear path, with a few available shortcuts to make backtracking less frustrating: ladders to reach an upper level, a bundle of wood that acts as a stepping stone, and so on. Other times, it’s the devastated Guandu, crumbling to pieces as veins protrude from the array of suspended buildings. Tianzhushan, with its vibrant pink-colored leaves, lush bushes, and glistening waterways. As the narrative unfolds, you’re taken (via lore-filled loading screen) to the subsequent location. Instead, Wo Long’s level structure is more reminiscent of Team Ninja’s Nioh 2 and Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin. There isn’t as much freedom here as in something like Elden Ring. Things only get grosser as you slash your way through each distinctly detailed locale. It’s a haunting, 1v1 battle on a moonlit, flower-covered field as Liang swings his now-deformed left arm in the hopes of crushing you to death so that darkness reigns. After battling a few Yellow Turban lackeys here and a possessed rendition of Tony the Tiger there, you’ll encounter the first of many two-stage bosses, Zhang Liang, who ingests an Elixir ball and grows a snake-like arm covered in blood-filled crystals. You start at the tail end of a fiery onslaught on the Yellow Turban Rebellion, the environment a desecrated mess of ransacked homes and burnt trees. It takes its time in reaching the depths of depravity, however, with the game steadily building on the horror as the story’s stakes ramp up. It’s telling that development producer Masaki Yamagiwa cited Bloodborne as “a new form of motivation” that inspired Wo Long, because the world is lathered in similar Lovecraftian imagery. Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty Fengxi Boss Battle In narrative and environmental terms, Wo Long is a lot like Nioh 2, but in ancient China with a dash of Bloodborne horror, and that’s dope. This is what you, a nameless militia soldier you customize through Wo Long’s impressively robust character creator, are actually fighting against: Not just the brainwashed poor, but also the grotesquely transformed, as the power-hungry jerks who take Elixir either die and come back as zombies or have their bodies forever changed with new limbs and animalistic features. Nah, it’s a mystical drug called Elixir that’s corrupting the lands, poisoning the people, and raising the dead. However, weaved into this mythically fictionalized retelling of the historical events of the Three Kingdoms period is an even greater threat than the poor, emboldened to rise up by some bad dude. ![]() Set in 184 AD during the Later Han Dynasty, the game tasks you with stamping out the Yellow Turban Rebellion, a peasant revolt that sought to disrupt ancient China. ![]() Wo Long is the latest Soulslike from action game aficionados Team Ninja, whose previous efforts in the genre comprise the Nioh franchise. In other words, next to Nioh 2, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty might be my fave Soulslike. And the fact that it manages to deliver on all of this without compromise, while also being the most accessible Soulslike to date, is nothing short of a marvel. It has brutal, pulse-pounding combat, a haunting world, and some memorable bosses. Team Ninja’s Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is a terrific game, one that excels in so many of the ways we’ve come to expect from great Soulslikes. You may call games in the genre alluring, unforgettable, and sometimes super cheap, but if there’s one word you likely wouldn’t use to describe Soulslikes, it’s “approachable.” Until now. It conjures something that’s hard as hell, with fearsome bosses to beat, intricate levels to explore, tight combat to experience, and a world rife with enough lore to fill several tomes. The term “ Soulslike” generates a specific kind of game in the mind. ![]()
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